The heat’s on & The Hunt Club

The heat’s on – The meals at the Depot were excellent as they were organized to keep one on the move. The beautiful China was made of tin and when the coffee was poured into the mug, one had to quickly eye a proposed place of sitting and then go like a bat out of hell before the rising heat of the tin mug burned holes through one’s fingers. Much food was spilled on the floor and you had to have a keen sense of balance to stay on your feet.

Drilling

Drilling – We lived with the odour of creosote in the cleaned-up horse stables at the Canadian National Exhibition Grounds. Some had uniforms and the remainder had parts of uniforms. We drilled and were taught how to make our bunks up for about ten days. To me, drilling became fun because it was not too long a period of time before I noticed the types who had poor coordination and I would make a point of falling in behind these characters.

On the way

On the way – It was not until the first part of June, 1940, while I was helping to wire houses along the Bay of Fundy, that I received a train ticket to Moncton. I hopped a train and never returned to Saint John again for any economic reason.

A Young Punk Steps Forward

Canada declared a state of war against Germany on September 10, 1939. In the fall, on a sunny weekend afternoon, I was standing in a potato field near Fairfield, New Brunswick when an old aircraft chugged over. It was the only one which I had seen since I was a stripling in Windsor, Ontario. Right then and there I decided that to pilot an aeroplane was for me.

Preamble

For many years whenever I spoke of something or someone relative to an anecdote from a military sojourn (1940-46) in World War II, Edna urged me to write down the anecdote. So I took Edna’s advice and over the years I jotted down numerous highlights of humour, embarrassment, sorrow, disaster and achievement.

This concoction of memoirs is not intended as a piece of literary art and there is no chronological story or thin-red-line through the collection. The anecdotes are simple fact and the quotations by persons are remembered precisely. I have omitted the presence of dates so that the text may not be one of a bore in this aspect. The memoirs are, however, assembled according to the home aerodromes or bases from which I operated or was stationed in Canada, Great Britain, Malta, and in Canada again. I apologize for not remembering the names of some persons long gone but I do not think that the omissions here deter the descriptions or actions.