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Issue 24 - November, 2003

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I was remembering about growing up and how we kids learned things about the war. About World War II mostly. We knew about Viet Nam from television and the newspapers, but we were Canadians so it was less direct to us.

I watched Vic Morrow, playing Sgt. Saunders on the TV show, Combat. I thought he was the most responsible heroic soldier one could be.

My buddies and I used to build plastic models of WW I and WW II aircraft and tanks. Doug's mother, Mrs. Newland told us one day how she had helped build Avro Anson aircraft. It was a two engine training, light transport and communications airplane, nicknamed the flying greenhouse, because of the many glass panels along the fuselage. We believed her but it was a little strange to us.

My mother made 20mm cannon shells in a war plant in Montreal. My two uncles, her brothers, sailed on Great Lakes Freighters that worked up and down the US northeast coast up to Halifax. She told me a few things about the war. How everyone, absolutely everyone smoked cigarettes. She told me about a young man from her home town who asked if he could write to her. She said yes, and he did.

My father served in the RCN. He tried to get into the RCAF and the Canadian Army but they didn't like his flat feet. He was lucky to land a post in Montreal harbour co-ordinating refuelling of ships. He told me about going on board ships from England, the US, and some from the Soviet Union. In the winter, the Royal Navy would give him a rum ration. The Americans had no spirits, but always good hot coffee. On the Soviet ships, only one man spoke, the rest never smiled. He told me how he would get up in the early morning and go down to the train station and moonlight, getting money to unload trains. Many of them with boxes of fish on ice. His brothers, one a lawyer and one a doctor, served in England.

At the end of my street was an architect who came to Canada from Poland. He had been in the Polish Cavalry at the start of the war. He and his wife had been in the Resistance. A small wiry, amiable man. She had a lovely garden. Two daughters.

Our next door neighbour was a man who had been a Major in the RCA, an engineer who fought in Italy. He taught me how to play cribbage. Had two daughters and a son. The people who moved in after he and his wife divorced, found dozens of bottles hidden around the house.

On my street, the father of two girls who were about my age had served in the Royal Air Force Bomber Command's elite unit, the Dambusters, flying Lancasters over Germany.

A young woman, who was the love of my life for a period of time, her father was a Bomber Command navigator. He met her mother in Manitoba during his Commonwealth Air Crew Training. He survived the war but was emotionally damaged and drank himself to death by the time she was twelve years old.

www.bluetyger.ca ---- Contents Copyright (C)2003 William J. Gibson. This poem first appeared in The Overshoe Hockey League and Other Poems, 1993, Alburnum Press.

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