Boots and Beauty

Boots and Beauty:

         Our trip to England was aboard the Duchess of Richmond, one of the seven troop-carrying vessels that safely crossed the ocean in advance of the brutal Battle of the Atlantic.  Many members of the Royal Montreal Regiment lost their kipper breakfast the first day at sea! 

         From Grennock, Scotland, we traveled by train to Aldershot in  the south of England, were we were marched to Albuhera Barracks, where we shared our first English breakfast.  Albuhera and her sister barrack, Corunna, memorialize battles fought in Spain and Portugal in the late 1700’s, and were built just after the Crimean War.  The six barrack blocks accommodated an entire infantry battalion.  Each two-tiered block sheltered a company, which was divided into platoons of thirty-five men each.  We each had a pull-out bed, three ‘biscuits’ that served as a mattress, and one blanket.  There were no pillows or sheets.  Over each bed hung a two-shelf cupboard for personal kit and pegs for webbing equipment.  A coal-burning stove stood in the middle of each dormitory, and provided the only heat.  Common areas included toilet and shower rooms, a few small spaces for senior staff and stairwells.  On the grounds were canteens, mess halls, a transport compound, and a guard house which fronted an enormous gravel parade square.  Thus were the accommodations of the Royal Montreal Regiment.

         The winter of 1939/40 was one of the coldest on record, and we shivered through the nights, despite wearing our greatcoats, socks and balaclavas to bed.  The water and drainpipes regularly froze, and our coal rations were always used up too soon.  The twelve men under the command of Section Commander Corporal Peterson trained assiduously yet haphazardly for a war that was yet to happen.  My hard work paid off, for I was soon selected to be the platoon’s Senior Section Commander, earning me the three stripes of a sergeant, and a bed in the platoon sergeant’s room.

We sergeants learned the night before the skills we hoped to teach our soldiers the next day.  And so our preparations continued.

         We Canadians were often hungry, not having adjusted to the overseas scale of rations.  Aldershot had long catered to soldiers, and civilian rations had not been drastically cut.  We often spent our pay nights downtown for steak suppers and a pint or two at the pub.  Our hikes back to barracks were often interrupted by the lure of a ‘cuppa and a bun’ at the NAFFI  canteen.

         It was there one wonderful night I met my Eileen.  Some six weeks later we were married in the seven-hundred year old village church in Frensham.  We bonded against a much larger canvas – the end of the resistance of Finland to the Russians, the collapse of Denmark, the surrender of Norway to the Germans, the defeat of the British Expeditionary Force and their subsequent evacuation from France, and the devastating surrender of France.  We were only weeks away from coming under the bombs of the Luftwaffe when our brief honeymoon weekend ended and we all once more turned our attention to the business of defending England, who now stood alone against the devastating threat of Hitler’s Germany.  

Darkening Days

         The next few weeks were dark for Mother and me – grieving for and burying my father on Mount Royal also made me realize how highly regarded he was, as well over a hundred of his union brothers attended the graveside ceremony.  Back at our house, Mother silently served the mourners cake and coffee.  She would not, she told me, serve alcoholic drinks at her home.

         Mother grew more quiet and reserved as the months passed.  I think the radio was her only companion.  She listened to the CBC with ever-increasing intensity, for the news was blacker and blacker.  Every week, it seemed, Hitler and his cohorts marched an inch, a foot, a yard or a country across the face of Europe.  My friend Gordon and I even joked about how tough it would be to live through World War Two. 

         In 1937, all of sixteen going on seventeen I enlisted as a militia guardsman, choosing my father’s old Battalion, the eighty-seventh.  I learned how to form a mass of webbing equipment into the recognizable shape of puttees, carry a rifle and wear a scratchy woolen uniform.  Then I was off for a week’s training at Valcartier.  The real soldiers twitted us mercilessly as we were drilled hour after hour, in the heat of a Quebec summer.  Hordes of mosquitoes feasted on us.  I think they were better fed then we militia who dined on army rations.  I decided I would soldier no more, and returned my kit to the stores.

         Fate had other plans for me, however.  On September 2^nd of 1939, England declared war on Germany.  Assuming we were at war as well, Gordon and I presented ourselves at the armories as recruits.  The Royal Montreal Regiment was to be my home for the next six years.

         My militia experience was used to catapult me into guard duty.  To the dismay of some apartment tenants we were ordered to march up and down behind the armory, two hours on and four hours off, for night after night.  Gordon and I attested – that is, volunteered to be sent overseas for as long as the King desired.  I had heard his stirring speech over the radio and was inspired.  A little younger than me, my friend had to wait several months before signing, but I was now a regular soldier!  Several months of drill followed. 

         I learned that Prime Minister MacKenzie King had visited Europe and had been impressed by Hitler, not falling in with the general sentiment until England actually declared war on Germany.  Despite the increasingly dreadful stories regarding the treatment of the Jews in Germany, he saw to it that Jewish immigration to Canada was next to impossible, so stringent were the rules.  I also learned his government refused to allow any of the 1300 members of the Mackenzie/Papineau Battalion who had volunteered to fight Franco to enlist against Germany, on the grounds 'they were all communists'.  During my weekend visits home, my mother also told me how fifty-three thousand unemployed young men had signed up, lured by three meals and a $1.30 daily.  “To support Britain, they say! How many of them don’t give a fig for the English. How many of them come from good Scots families who are secretly glad to see England on its knees for a change?;  Now they’ll know how it feels.  Any Scot could tell them.”  Looking back on my mother’s behavior I can see she was getting what we used to call ‘a little funny in the head,’ but I was very young and full of myself, and didn’t really understand her rantings against the English to be anything out of the ordinary.

         One day, in the course of a battalion parade Regimental Sergeant Major Wharton searched our ranks for someone, anyone who showed even the faintest signs of soldier-like qualifications.  He picked me as one of four who were to train as Company Physical Training Instructors.  (The reader who appreciates irony should refer back to my high school days!)  Four weeks of six-hour days of physical exercises and competitive games prepared us for being loosed on our respective companies to promote physical fitness.

         Very soon, with the appointment of Major-General MacNaughton, we learned we to be mobilized.  The Toronto Scottish, the Saskatoon Light Infantry and the Royal Montreal Regiment, were designated as the Division’s machine gun units, one unit to each brigade.  I spent my last weekend at home,   Having completed my last night school class a couple of weeks before signing up, I spent some time sorting through my textbooks and notebooks, cleaning up my bicycle, and helping my mother as best I could, shoveling the sidewalk and stacking firewood.  We were to be secretly spirited away so as not to cause a disturbance, so I didn’t even dare leave a note for my mother.  Even so, she must have had known, although we both pretended it was a normal weekend.

         And so we entrained for Halifax in the darkness of a late November evening, and were soon on our way to war.

Employment

         I soon discovered that Montreal did indeed have lots of jobs for boys with bicycles.  Even more, I discovered a sort of caste system among us.  Those who delivered telegrams and cables from the two national railway systems were mostly men who were paid more, frequently received tips, and wore a uniform.  They looked smart in their peaked caps, grey jackets and riding britches with knew-high black leather gaiters.  The rest of us wore what we had, worked for about eleven hours daily, and collected the princely sum of about five dollars weekly.  We worked as gofers and fetchers, delivering packages and small goods in all seasons and weathers.  Pharmacies, tailor shops and printers employed us.  There were always more boys with bicycles, so turnover was simple.

         An Otremont pharmacy accepted me.  Soon I learned to use the tradesmen’s entrance, smile brightly, and say ‘yessir’ or ‘nosir’.  Once or twice I was tipped a dime, but mostly I received a curt ‘thanks’ or ‘merci’.  The dying winter’s sleet and rain made the roads slippery, and often the bike’s wheels stuck in the trolley tracks.

         That job lasted a few weeks.   I was spending the day delivering packages of cigarettes, cough syrup or bottles of Canada Dry.  In between I shivered, cold and wet, in the basement storeroom.  Eventually it dawned on me that this job was not the high road to success, and so one pay night I took my five dollars and didn’t go back.  My wise parents didn’t comment.

         My next employer was a kindly Jewish tailor who lived by dry cleaning, pressing, altering and invisibly repairing costly garments.  He was patient and painstaking in his work.  My six-day a week hours were reasonable, beginning at eight-thirty and seeing me on my way home shortly after six.  Balancing hangers of freshly cleaned suits across one shoulder, I was easily able to steer with one hand on the flats; the hills proved more difficult.  It meant transferring my load so it travelled perilously close to the well-greased bicycle chain while I toiled uphill, and the results were predictable.  My boss merely frowned and sighed as he took the soiled and torn garment from me.  He could see I was truly penitent, accepted my remorse and promise it would never happen again, and set about ‘invisibly’ mending the damage.  For the next three days I could not have been more careful.  But then disaster struck on an even longer hill!  Mortified, I hurried back to the shop, placed the results of my ineptitude on the counter and fled, neither asking for my pay to date nor a reference.

         Answering an ad for messenger boy with a bicycle I was next employed by two young people who had inherited their late father’s small printing shop.  The work was not onerous – delivering paper samples and proofs for customers’ approval, collecting paper of various kinds for the presses, delivering completed work, and doing odd jobs around the shop, all within a sixty-hour work week.  I was still earning a five dollar weekly salary, but was now on the working edge of the print world.  It was enjoyable and in some ways exciting to hear the noise of platen and roller presses, the smell of ink and the crisp feel of printed paper, the sense of ever-fleeting time between start and finish of a job, and the pleasure of delivering the end result on time.

         Around this time a new soft drink came on the market.  Pepsi Cola was accompanied by a belief that if one held a half-empty bottle up to a certain light a very naughty picture would become visible.  It sent scores of my fellow workers scurrying to buy the soft drink.  The rumors were, of course, false, but it did put Pepsi on the market!

         My photo-engraver father understood the pleasure I was taking in this type of work, and saw to it I was interviewed for an opening in the photo-engraving department of the Montreal Herald.  True to the old tradition of union members with children to launch into the world, the wheels were greased in my favour, and Mr. Finn, the flat-footed shop foreman became my new supervisor.  Still earning five dollars weekly, my job, (and, I thought, probably my life!) depended on keeping the two cameramen supplied with a never-ending supply of clean, clear sheets of glass.  Watson and Bill photographed the black and white photos through a filter of very fine dots and developed negatives onto pretreated sheets of zinc.  Subsequent treatments eventually transformed the images ready for the newspaper productions. 

         I discovered the users of the images were not in the building – they were on the second floor of the Montreal Star, three blocks away.  And they always had to be delivered right now!  Both newspapers were owned by a minor member of the British House of Lords.  The Star provided its Anglophone readers an afternoon paper, and the Herald would come out in the evening.  A third newspaper, the Gazette, gave its readers a morning paper.  Thus the Anglophone residents of Montreal three papers.  Only the Gazette is still running.

         During the three years I was employed there my weekly salary climbed to eight dollars.  I received the occasional tip for the seasonal ‘bottle run’ to the provincial liquor control store.  It was enjoyable for the most part, and a useful education, of its sort.

         It was during those three years I found myself meditating on the wisdom of being a high school dropout.  Cap in hand, I found myself in night school three evenings a week, in an accelerated program designed to grant me a high school diploma before my eighteenth birthday.  My time away from school had changed my attitude towards studying, and my life now felt purposeful.

         It became more so when I realized my father’s health was beginning a rapid decline.  I suppose I knew my mother and I were looking at a future devoid of our husband and father, although we never spoke of it.  I will never forget the night my mother sent my friend Gordon to find me at the high school and rush me home in time to say goodbye the finest man I had ever met.