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.