A few more thoughts and some family History...

I did not mention the experience of my wife's brothers. The oldest of these, Ron, went into the Artillery and eventually found his way to the fighting in North Africa. While in Tunisia he contracted Malaria and had a such a bad case that he was shipped home. Strangely enough, whatever it was that they gave him for his Malaria, they also credit it with curing a knee problem that he had since his childhood, some sort of Osteo problem. Anyway, he was shipped back as an invalid and told that he should be in Malay, as it was then, in Kuala Lumpur. He made the tour without any further ill effects and was able to send us a couple of book ends for our Wedding, made out of some light brown hard wood from that country. They are carved to represent Elephants standing against a book.

Reg, the second kid, chose to go into the Marines, and he wound up in the Far East. He never said a word about his bad experience until a few years ago. He had told us that he was on board a navy ship and after the War in some harbor in Japan, but apart from that--nothing. Turns out he was on a boat was either badly bombed and sunk, or sunk by a submarine and that he was one of the minority that survived. He had kept silent all those years.

Cyril, the youngest, was in too late for the actual fighting, but spent quite a lot of time in Germany, much of it around Nuremberg on garrison duty. Eventually, quite a bit after the war, his tour was over and he was demobbed.

Then there was my brother, Arthur. His stay at the University was interrupted by a call from His Majesty's Government, and he enlisted as a pilot trainee. His eyesight was much better than mine and he successfully graduated from training school. Much of his flying training was done over in Canada in Saskatchewan and Nova Scotia.

He returned to England just in time for our wedding, so you see that he was not in the RAF until 1943. In fact, he sailed for Canada about the time I arrived back in England from overseas. Another coincidence. After coming back to England, he did some more training and was then shipped out to Ghana, to the very same place where I spent nearly two years.

His job was to fly the planes that were assembled at that base up to the war zone in North Africa, then all the pilots would be flown back by DC3's. No sooner had he landed there, found his quarters and had a batman take care of everything, they found out that he was the wrong Arthur Clarke, and flew him back to England. For a while, he was flying twin engine bombers training air gunners. Then, as the country of France was opened up when the Germans were driven back, he was assigned to a transport squadron flying VIPs on the London, Paris, Marseilles, Lyons, London circuit.

He tells of one time flying in the mountains and his navigator did not know exactly where they were as they were flying in the clouds. Suddenly, he got an unusual feeling and reacted by pulling back on the stick and climbing rapidly through the clouds, came out into the clear air to find a mountain directly on the course he would have taken had he not reacted as he did. The strange part of all this is that he could fly these big planes, but could not drive a car. He had not got a license when war broke out, and gasoline was rationed for the next few years, so there was no opportunity to learn.

That Britain was no respector of persons as evidenced by this. In World War I, my father and two of his brothers served. Yet, in WWII, the youngest of their brothers, Herbert, who was born in 1901, and married long before the war broke out was drafted. It seemed strange to see him in uniform as I did just one time that our paths crossed, two generations.

A few thoughts about those times....
In Britain, we understood without saying that it was our duty to fight for our country. Sure, there were a few slackers and evaders that used all kinds of excuses for not serving, but by and large, it was everybody's War. The only one of our gang that did not serve was one whose father and grandfather owned a shoe factory. They wangled him a job in a truck factory where he worked for the entire war. I do not remember any of us having any antipathy towards him. After all, he was our friend and had been since childhood, we had all grown up together, and it was brushed off as a personal idiosyncrasy. Another of the gang, his father was an Attorney of very good standing, joined the army and was put into a Tank Transporter Company. He hauled good tanks to the front lines in North Africa, and repairable tanks back to the shops further east. In a retreat after General Rome took over the fighting for the Italians, he and his mates were driving these big transporters loaded with Italian prisoners back east to safety. His machine quit, and they could not repair it so he jumped in with one of his buddies, leaving his rig and the Italian prisoners right there. They pulled into a base area for the night, and before morning, his own rig, repaired by the prisoners was also in camp. The Italians deciding that they were better off as prisoners of the British than being freed by the Germans and have to fight again.

When the war was over, we did not look for benefits, financial assistance, and other privileges because we thought we were due these things for having fought a war. It was our duty, we had done it, and that was that.

There were a few minor programs that were put out half-heartedly, such as the one that we chose. To train on a farm to be a farmer. But here again, all the Air Force did was to tell us which Agricultural Agent we should contact, or they may have given us a list of the entire staff in the UK and we chose which one to contact. Anyhow, we were interviewed by a farmer, and if we suited him, we moved to his area, and worked for him at regular wages, - no endowment, no financial assistance, and no follow up. You were on your own, and we liked it that way.

Before we left England, I had been in contact with the Canadian Pacific Railway, told them we wanted to go to Nova Scotia and they talked me out of that saying the province was just above the poverty level and that jobs were hard to find, the pay was low, and the future was not bright. Better to go to Ontario where there is much more farming, and to this we agrees. They notified their agent in Toronto that we would be coming and after landing at Halifax, followed by two days and one night on the train, we arrived in Toronto. We had booked two lower berths, but had to settle for two uppers because of some snafu. It was not too bad, but Jacqueline need some warm milk, and I cannot remember how your mother made me aware of that. Perhaps we were in adjoining upper berths. Anyway, I climbed down onto the bunk below and headed for the kitchen with the bottle, some milk powder and heated some water and Jackie was fed. I am sure she relished that because on the boat, all she could keep down was sugar and water. I remember getting the ladder to talk to your mother, and when I came back it was down the car I moved it back to where I had left it, climbed into my own bunk and went to sleep. Sometime later, there was a crash, and when I looked out of the curtains, one of the young fellows who was on the boat, and to whom we had talked was on the floor. Apparently he was getting out of a young ladies bunk and did not notice I had moved the ladder.Next morning he said" We were only talking" We met the C.P.R agent in Toronto and he tried to call the farmer up country with whom he had made arrangements for me to go to work for him. There was no answer, and that made sense. The weather was good and there was no reason for the farmer to stay at home for a phone call when he did not when it would come. In the meantime, with all four of us wandering around downtown Toronto, where we were directed to a good rooming house to park three of us until I found something definite. The agent had been in touch with another 'farmer', and I use that word delicately in this instance, who would take us right away.He was a school teacher who had inherited his wife's parents farm and feed mill. The man running his feed mill was from England as was his wife, but all the children had been born in Canada. The farm house was not ready for us to move in so this other family put us up for a night or two. I cannot tell you how we survived those first few days at Derry West, the name of the area, or hamlet where the farm was. Maybe there was a Ma & Pa grocery store just up the road where it intersected with a road to Toronto I believe that someone had just died in that house from tuberculosis and it had to be cleaned and fumigated by law or something. There were some sheep and lambs and at least one of the lambs had to bed bottle fed, and guess which of our two children wanted that job. The first day we put Jackie in the middle of our bed, she was only six months old, and somehow she rolled off it and hit the floor. As far as we have been able to determine since that time, it did not affect her one way or the other. There were also nine in-calf Aberdeen Angus heifers on the farm, all pure breds. Luther Emerson, the 'farmer' told me that if he got seven young heifers, he could register the herd as it took a total of 16 females to do so. Every time one calved, I would search it out in the trees and brush, and five times I had to tell him that he had another lusty bull calf. About the last one to calve, did so in the field next to the house. We woke up that morning to see a large circle of the grass beaten down, and a black calf lying in the middle of it. Of course, I raced out to check the sex, the mother was grazing quite a few yards away. I had just rolled the calf over when WHAM, and I landed outside the circle of flattened grass.I just had time to see that it was another bull calf before I took that unpaid flight. This was the kind of thing that seemed to happen to Emerson. He had a field of buckwheat growing on the other side of the house and the agricultural agent had told him to plow it in as green manure to enrich the soil. After having shingled the roof of a new outhouse, he told me to plow it in the next day. So, I got out the Ferguson-Ford tractor, hooked up the plow and was just going out to start plowing when the phone rang and he said "Let's take a crop off it when it is ripe". Two days later, it was "Plow it in" . Then a change of heart and "Don't plow it in. By this time, I had had enough. On a Friday, he would come up and when I would remind him that it was payday, he would have forgotten and I would be paid on the Monday. Some neighbors down the street, about a hundred yards, had just finished building a large two storey chicken finishing house. The husband knew the story and he said that the aircraft plant in Malton, on the airport grounds, was hiring. So, I took the day off, how I got to the plant I have no recollection, probably hitchhiked as, with no car, I had to do a lot of that. Was hired right away, and gave a couple of weeks notice to Luther. During this two weeks, your mother, walked up to the store with Pat walking along and Jackie in the baby buggy, or stroller, or whatever, caught the bus to somewhere and bought a house. The agent had taken her out to see it and it certainly seemed to fit our need and pocket. Somehow, we both must have gone down to the real estate office and signed what we would call, in this country, a contract for deed . That was in August or September 1948. The only water for the house was a sand point in the back yard, if you could call it that as it was a wooded slope down to the river that ran about 60 yards away. The outhouse was further down the slope on the other side of the 'backyard'.The first thing that we did was to dig a trench from the house to the 'well' and bury the water pipe. This place had been, like all the others on the road, a summer cottage before the war, and all were rapidly being snapped up by hard working but penurious young people. Well, not all. A few houses up the road from us were Wilmer & Winnie Young, he owned a concrete block plant and maybe earned a couple of bucks more a week than the rest of us. and at the bottom of the road, were 'Uncle' Will and 'Auntie' Betty Wilcox, long from England, but very happy to help some new immigrants. This went on for a good six months, and during this time, Uncle Frank, Aunt Ellen, Wesley & Donald came up for a visit. We visited some distant relatives of your mothers or perhaps they were relatives of some of her neighbors back in Cheshunt, and cousin Dorothy got married. As soon as I started working at the aircraft plant, AVRO, I bought a car. It was an old two door Chevrolet, of 1931 vintage. It did not run but the guy who owned it was the Chevrolet man in Brampton, our nearest town. By the way, where we lived was in Huttonville, on the river Credit. The seller fixed it up and total cost for car and work was $50.00. As I was going to drive away, he said "Do you have a driving license", and of course I said "No". So he said drive it around the block, so I did. He then wrote me out a license as he was the official for that area.

When I started work at the AVRO aircraft plant in Malton, it was in the material handling department - grunge work, and one of my fellow workers lived in Brampton and he was the one who told me about the 1931 Chevrolet. This department handled most of the incoming materials from nuts and bolts to 4 x 8 sheets of aluminum and masonite. The masonite was up to 3" thick. These would be brought down to the basement storage area and stacked on sloping two sided racks until requisitioned . One day, just as we were filling a rack, the counterbalance weights on the other side were not heavy enough and the rack fell on me. After they had picked up all the sheets and righted the rack, I was picked up and taken to the first aid center where they found that no bones were broken, just some abrasions all down my legs and my ankle took the brunt of the blow. I seem to remember that they used an ambulance to get me home, and you can imagine the shock when that drew up to our front door and they carried me in. Your mother with two young children and an injured husband. I do not recall how long I was at home, but being young, I soon healed. We became quite settled in, working at a good job as after a few months they advertised in the plant for an opening in the inspection department. I applied for it and got it, perhaps because the head of that department was an ex RAF squadron leader.. The only heat in the house was a three foot high wood and coal stove, with the chimney going out of the near the peak on the north end, with just a wrapping of a sheet of asbestos where it went through the wood siding. We would order coal delivered to the side of the house and have to bring it in buckets loads to keep the stove going. And of course by the next morning the house would be cold again until the fire was going again. As this was built as a summer cabin, it had relatively little insulation. There was a screened in back porch with pseudo log siding on the two inside walls. Back in those days, the latest insulation material came in rolls of heavy brown paper lined with aluminum foil. When you pulled on the edges of the roll, the foil opened out into a tube with tabs of paper to nail to the studs giving a hollow column of aluminum containing a dead air space. Then, on the outside we put the fake log siding that we had taken off the other two inside walls. What we covered the inside walls with, I have no recollection. Occasionally I would get to the head of the list for a load of masonite pieces from which various shapes had been cut. and this would be dumped on the coal pile, which did not leave much space for parking the car off the road. Anyway, all went well until my cousin Dorothy in Cincinnati sent us an invitation to her wedding. We decided to drive down there in the second car as I no longer had the 1931 Chevrolet. A fellow inspector was building a panorama of some work that the Forest Department wanted to illustrate how a cut they were planning through the forest would affect the area. His car was on the blink so he asked to borrow mine. As four of us from Huttonville had a weekly car pool, all I had to do was to drive my car to the plant, let him use it to haul the layouts into Toronto , come back to the plant and return the car. Unfortunately, on the way back, a rod thrust through the engine block and totaled the vehicle. He assumed the responsibility and paid me for the car - I do not remember the amount,and so I had to look for another vehicle. One of the other car pool members had a son who wanted to sell his car and buy a more prestigious one. I thought he had a beauty and bought it. A four door 1930, clean as a whistle. I swore that you could eat an egg fried on the block, it was so clean. It had a two by ten fixed to the front bumper for pushing disabled vehicles, the jangling foot operated bell that street cars were equipped with and the old 'cahooga'. horn. Ran like a top and as quiet as an electric sewing machine. Now I cannot remember to whom I sold it when we came down to the States. We bought the second car because we had been invited to my cousin Dorothy's wedding For some reason, we decided not to drive down to Ohio and took the train. How we got to the station in Toronto has faded into the mists, but possibly we used a taxi that conveniently worked out of the village. It paid it's way because that was the only way anyone who did not have a car could get to Brampton to shop.. We would have been met at the Union Station in Cincinnati and driven to Frank & Ellen's. The return trip from Toronto to Huttonville would again be by taxi. And the question of who took care of Bessie while we were away will never be known As a result of attending Dorothy's wedding where we met a wealthy farmer, who offered to sponsor our migration to the U.S. we began to make arrangements to come across the border. We still had our border crossing permits, no, we had not got to that stage, so we must have used our passports.We did not get our border crossing permits until 1954 when we made a trip back to Huttonville, and had to get these cards in order to get back into the U.S.That in itself was a chore. One immigration officer in Detroit was going to allow us to go over with just the I.D. we had, drivers license or whatever, but the other said "No, you have to get a border crossing permit otherwise, they may not let you back in. So we had to rush into downtown Detroit, find a one hour photographer, have five passport photos taken, rush back to the immigration, fill out all the paper work, have a photo glued to the card, and stamped with an impressed stamp and away we went. However, that delay meant that we did not reach Huttonville & Aunt Bett & Uncle Will until around midnight. It must have been fairly early in the spring because I remember driving through one town late that night, and having to swing from one side of the road to the other to avoid all the many potholes. I was so tired that I would see a mail box on a post in the distance and think it was a deer about to cross the road. As we had bought the house on what would be a contract for deed, as far as I remember, we just paid the last month's payment and handed back the keys. Cannot remember what happened to the beds, the furniture such as it was, the toaster oven , such as it was that I had bought from a fellow emigrant who worked in another department of AVRO, and who came from about 2 miles from where I grew up, and where Pat was born. Probably gave everything to the people next door. who were also from England. During this time, we kept up correspondence with the Immigration people in Toronto. they asked what I would be doing in Ohio, and when I told them I would be working on a farm, they asked me to get a statement from the farmer affirming that. After I sent them such a letter, they wrote back and said that as I was not a professional, I would be taking a job away from a native American, and that under the 1935 or 36 Alien Labor Laws, I was not admissible. So there we were. It was a Saturday morning when that letter arrived, and I remember walking down to the village and using the public phone to call Frank with that news. He was home, and was as shocked as we were. It so happened that Senator Robert Taft was running for re-election and Frank knew him well and that he was in Cincinnati campaigning. I do not remember how soon we heard from the Immigration people after Frank had talked to Sen. Taft, but remember,we were without a roof over our heads or soon would be. Some neighbors a few houses down the street let us use their back porch for a few days. It was about as big as the front porch in this house, and in it we had ourselves, three children and a dog, and a hot plate, two beds, a crib, and a folding table and our clothes and suitcases etc.. .Washing of hands and faces was done outside, in an enamel bowl, with water from the pump and of course, the outhouse was down the garden.Barbara was only three or four months old. After some days or weeks, the Methodist minister invited us to the parsonage until we could find a longer stay location. At least this house had central heating, but beyond that, I do not remember.. It was quite crowded because they had five or six kids themselves. Then the minister talked to one of his flock, a widow lady living a couple of doors away. she agreed to make a temporary apartment in part of her house, and we stayed there until the day we left for the U.S. The letter from the Immigration said that our case had been reconsidered, and we were now free to come down, So of course, somehow. we found out the times of the trains from Toronto to Detroit where we changed for the Cincinnati train. Remember it was February and not particularly cold to us, Pat and Jackie were in little anoraks, and still had the English complexion, and people would stop and look at you two rosy cheeked youngsters as we walked through the station platforms for our next train. We had heard that the Canadian government did not like people leaving Canada taking U.S. currency with them. There was always a lot of U.S. coins in circulation, and we would pick them out and put them away until one of my co-workers went down to Buffalo on one of his frequent trips and he would change the coins into currency. Said he had a cousin living in that town. Whatever. I heard after I had left AVRO that the RCMP came in one day and arrested him as a dissident or a trouble rouser, or a communist agent, take your pick. Anyway, I liked the guy, but I do not remember what part of England he came from, the Midlands, perhaps. Wanting to take our legally earned U.S. currency with us and hoping to lie with a straight face when we were asked, we took the lid off one of the shaker tins of baby powder, rolled up the bills and stuffed them inside, put the lid back on and we got through without any bother After a few days with Frank & Ellen they drove us up to Camden and to Russell's. When Frank saw the condition of the house we were going to live in, he was extremely upset. The only improvement Russell eventually made was to build a new outhouse.On a windy day, the sheet of linoleum on the floor would waft in the breeze. So many nail holes in the wall where pictures had been hung that we had to fill them up and paper over them to make it habitable. We had lots of fun there and we have pictures to prove it. After a while, Russell decided that he could manage without my help and I obtained a job at the local concrete block plant. within a few weeks, I was running the machine that made the blocks and had three or four high school kids doing the hauling and stacking of the blocks.The owner was also the mayor of Camden, and did block and cement work as well. When it became known that a manufacturing plant was coming to town, I was there applying as soon as possible. that was in November, My first job at the plant site (which had been an auto showroom and garage for Chevrolets) was to demolish the concrete block toilet building that was on the outside of the main building. The plan was to turn the showroom into offices on one side the front door, and the other side into the maintenance foreman's bailiwick. By the first of January I was plant superintendent with a mad foreman reporting to me because he felt sure he had the job. Machinery started coming in, the addition for a large warehouse was progressing and hiring had to be done. I started with a crew of 30 to handle the nailers, the swing saws, forklift, labor to unload the cars of cleats coming in from the Gaspe Peninsula in Canada, and so on. As we progressed, we had to put on a second shift to take care of orders that came in while we were training the first shift. Being a somewhat dumb smart aleck, I took the instruction manual for the big machine that stapled the cardboard to the cleats and extended the settings for the various motors and gearboxes to almost 125% of the stipulated maximum and we operated that way as long as I was there. And I still have that instruction book. Because Atlas was a big company, I figured that if I was to move up in the company I should make the acquaintance of the home office people. So, when they were looking for an office manager, I volunteered and was accepted.There was one girl doing the typing, invoicing, receptionist etc. As this is getting to be an almost endless saga, and I never know when to stop, I will just say "To be continued in my next"