REMEMBRANCE DAY

Today is Remembrance Day. this is the only wartime photo that I have on my computer.

the photo is of my mother in the white dress, my aunt Ernie on the right of both photos, and my Uncle Roland and his then wife Alice who was from England.

They took this photo in Montreal. My father was overseas at the time. My mother has many good memories of the war as a young woman growing up in this time. She lived in Montreal, had a good job and said it was a time when people were quite fatalistic because of what was happening in Europe.

My father, had not met anyone in the family before he was shipped overseas as they had eloped, so one night during an air raid in London, my dad having had too much to drink called the MPs to come and get him and his buddy out of a shelter. Low and behold, who appeared but my Uncle Roland and with the look of him being 6ft 3", and a french canadian accent, my dad asked him if he was a "Martin" and he said yes, and my dad said "Well I am your new brother in law." True story of how they met.

My Aunt Ernie went to work in Montreal for Bell and was an overseas operator as she was fully bilingual and one of the first of her kind. She never forgot how you had to behave being a bell operator and an overseas one at that. She was always very proud of her duty in those times.

My uncle, and my mother are both elderly in their late 80s and still can talk of those years of the war as being so exciting, because they were young and carefree.

My mother who learned so much about fashion living in Montreal, so for the rest of her life she has always dressed so well, and loved shopping for clothes. She said that she bought a mink coat during the war for $400.00 and when she and my Aunt Pat went home to visit my Grandmother, she would wear the coat to church. My mother said she literally wore that coat out.

So today, at the ceremony at 11 am, we remember them all.