LETTERS HOME from WW2

Dad had a war chest that contained letters, photos, medals, and other paraphernalia from his life during the 1940s. I have seen none of its contents until this past week.

About my family.

I am the eldest of four brothers who have one older sister. We were born between 1950 and 1960 in Toronto and Oshawa during that decade. Between 1952 and 1958, dad was employed by the Canadian government as a pilot who flew out of an Oshawa airport to chart (cartography) the north country while mom was at our Oshawa home rearing the kids.

Dad was born in 1924; mom in 1925.

He was Catholic; she was Protestant but converted to Roman Catholic (RC) as a condition to marry dad in 1949. His dad, my grandfather, was a WW1 veteran who returned home after mustard gas poisoning left him with emphysema - the medical condition which eventually killed him in 1952. Granddad earned his living as a tailor because his medical condition required that he avoid strenuous work.

Growing up, my dad attended St. Michael’s College in Toronto,  a Roman Catholic high school for boys.  Through that experience, he acquired and shared a strong commitment to the RC faith with his dad.

In May 1943, dad was accepted into the RAF as a trainee pilot, and graduated as a first officer six months later. Being away from home, he wrote letters to his mom and dad often, and occasionally to his eldest sister, Teresa (8 years older) and younger brother Harry (2 years younger).

The letters home were simple at first but became more revealing of his state of mind after he began to see action in Europe through 1944-45. Life within an airforce platoon on active duty during those years must have been a psychological rollercoaster ride between very high levels of stress and stretches of boring lows to the men who flew air raids and bombing missions.

Their only distractions in between missions seem to have been drinking in the mess hall, playing cards, and passing away many hours alone with their thoughts about the dangers of war and the memories of loved ones left at home. In one letter, dad described the “theatre of war” into which he had flown after midnight and viewed from the cockpit of a Mosquito;  he was assigned to particate in a bombing raid over the French-German front line. What he witnessed was a “light show” from all of the bombs, fires and gunfire the resembled the Milky Way except that it was very dynamic. Simultaneously awe inspiring and beautiful, it was also a nerve-wracking experience.

Today and yesterday.

Contemporary young men and women have infinitely more ways to spend their time than men at war in the 1940s. They are awash with news, information (often of questionable veracity) and various modes of entertainment provided via the internet, smartphones, video games, television and many more communication and entertainment devices that exist today. By contrast, dad wrote letters by hand on flimsy airmail envelopes in a weak and periodic attempt to maintain some link to the world he left behind. News sources were likely coming through his chain of command, the rumourmill and some local newspaper and radio sources.

Reading dad’s letters, and the ones he received from friends and family,  has had a big impact on my perception of the young man who would eventually become my father in the next decade. In his early 20s, he was deeply devoted to church and family, and was evidently a thoughtful, introspective guy who contemplated the uncertainty of his life and its future prospects after the war if he lived to see it.

Mom met dad at a party in 1946.

The early period of the relationship between my parents shows sparks of romance but seemed to grow slowly and didn’t “get serious” until 1948.

Post-war, Dad attended U of T to study Architecture but dropped out within a year apparently because he was unable to cope with the pressure of the academic work load while dealing with bouts of PTSD that were remants of his war experiences. Mom had earned a Bachelor of Arts degree from U of T during the war, then attended Shaw College to acquire the secretarial skills needed to become employable as an office worker.

Imperial Oil hired mom as a medical secretary after Shaw.  A few years later,  she was offered a job by Standard Oil in New York to work as a medical secretary in Columbia: her university courses in Spanish had sufficiently qualified her to work in the English-Spanish translation required by the job. After discussing this opportunity with dad, she declined the offer likely because she was afraid the two-year Columbia assignment would cause the end of their relationship.

It was clear from her letters that mom was “smitten by dad” from 1947 and beyond. She wrote like a love-sick teenage girl at times.  I guess there were periods when she was uncertain that he was as committed to her as she was to him. Otherwise, why would she have gone to New York for the job interview? We have a photo of her in NYC and the offer letter she received afterwards from Standard Oil.  The offer was quite attractive.

In the Fall of 1949, my parents married. 

My sister was born six months later. Shot gun weddings were common in those days but never openly discussed. It wasn’t until my 50s that it occured to me that mom and dad were married under those circumstances, not that it matters now.

Dad was an unusual man. He was more intellectually curious than most of his peers and social circle. He had a wide range of interests in sciences, technology, health & wellness, nature, the occult, the great yogis of the East, and more. In social gatherings, he was sometimes awkward because he wanted to discuss his domains of interest beyond just superficial levels, but few people were interested. His four sons each inherited a different aspect of dad’s character which is evident to this day even though he died of cancer at age 66 in 1992.

Mom was the “glue” that held her family together after dad died.

She hosted Sunday family dinners weekly with her second husband until near the end of her life. She was always a deeply religious person until her death in 2015. At one point, she declared that one of her greatest disappointments was that none of her five children remained Roman Catholic, or were even religious.

After mom’s passing, riffs began to appear betweem my siblings and I which remain to this day. We are very different people with views and interests that share little in common. The Covid pandemic accentuated our differences leaving scabs that no one dares to remove. We now have “no-go zones” of conversation such that sibling meetups are mostly superficial chatter interspersed with some fun conversations about happier times when our parents were still alive and well. I suppose that is what family get-togethers are supposed to be for, but I am always left with the feeling that my siblings are now little more than casual friends rather than “family”. I no longer know them very well and they have no interest in knowing me.

The fragmentation of family connections is not an unusual story these days. I wonder if this will improve in time.

Life is certainly an interesting ride.

Dad said to me shortly before he died that “life is a surprise”. I have interpreted this to mean “life is an adventure” - one that takes place in every mind. We each accumulate life experiences constantly and these aggregate to form a kind of mental “lens” through which we evaluate next steps on the road beyond. This is not “the road less travelled” about which  Dr. Scott Peck had written, but it is “the road not yet travelled”.

While reading the decades-old letters of my parents, I felt privileged to get a peek into the whys and wherefors of the roads they each travelled in the decade before I was born. I am also left dumbfounded by my recognition of how very different their lives were than my own has been. I think often about what my children are experiencing today, and the prospects of future generations who will travel their road into this ever-evolving Digital Age.

Those LETTERS HOME from WW2 have sure left their imprint on my Life Lens today.