“There’s a war going on, but if everybody’s scared then you’ve lost the war, haven’t you?” said Second World War veteran Ann House. “That’s the feeling.
“No, we weren’t scared – of course not. You couldn’t do your job if you were.”
House, 93, was born in England in 1924 and as soon as she turned 18, she joined the war effort in the Royal Air Force (RAF).
“Everybody decided they had to do something,” she said. “You could work in a factory or something like that, and I didn’t want anything to do with that … and my brother worked for the British air force, designing air craft so … that’s how I decided to go into the air force.”
After three months of training, House ended up working for most of the war in Biggin Hill, a suburb of London.
“I was a wireless operator,” she said. “I used to send and receive messages in the Morse code to the bombers, long range aircraft.”
She said before she could work as a wireless operator, she had to be able to communicate 20 words in a minute through Morse code.
And once she started, things were busy.
“There were a lot of aircraft up with the fighting going on,” she said. “They would report you know ‘we see these German aircraft coming’ and ‘we’re going after them’ and ‘we shot that one down,’ or ‘I’ve been hit, give me the nearest airfield to get back to.’”
An officer on duty would tell the wireless operators what information to send, and where and when.
But it was up to the wireless operators to communicate it to the planes.
From January 1942 to the end of the war in 1945, House lived on airbases. She remembers one memorable walk to work.
“I think that the thing I remember most is having my ribs, six ribs, broken because I was blasted across the road into a brick wall from a bomb,” she said.
“We just went to the air force hospital and they gave us painkillers and sent us to work.”
She said working was actually better for her because she wasn’t able to lie down. She slept sitting up for two or three weeks.
“The bombs were dropping all over … things like that happened,” she said.
“I was probably one of the lucky ones.”
While House doesn’t remember the base ever experiencing a direct hit from a bomb, she said they were situated close to London, which was bombed frequently.
“I don’t think we ever had glass in the windows,” she said. “You know, blown out, blasted out.”
But life during the war wasn’t all about work.
“We used to go to the local pub, play darts and have a pint of beer,” House said. “You know … sing songs around an old piano.
“Oh, yeah we’d go out, go to the movies or whatever, life just carried on normally.”
She said she met people from all over the Commonwealth at the bases, noting squadrons from Canada, New Zealand and Australia were stationed there.
It was at the Royal Air Force Hawkinge that House met her husband, Francis House, who was with the Royal Canadian Air Force.
“He was a mechanic. He didn’t fly the plane but he worked on the planes,” she said. “We met and went out and then we got married.”
The wedding was small; only her mother, one brother and a few friends attended.
Once the war was over, House didn’t spend much time in England. She left for Canada to meet up with Francis.
“He had got discharged before I did,” she explained. “I came on a war bride boat. We were all war brides. Yes, a whole boat load.”
Before she left England, House said Francis’ mother sent a letter that made her feel comfortable coming to Canada. Other war brides were not so fortunate.
“A lot of them had to go back home because their husbands had lied about where they lived or the in-laws wouldn’t accept them and all that,” she said. “There was a lot of that going on.”
House landed in Quebec and took the train to Toronto before driving to Dundas, where she would live for over 50 years.
“The thing I noticed most was there’s so much space between each town,” she said. “In England, the villages are all on top of one another.”
Going back to civilian life was different.
“It was kind of tame,” House said. “But then coming to Canada … helped with that.”
House and her husband settled in Canada and raised their three daughters in Dundas.
While Francis was an airplane mechanic during the war, he chose to work in the funeral business with his brother once they were settled.
Now House’s daughters live across Canada. One lives in London, one lives in Western Canada and the other lives in Fergus. It was to be closer to the daughter in Fergus that encouraged House to move to the town about seven years ago.
