Nova Scotia/Nunavut Command of The Royal Canadian Legion www.ns.legion.ca 115 barley or sugar, anything I could get my hands on. One time I took a handful of butter, cramming it quickly into my bra, not thinking that it would melt. By the time I got home, I sure was in a mess. Another ingenious way we had of taking food was by sewing a cloth bag to our sanitary belts. You may not get very much every day, may be just a handful stuffed into the bag but by the end of the week you'd have a meal. As it turned out nobody got caught, partly because we had a sympathetic German sergeant working as a chef in the kitchen. He was a Catholic fellow from Bonn who had had a heart attack on the Russian front. At dusk, whenever he heard planes overhead, he'd cross himself and say, "I hope they don't bomb Bonn". Anyway, he would leave food items around, saying "I put them there but they don't have to stay there". We sure got the message. In fact, many of the Germans we worked for were quite polite and didn't go out of their way to be nasty. Hans, the canteen overseer, was kind of a mean, shifty-eyed guy but never did anything to us. While we were staying there, the hospital put a call out for Red Cross workers. I volunteered to take a crash course in first aid and learned very quickly how to take care of the wounded. This is how I met my future husband. William Lamont was a Canadian from Nova Scotia who was with the 23rd field ambulance, 2nd Division. He worked alternately, two weeks on the front and two weeks at hospital headquarters. I was 21 at the time and I was walking home from the hospital with my younger sister Rhea. The English had really scared us about taking up with Canadian soldiers, telling us they were a rowdy, boisterous crowd. So when Bill started walking with us, I was a bit nervous at first. Then, all of a sudden we heard a young fellow hooting like an Indian. When we asked Bill what that was, he told us, jokingly, that it was "an Indian love call". Later, he explained that it was an English soldier suffering from shell shock. Communication with Bill was difficult at first because my English was not too good. I had learned basic English in grade 7 at the convent because it was part of the core program you had to take in the mornings. In the afternoons I had taken vocational subjects such as sewing, cooking and homemaking. Nevertheless, after meeting Bill, my English soon picked up. One word that continued to puzzle many of us was the word "Dutch" because it sounded to us like "Deutsch" which is the word for German. We'd keep saying, "No, we're not Dutch (Deutsch), we're Nederlanders!" After five weeks, we were allowed to return to our home where the windows had been all boarded up. With only a candle for light, we stayed most of the time in the basement, safe from heavy shelling from the Germans who were still trying to get a foothold on the bridges that formed the main gateway from Germany to the northern part of Holland. Once, soon after I had hung out Bill's clothes on the clothesline, a bomb landed in our backyard, taking Bill's clothes with it. I still have a little picture of that hole in our yard. The winter of 1944-45 was the toughest part of the war for us because although Nijmegen had already been liberated by the allies (Sept '44) there was still a lot of heavy fighting going on as a result of a strong German counter offensive in the Ardennes. For security, we were not allowed to go out; we had very little to eat and only two hours of every twenty-four, to cook with gas. One evening when Bill took me home, he saw what we were eating - cold potatoes and a slice of bread, because everything had been destroyed and there was nothing to cook. The next day he came with two loaves of white army bread and two cans of herring in tomato sauce. We broke the bread up and dipped it into the can. It was the best meal we had had for a long time. But that winter was so cold. I remember I had a pair of rubber gumboots that were full of holes. The icy water would flood into my boots giving me blisters and chill blains. Ooh, it was terrible! continued ... continued ...
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy MTM0NTk1OA==