Description
Mr. Gerrard describes leaving North Point camp at daylight to go to work and not returning until after dark. He recalls having a day off and discovering for the first time that his bedding is infested with bed bugs.
Horace Gerrard
Although born in England on January 19, 1922, Mr. Gerrard's family emigrated to Red Deer, Alberta where his father died when he was six years old. Once he was old enough, he hunted game to help feed his family as well as cutting wood for heat. Mr. Gerrard left school after grade nine, working at odd jobs. He joined the 78th Field Battery as a reserve when he was sixteen. He later joined the permanent force in 1939 with the 5th Heavy Battery. Eventually Mr. Gerrard joined the Royal Canadian Corps of Signals, with whom he served in Hong Kong. He worked with both British and Canadian battalions during the Battle of Hong Kong, before being taken prisoner by the Japanese.
Transcript
You had to be lined up on the parade square at daylight and we would go and get on a tug boat. It was a big tug boat and they would march us onto it and it would take us up to the airport where we worked on the airport. Then at night when they brought us back it would be dark by the time we got back. So we used to walk into, there was no lighting in the building and you used to go in there and it was pretty well feel your way around, you never saw the place in daylight, you didn’t even know what it looked like. And I remember after I’d been working for a while we had a day, a day off I guess, in daylight and I looked at where I’d been sleeping and I had like a piece of white canvas, I guess it was, and I couldn’t figure out all these black streaks in it and somebody told me it was bed bugs and I didn’t even know they were there. I just come in at night and just flop and go to sleep and then wake up in the morning and you’re gone again, you know.