Living Conditions and the Trip to Belgium

Heroes Remember

Living Conditions and the Trip to Belgium

Transcript

Well, not very good really. The operating room was the main thing, the rest wasn't much and about once a week, a great big truck would come along that had pipes in it with water, and if you were lucky you would get on the back of this truck and you would go there and you could have a shower. Ten minutes you were allowed to get undressed, have your shower, get dried, get your clothes on and get out. But it was water and it was hot. Funny the things, but we all laughed, we were all in the same boat, fabulous sense of humour and so I knew. Once in a while, you would see, like a bell tent, you know, an ordinary bell tent, and that would be some poor fellow with gangrene and so on and he was isolated, wouldn't be in the big ward with everybody because of, and the smell was ungodly. Then we moved, we had to move then and we went up to, we went on our way to Antwerp, supposedly, and it's so funny the way you think of it now, because, the men went one route, we were all in back of lorries and the girls went another one because we couldn't go the same route you see, or stop some place over night, in the same thing. And we landed in Brussels, and that's when all the B2's started landing in Antwerp, so what are we going to do with this hospital and our poor, we were stuck in a hotel in Brussels for a couple of nights til they decided what to do with us. And so then they got wind the Germans had left a hospital in, just outside, Bruges in Belgium, it had been a house for wayward girls I think, but then the Germans had taken it over as a hospital so we took that over, it was a couple of miles from Bruges. So we were shipped down to Bruges.

Description

Mrs. Page talks about the living and working conditions at the hospital, and then moving north into Belgium.

Nancy de Boise Page

Mrs. Page was born in Saint John, New Brunswick. Her father was a doctor and her mother a nurse. Mrs. Page recalls going to the hospital with her father when she was young and knowing early on that nursing was her calling. She trained at the Royal Victoria in Montreal and in 1942 joined the army as a Nursing Sister. She served overseas in England, France and Belgium loving every moment she was able to help the soldiers. Following the war Mrs. Page returned to Queen Mary's Veterans Hospital in Montreal to continue nursing Canadian Veterans.

Meta Data

Medium:: Video
Owner:: Veterans Affairs Canada
Duration:: 02:36
Person Interviewed:: Nancy de Boise Page
War, Conflict or Mission:: Second World War
Location/Theatre:: Northwest Europe
Branch:: Army
Occupation:: Nursing Sister

Language selection

Living Conditions and the Trip to Belgium

Heroes Remember