Post War Stress

Heroes Remember

Post War Stress

Transcript

People who went through all that warfare changed. I came back to people who didn't know that they had changed. That, I think was the problem. Wives with children who had been alone all that time waiting for them to come home and they came home and it wasn't that easy to settle back into any routine and there were some pretty tough years there; which resulted in divorce and separations and alcoholism and all its glory. And we had two of those in my family, we went through that. There was nothing you could do to help. I hadn't been overseas with them, I hadn't suffered through all the stuff they had. I'd had a pretty nice war and they always... my newspaper brother, photographer newsman went from one thing to another trying to publish his own papers trying to do this and it never really came to grips again and lost his family. And he was a hell of a good photographer and a good newsman and had edited his own papers. It was a... lots of people went through worse times than he did and they managed to survive. Everybody's different but my artillery brother had been working in a bank before he went overseas, and after a few little experiences I thought for one, were people not knowing where they were dropping bombs? He came back absolutely rattled and the bank took him back and unfortunately they put him in a busy branch down in Toronto and poor John, he had nightmares. These people were coming at him, coming at him coming at him and he had to count and get it right and it was stress and strain. He had to, he quit, he quit, he couldn't stand it. And he went to work for the Toronto Transportation Company driving a street car on rails and all you had to do was bang your foot on the bell and you didn't even have to take money, they put it in a box on the... it was heaven compared to what he'd had. So he was fine, and then he worked on the subway afterwards and that was even better, all alone up there and just nothing going wrong.

Description

Ms. Whyard speaks about how family life was changed after the war.

Florence Whyard

Florence Whyard was born in 1917, and lived throughout Western Ontario. She comes from a military background as her father served in both the First World War and the Second World War. Ms.Whyard joined the war effort in 1943 after her two brothers joined up, one entering the air force and the other enlisting in the army. Ms.Whyard became a journalist for the Naval Information Unit and worked long hours to get the required information out to the people awaiting it.

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