Enlisting into the Army

Heroes Remember

Enlisting into the Army

Transcript

Oh, I was ready right away. I was home on holidays when war was declared, but I couldn't enlist right away because I hadn't written my RNs. I had graduated, but we had to write, be a Registered Nurse and so I couldn't do it until I had written all the exams in Montreal in October, and then they told me you had to be twenty-five for Nursing Sisters to get in the army. The first year or so they took them younger, but then I had to go back to Montreal and write the RNs and everything so I stayed in Montreal that year, and when I came back from a holiday in the summer I went down and I couldn't get in until I was twenty-five. So I waited til I was twenty-five. So I joined up in ‘42. We had a big training camp in Sussex, it was a big, big army camp so I was in Sussex and I was there for quite awhile, then I went to the military hospital in Fredericton and of course a big training ground up there, and then in ‘43, all of a sudden, we were, all went to Sussex, we went to Halifax then we went overseas to England. I didn't know anything about the army, we had sort of a short course, we didn't drill and all that stuff,we didn't know, like I say I didn't even know I had a regimental number. Never knew, until after, after the war! We were ready trained nurses, you see, so we went right to work in our own profession. And you know, it was a funny thing, you know, we didn't salute when we were first in the army, Nursing Sisters didn't salute, everybody saluted us, and we smiled, that's what we were suppose to do. And then when we landed in England, all of a sudden Nursing Sisters have to salute. We didn't know how to salute and you'd be in London or something and you would see all this stuff with all this brass on them and they would be saluting left and right and we'd think oh, we'd turn and look in the window and pretend we were window shopping. We didn't know.

Description

Mrs. Page talks about enlisting and the very brief training she received before shipping overseas in 1943.

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:: 02:37
Person Interviewed:: Nancy de Boise Page
War, Conflict or Mission:: Second World War
Location/Theatre:: Northwest Europe
Branch:: Army
Occupation:: Nursing Sister

Language selection

Enlisting into the Army

Heroes Remember