Mail From Home
Heroes Remember
Mail From Home
Very, very important. Unfortunately, a lot of the things never
did reach us. Mail from home from Newfoundland, I guess I heard
from my mother on an average about every month and a half. I
made a point of writing home at least once a week and I kept that
regimen pretty well all the time that I was overseas. In fact,
until 1968 probably, every one of my letters home was in the home
in Elliston because when my folks, when my dad retired from
the mill in Grand Falls, he sold the home there and they moved
back to Elliston. At the age of 70, he built another home. He was
a first-class carpenter. And they kept, they had kept all these
letters and just before he died, the question arose...The letters
were in a bread bag, I guess, in the attic, quite close to the
chimney and he was sort of apprehensive about the
possibility of fire. And I remember he, I had gone to
Elliston to visit at the time and he mentioned it to me. I said,
"Dad, they're of no consequence; throw them out." And well, to
this day I rue that, ever having said that because it was
part omy history. Certainly part of my personal history. It would
have been nice, even now at this late stage in life to look back
and see the nefarious deeds that I committed and had the
nerve to tell them about. But packages were a different story. I
had made quite a number of friends on the mainland when I was
doing my flying training and they would send cartons of
cigarettes and with Sweet Caps in those days, Sweet Caporal. And
of course, we had always been used to Camels and Chesterfields
here in Newfoundland. It was all American, you see. We had none
of the Canadian Players and Sweet Caps and Export and so on.
So anyway, there was a young lady in Lasheen (sp) when I was
at the manning depot. I met her and spent weekends at her home.
Her parents were very, very gracious people. And they sent me
on the basis of once a month a carton of Sweet Caps, and that
went on for the whole two and a half years I was overseas. And I
venture to bet that I received maybe six. The others, of course,
probably lost during the voyage. Probably torpedo ships or
something. But a great majority, I would say, on the black market
For instance, we could go to the trade commissioner's office at
58 Victoria Street in London and if we had five or six days leave
we were guaranteed, as far as possible, a carton of Wings when
we arrived and a carton of Wings the last day we were there,
heading back to base. Numerous times, in fact, on numerable
occasions, I went to 58 and picked up things like seaboo (sp)
stockings which I found great for wearing when I was flying. But
Wing cigarettes, Flag cigarettes, no. None in stock. But you go
about a block and a half up the street and you could get them
from under the counter. So even our own guys, you know, just
flogged, blankets of sweaters and all that sort of thing that the
Patriotic Association, the WPA knit and sent over. A lot of them
just went the way of all flesh, bartered and sold on the black
market.
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