Voyage Overseas

We got the call at 3 a.m. and got on a, everything was blackened out because the subs were still cruising the mouth of St. Lawrence, of course, to Halifax harbour. And I can remember so well standing on the harbour and seeing the outline of the huge ships and the convoy in the horizon in the dark and we were put onboard this little ship thinking that we were being taken out to a big ship but we found ourselves in the Atlantic in the morning. The one amusing thing that happened on the way over, of course, we were never without our life jacket in our hand, and we’d be sitting on the deck . So a few days out, we must have been out in the Atlantic, I think quite a few miles and we had the call from the captain over the loudspeaker, “All nursing sisters report to the port bow immediately.” So we thought great, you know, some disaster, they need us, war has started for us, it’s going to be wild. We all tore up and he had us lined up and there over the railing was a little Canadian corvette and the corvette had heard there were some Canadian girls onboard this and they wanted to have a look at us so we lined up and waved and said, “Hello.” So that was a lighter moment!

Mrs. Flynn shares her memories while travelling across the Atlantic and the humorous act the nursing sisters provided to the soldiers at sea.

Pauline Flynn

Mrs. Pauline Flynn was born in Port Elgin, Ontario January 23, 1920. Her father was a Canadian Railway Station Master and her mother a school teacher. There are three brothers in her family, she being the only girl. She attended nursing school and in 1938 graduated from Toronto Western. Mrs. Flynn, always having a sense of adventure, decided to join the military. She served as a nursing sister and held the rank of officer. To this day, she holds great pride for the history of the nursing sisters and pride of the blue uniform. After discharge from the service, Mrs. Flynn married and continued to nurse while raising a family in Ottawa. Today, she spends a great deal of her free time volunteering and is very proud of her military connections with other local nursing sisters who served during the same period of time. She is a great spokesperson for the Nursing Sister Association and represents her comrades during many of the Remembrance Day Events in our capital city, Ottawa, Canada.