It’ll All Work Out In The End.

My grandfather Dowell was a very, I don’t know what you’d call it … a man that believed not to worry about things. If it’d be, it’d be. You done the best you could, and that was it. Anyway, I was very disappointed to get in the medi corps, but couldn’t get on the ship and so on. And I was put on a draft up in Ontario. Boys you trained with for four months, your buddies, was all there, taken off the draft. And that was, I suppose, the most disappointed day in my life, pretty near. If you’re going to go, you might as well go with the guys you want to. But there was too many of us for that draft, so they put us on a second draft up in Camp Borden. And same thing out in the field. We … we’re standing there, they took us all, everybody was called off, went to different places. There was five of us standing there, when it was all done, five of us standing there by ourselves out in the field. So we went over to the sergeant, asked him what’s going on. “Well,” he said, “you’re going on special detail.” They rushed us around, and give us a place, something to eat, told us to go to sleep, and they put us aboard an ambulance about twelve o’clock at night, and took us in to Barrie and shipped us off to Halifax. Didn’t know where we were going, of course, they never tell you anything. We had a route letter and it said we’re to report to implication Pier 20 Halifax, that’s all that was on it. So you imagine, two or three days sitting in the train coming down from Ontario. We were doing a lot of thinking, what’s going to happen to us? We get in to Halifax. You’ve been to Halifax, have you? Pier 20, you know, it’s down right by the station house. So they told me you could walk down there. There was a big ship tied up there, so we figured come daylight, we’d be gone, ‘cause sometimes they’d sent an extra, perhaps two guys short. They’d sent us down … we figured that was where we were heading for. Anyway, we got down there and they asked, give us a place to sleep and so on. And the next morning, they come looking for us, took us over to the order room. “What are you doing here? ” Well, all we ... any other letter? No that’s all we had. They didn’t really know we were coming. We were just replacements. They were changing …it was a ... implication transit had active men and zombies, or reserve men in the same unit, and it wasn’t working out too good. Because, like, if a ship came in and they wanted someone go on as an orderly or something, and they couldn’t take so-and-so because he wasn’t going overseas, and this kind of thing. And it made for bad feelings too, so we were just replacements for the unit. So anyway, the Lady Nelson came in and we helped to unload her, stretcher bearer work. And the next evening I was getting washed. I went out, working out on (inaudible) I guess it doesn’t matter, but Buffet come to me and said, “You better hurry up and get washed,” he said, “we gotta go aboard the Lady Nelson at six o’clock.” So that’s how I got aboard the Lady Nelson. But I often thought what my grandfather said, “Don’t worry about things. It’ll all work out in the end.”