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Description
Now in England, stationed at Aldershot, Mr. Gorman tells how he met his future wife, Gwen, at a neighbouring town’s firehall dance.
Donald Gorman
M. Gorman est né le 23 juin 1921. Son père était mécanicien de machines fixes dans une école secondaire de Windsor et était un ancien combattant de la guerre des Boers et de la Première Guerre mondiale. M. Gorman a quitté l'école après avoir obtenu son immatriculation junior et a travaillé dans une boulangerie, une poissonnerie et comme apprenti mécanicien à l'usine de machines à écrire Remington-Rand, à Windsor. Après s'être enrôlé le 16 septembre 1939, il a reçu son instruction élémentaire à Windsor, avant d'être envoyé en juin 1940 à Borden afin de recevoir son instruction avancée. M. Gorman s'est rendu outre-mer avec le Royal Hamilton Light Infantry Regiment et a participé au raid sur Dieppe.
Transcription
We didn’t have a hell of a lot of money and there was a fire hall next door to the palais and so we went in there and we flogged some cigarettes to the fire men and that gave us the price of admission in you see. We got in there and they had, at that time, in England, because of the air raids and that, they had a lot of afternoon dances. They were called tea dances and that’s all that was sold, was tea and lemonade. So Ed and I, we were standing there, looking over the situation and that. We spot these two girls and so we went over and asked them to dance. One was Gwen and the other was her sister Edie and so anyway I ask Gwen to dance and Ed danced with Edie. So we had a dance and I said, “Can I have the dance after next? ” “Yes”. So up into the men’s room I went and flogged some cigarettes, so that we could buy some tea and for the longest time Gwen couldn’t figure out how come it was every other dance until she found out later that we were flogging cigarettes so that we could buy them lemonade or whatnot. And the dance it normally finished around 4 o’clock something like that and they had, Gwen had to go home. She lived at a place called Haze-Middlesex and they had to go part tube train and then bus and so Ed and I, we’d leave there and “See you next week can we meet you inside? ”. So the following week, the same thing, but the reason we met them inside was that we didn’t have enough money to pay their way in you see, until we flogged some cigarettes. Gwen and I, we got engaged and we were married on February the 14th, 1942. We had, we went up to Wales, Prestatyn and Wales for our honeymoon and that and then we came back and we sort of led separate lives except on weekends, you know.