An Unusual Welcome to England

We arrived to Britain and the first thing we saw was Spitfires flying over the ship and that got everyone very excited that this was the plane that they wanted to fly and so we were put on a train and were on our way down to Bournemouth. That was more or less the city that most Canadians were stationed and on the way, what they did, they, I don’t know, about 4 miles from Bournemouth they stopped the train and we had to walk the rest of the way and that was quite a chore because we had all our baggage and so we had to march in. The thought behind it, they didn’t want the Germans to know that there was a new group of Canadian pilots arriving in Britain, but we found out a day later that they did because a 109 came down main street of Bournemouth, dropped a bomb, just saying hello to these Canadian pilots coming over from Canada.