I've been staffing our booth at Truck World for the past two days and I'm there again all day today.

I've had little free time to visit most of your blogs and limited time to update my own. I'm anxious to know what's been happening in all your lives but won't be able to catch up until Sunday.

Lindsay is depressed, not having had a decent run for two days and no opportunity today. She's laying on the floor at my feet giving me a pleading look, "No, not Truck World again!" Sometimes a dog's life is a tough one.

In the meantime, if you're looking for something to read here, I can recommend the two previous War Bride posts which I spent some time re-editing last night. I was rushed in writing them and not completely happy with the result, but after much tinkering, I'm satisfied they are the best I can do.

See you Sunday!

Following a blast from her whistle and a great bellow of steam, her massive pistons began to churn and the long train pulled smoothly away from Pier 21 in Halifax. The war brides crowded the windows for a last glimpse of the Queen Mary, her superstructure clearly towering over the buildings at the pier.

On board that great ship they had enjoyed their first taste of white bread and real butter in over five years. They breakfasted on unrationed food, enjoyed the latest movies and the ship's band. They had been treated to a luxury few thought to see again.

They had been greeted at Pier 21 by a line of mounties in red surge uniforms, a large military band playing patriotic tunes, a crush of reporters and thousands of well wishers all waving the Union Jack.



It was a sweltering day in late May, 1946 and the women were not dressed for the heat. They had come expecting a land of ice and snow. Instead they faced a long slow ride in 80 degree temperatures with no air conditioning. They had as far to go across land as their voyage across the Atlantic.

Along the way crowds gathered beside the tracks to wave and cheer them on.

Periodically the train would stop and small groups of women and children would detrain to the welcoming arms of their husbands and to meet their new families for the first time.

At one crossroads, in an otherwise empty landscape, the train shuttered to a stop and a woman detrained with her young child and luggage; but no one was there to greet her. She sat on her luggage, periodically walking to a curve in the road to get a better view down its length. The train waited a full hour, blowing its whistle periodically, but still no one came and eventually one of the Red Cross volunteers who accompanied the brides came down and rested a hand on her shoulder. The woman got back on board and they continued to Toronto.

My mother often thought of that poor woman through the years, alone in a strange land, isolated among the joyful reunions taking place all around her, everyone on board feeling her embarrassment.

Had her husband mistaken the place, or the date (the train certainly wasn't keeping to any schedule), or had he just been conning her all those years? Everyone on board thinking, could that be me when my turn comes?

The slow and stately journey continued, the train sometimes sitting on a side track for hours to let regularly scheduled trains pass while everyone on board baked in the merciless sun. But at every stop the number of women on board lessened and my mother and I had more room to ourselves and a degree of comfort.

Finally, two days after leaving Halifax, the conductor walked through the carriages announcing Toronto's Union Station was less than half an hour away.

There was a rush for the washrooms and some last minute grooming. The sound of the train's engine began to echo as it pulled into the station. The platforms were empty until the train came to a full stop. Then some women leaped from the train and ran excitedly to the exits.

My mother and I waited for the rush to subside while she gathered our few things together. Then she took my hand and we stepped down from the train and joined the flow of women moving to the exits and down the stairs into the massive hall of the station.

It was chaos. Thousands of people had come out to greet them. Anxious husbands, his parents and other family members had all gathered for a first glimpse of the bride they had heard so much about. Reporters were everywhere snapping photos for the next day's paper.

It had been three years since my mother had seen my father and then he had always been in uniform. The only uniforms here were the police and the Red Cross escorts who had been with the women from the beginning.

It was a shock when she saw him step shyly out from the crowd. At six foot three he towered over everyone near him, dressed in sports coat and cloth cap. He pulled off his cap and twisted it anxiously. And smiled a big grin of pure delight.

I held back, frightened by the noise and the crowd, but my mother suddenly rushed forward pulling me until I had to run to keep up, letting go of my hand only at the last minute as she rushed into his embrace.

I stood there, uncertain what to do.

Then a short lady in a polka dot dress bent down beside me.

"Hello," she said. "I'm your Aunt Nelly. Welcome to Canada."

Consider, for a minute, the unbelievable statistics:

The total estimated human loss of life caused by World War II was roughly 72 million people. The civilian toll was around 47 million, including 20 million deaths due to war related famine and disease. The military toll was about 25 million, including the deaths of about 4 million prisoners of war in captivity. The Allies lost approximately 61 million people, and the Axis powers lost 11 million.

Let those numbers sink in for a moment. Europe had virtually destroyed itself.

And yet, against this backdrop of devastation, love had bloomed and hope for a better future.

In pubs and restaurants, in lawyer's offices and churches, on streets and in parks, Canadian and American and Australian boys and British girls had found one another. Some boldly, some with awkward shyness, some out of a desperate loneliness, some not even knowing love had taken place until others told them.

In many ways my parent's story was typical of the time. My mother was an English Nanny looking after the children of a Major in the British army. My father was a staff Sargent in the Canadian army stationed at Aldershot. On his days off he would walk in the park where my mother would take the children to play. Because they would always run into each other, they eventually spoke and eventually my father worked up the courage to ask her out.

She said no.

The little girl my mother cared for was heart broken, her imagination captivated by the shy and fragile flirtation that had been unfolding before her.

"Why do you treat Staff Sargent like that, why won't you go out with him?" she asked.

My mother was heart broken as well, "Because he's married and it's not right to go out with married men, sweety."

Unlike the teenagers who make up the bulk of those in war time armies, my father was already in his late thirties. My mother had assumed from his age, that he was already married. But the Major's precocious daughter knew better.

"No he isn't," she said. "Staff Sargent isn't married. I asked father to check his service records."

"You never!!!" My mother cried, turning red with embarrassment.

And so, out maneuvered by an 8 year old, my mother finally agreed and my future parents began dating. They were married within the year. One month short of their first wedding anniversary, I was born.

A week later my father was gone. His entire division was deployed to North Africa and then into Italy and eventually marched all the way to Denmark. I was already three before I saw him again.

During that three year period my father saw death on an unprecedented scale. My mother saw much of her village reduced to rubble and lived with the constant threat of death through bomb and rocket attack. It changed them both.

In 1946 my mother and I joined 46,000 other women and their children in immigrating to Canada. She was a different woman than the one my father had married and he was a very different man.

In ship load after ship load they came, women devastated by war and privation and grief to meet men they hadn't seen in years but who had been exposed to a brutality beyond belief.

As the Queen Mary, in her drab gray military uniform, pulled out of Southhampton to take these women to a country they had only dreamed of and to a life with men who were also more dream than reality, the crowds of well wishers lined the dock and a military band played, "Will Ye No Come Home Again".

My grandparents stood in the vast crowd and watched as the second largest passenger ship in the world pulled out of sight.


It was only then that my grandmother wept.

Gever Tulley, founder of the Tinkering School, talks about our new wave of overprotected kids -- and spells out 5 (and really, he's got 6) dangerous things you should let your kids do. Allowing kids the freedom to explore, he says, will make them stronger and smarter and actually safer.

This is a nine minute video

The dark waters of the mid Atlantic were heavy, cold and eerily calm. Stories of icebergs had circulated and memories of the Titanic were still fresh. A light fog lay wrath-like on the waters.

It was a day out of Liverpool, in late May 1946, on the North Atlantic run and the huge grey ghost sliced the waters with calm assurance. The Queen Mary was still painted her wartime colors, was still stripped of most of her finery but her decks held a precious cargo.

For years now she had carried men, grim soldiers in battle gear, over 8,000,000 of them, 16,000 at a time, many going to their deaths on the bloody battlefields of Europe. But today she was on a return journey, her decks alive with women and their very young children. War brides on their way to a new future on a new continent. Hope and joy replaced fear and determination as emotional cargo.

My mother and I were among them. I was three years old and had just had my first train ride, from Mitcham to Southhampton, and was now settling into life on board the second largest ship in the world.

There were children everywhere and every woman had a story of romance to tell, swept off their feet by brave young men in uniform on their way to an uncertain fate. The men these women had chosen had survived the nightmare of battle and had returned to North American to prepare homes for them in a new world.

For every woman on board, this was the adventure of a life time and no small testimony to their own courage.

It came out of the fog, a towering island of ice far to starboard. Women grabbed their children and ran, anxious not to miss seeing the fleeting drama of an iceberg at sea. My mother lifted me onto the rail for a better glimpse as other mothers were doing, her strong arms holding me tight.

Many of these young women had been children themselves when a berg such as this had sent the Titanic to bottom of the ocean and the memory sent a delicious chill through the crowd.

Suddenly, the ships fog horn sent an ear-splitting blast of noise into the air.

Women screamed and lost their tight clutches on their children and we tottered on the rail three stores over the icy waters of the North Atlantic. There was an instant of panic before grips were reestablished and terrified women hauled their children off the ships rails.

And then everyone laughed with relief.

Someone noticed the iceberg had already drifted out of sight as the great engines of the Queen Mary drove the ship toward the distant shore.

My closest encounters with death were all before I was three years of age. The first when illness led the doctors to contemplate an abortion to save my mother's life, the second when shrapnel from an exploding V1 rocket ripped the hood of my carriage apart. The third when I was almost dropped into the dark frigid waters of the North Atlantic.

Life has been pretty good since then.