B. Blanche Hogg (Primary Source)

Transcription

Well, back in 1943, the war wasn’t going too well anywhere really and they were always wanting more people, so I felt I should enlist. But I was hopefully be able to provide some help, some way and I went over to Halifax and I enlisted from there and a month later, I was initiated into the service and had six weeks up in Kitchener in Ontario where I took basic training, mainly an introduction into the service and a lot of exercises to get in good physical condition and then we were allocated out to where we were going to help. And I was sent to the National Research Council in chemical warfare, as a secretary. And I was there for maybe six months or so and then I was transferred to post-war planning, down in the centre of Ottawa. It was rather interesting, to know what’s probably going to happen in the future and I was there until February 1946, when I took my discharge and came back home. You sort of knew what you were going to be doing most of the time, your daytime. And I was an only child so it was quite an experience to be, go to bed at night with ten or fifteen in the room, I’ll never forget that. When I first was in Ottawa and we were twenty-four in a room and me, used to being one in a room, it was quite an adjustment. You had a different life than you did when you were home. It was all according to schedule and every day was pretty near the same. Well, you more or less made friends with the ones that you worked with. And there was one girl from Summerside [Prince Edward Island] in the first section that I went to. And we did things together but when I went downtown, we sort of lost get-togethers, but there three other girls, there were three or four different sections in the office and each one had so many in it. And well, there were quite a few girls, a girl from out in B.C. and we were friends after that. It carried on after for a long while. She came to see me from B.C. and we made some good friends, they lasted quite a long while.