Edith Hemingway (Primary Source)

Transcript

I was working in a restaurant in Saint John, New Brunswick, and I was looking out the window one day and I seen all these Army girls marching down the street and oh, did they ever look smart. Because they were stationed in Saint John, New Brunswick. And I thought, boy, that’s for me. And the next week, I went right down and signed up and in a few days, I was called and I passed my medical and I was in. We were told we were taking over the, you know, for the men, like, you know, the men went overseas and there was many many jobs the girls had to go out to in the morning, to work in offices and other places, you know. And I worked in the medical room, as a medical assistant. And I was training at Chorley Park Hospital [Toronto], I was training there and they sent me in on the ward one morning and to make beds, I walked over to this bed, I still think of that. I walked up to this bed and a nice looking boy was laying there in his early twenties. I said, would you mind getting out of the bed -here’s a chair - I want to make your bed for you. He said, I can’t get out of bed, I have no legs. I never forgot it. That was just one of many. We’d get up in the morning and put on our white coats and go in and the doctor would come and there’d be a lineup maybe ten or maybe five or six at some days, of girls wanting to see the doctor. So I’d have to take them in and the doctor would examine them and they’d say whether they had to go into sick bay or some, some I took home on the train and returned back, made sure they got home for a couple of weeks. It was very good. We used to go out in the evenings up to the restaurants and have lunch and everything. And of course, we had our own entertainment. We had ball games, we had sports, we bowled; we had a bowling team. And I, I really enjoyed there on the weekends when we had weekends off together. We would, a couple of us would get on the bus, go over to Buffalo [New York], take trips to Buffalo; take little trips around on the bus. We had our own room where it was a large building. They’d hold dances just for the Army people. We’d go there on a Saturday evening if you wanted to. Yeah, it was real nice, you know, it was very nice.