Harry Batty

Actually, when I started out of school, I started in a brokerage office but then the war came along and they closed most of the brokerage offices down; because there wasn’t any business. So I got a job working for an aircraft company training pilots for the Air Force. [Royal Canadian Air Force]

[in England] We used to get bombed on a regular basis and shot up and whatnot. It was no fun. They were so close to the coast, they were always flying overtop of us, taking pictures. I imagine they were Germany. Oh no, there were reconnaissance planes over us every day.

Lots of days, you didn’t eat. You didn’t care if you missed a meal. You’d meet some guy somewhere, you’d go on the way to the mess hall and meet some guy coming back and you’d say, “what’s the grub like?” He’d say, “forget it.” So you’d turn around and go back to work, you wouldn’t bother eating because you weren’t going to eat the stuff anyway. And blackout, London was a terrible place to be in a blackout and everything was blacked out, you couldn’t see where the hell you were going, you know. And traffic was buzzing around with hardly any lights on them because they weren’t allowed to have lights. Other than had little venetian blinds in front of the lights so the light couldn’t shine up so aircraft couldn’t pick it off. But London was a terrible place. I mean, you get lost in London if you weren’t careful. Because everything is black, you couldn’t see your hand in front of your face.

There was always more girls than guys. Oh, at the dances, oh, you had no trouble getting a girlfriend. But see, mostly girls weren’t in military. Some of them were military, like Dutch girls were all military, you met a lot of Dutch girls but, and French girls, but a lot of the Scotch girls and English girls, they were civilians, because most of them worked in ammo factories or somewhere like, you know.

We chopped every second rafter of the roof, chopped every second slat out of the walls to burn. And we chopped down on all of the trees, there weren’t any trees left. I remember, the farmer had a barn next to us that he had kind of abandoned so board by board, the barn just disappeared. We kept burning it.

Well, we always met them [RCAF bomber crews] when they came in and had a chat with them, and it was amazing, like you knew every night you didn’t get everybody back. Every night you lost somebody. We used to lose two or three planes every night. And the guys would come back in and some of them would be wounded of course. But oh no, we used to help them out of the planes and stuff. But they always had chocolate rations on the flight and lots of them would leave the chocolate rations behind, they wouldn’t need it. They’d leave it for us to get, so we’d eat them.