Irene Jennie Miller nee Girard (Primary Source)

In 2010, The Memory Project interviewed Irene Miller, a veteran of the Second World War. The following recording (and transcript) is an excerpt from this interview. Miller joined the Royal Canadian Air Force Women’s Division and completed basic training at the RCAF Station Rockcliffe in Ottawa. She was then sent to Halifax, where she eventually married her husband, a member of the Royal Canadian Navy. In this testimony, Miller describes her role in the signals branch, where she would log and transfer messages. She also discusses the appearance of U-boats (German submarines) in Halifax harbour and the high cost of accommodations in the city.

Please be advised that Memory Project primary sources may deal with personal testimony that reflect the speaker’s recollections and interpretations of events. Individual testimony does not necessarily reflect the views of the Memory Project and Historica Canada.

Transcript

I was in the Signals branch. We were in the area where they had this pneumatic tube system that went through the building; I had seen it before, it was when I was a kid in the store that they used to have, I believe it was a tube come down a chute into the bin and it was air pressure. And the messages would come from the different parts of the building and it came into our office. And I had to go to the girl that operated the tubes, took the messages out and then gave me the ones that went to me, and then she gave the others to the other people where they belonged. And I had to log the messages as they came in and give them back to her to send them to the different places, the other parts of the building. And there was Teletype operators across the hall from us and right next door was the wireless room. That’s all I saw of the whole building when I was there. Oh, I enjoyed it. Very interesting, and you hear different things and different stations around the east coast. And sometimes got a little bit scary when we heard that there were, eventually we heard that there were U-boats in the Halifax harbour. And that was kind of scary, but we had the navy there to protect us. My husband was in the navy. I married him in Halifax. After I was married of course, we were allowed to – I moved out of the barracks and we got a room in a rooming house and after all, we had no place else to go to, to spend time together. And I stayed in the room – gouged us, they really gouged us, renting a room to two people. It was awful, the way they treated the service people. And they’d move into the basement themselves and rent out the whole house and they’d charge an arm and a leg for a little attic room. The room we had, there was barely room for a bed. And I think there was a dresser and a bed, and then the closet was hooks on the wall that you hang your clothes on. And that was it. There was hardly room to move in the room except for getting into bed and out.