James Kitchener Jim Fox

I’m from Toronto, Ontario. I was born in the Women’s Hospital in Toronto. And at that time, my parents lived at the corner of Havelock and Bloor, the southeast corner. We were living on the third floor and my mother used to have to carry her groceries upstairs and the milkman used to come and deliver the milk downstairs. She had to carry that up the stairs. And they were just building Bloor Street at the time. And they were taking it from a little wee road to what we know now as Bloor Street. And I can remember when she had to cross the road. It was all dug up and everything else. And the foreman used to send one of his men over and she’d carry me and he’d carry her and me across the rough ground and set her on the other side of the road. So when I went in the army, I was a private and as soon as I found out what I could do, they put me in with a drafting board and I was supposed to design an office, a field office for ourselves, like for the CO [Company Officer] and the, etc., etc., to work in, when we were in the field. We learned how to launch a Bailey Bridge [a pre-fabricated truss bridge] and we learned quite a few things about explosives, things I didn’t know before. And we went overseas then. I think it was 1941 when we went over. We went to Britain. We were taken to a place called Ashton Keynes. And Ashton Keynes is like an estate. And there was three entrances to it, it was quite a large estate. And our whole unit lived in there under tents and in the buildings. And while we were there, we built the people an air raid shelter and being Canadians, of course, we had lots of goodies. All the little kids there, some of them hadn’t tasted candy for weeks and weeks and weeks. So the guard we had on the one entrance, this little kid came alone and he gave him a candy. The next day, there was about 50 kids, all along there, looking for candy. So that was one of our main directives, take candy for kids. I guess just a little feeling of home, you know.