Lois Brown

I was working in Saint John, [New Brunswick]. Didn’t really like the work. It was housework. And they had the barracks in Saint John where the ladies were stationed which they looked so nice in uniform. Our uniform looked so nice! That’s how I decided, well, to join the CWAC [Canadian Women’s Army Corps] in Saint John, New Brunswick. I was assigned to … work in GOR [Gunnery Operation Room] in [The] Barrack Green [Armoury] in Saint John, New Brunswick, which was tracking airplanes. Worked with the light artillery. It was a branch of the light artillery. We ran a big lighted board and we got the directions from the light artillery base and we tracked the airplanes on the lighted board. As far as I remember, I think there was about 12 in each board for each shift. We used to go on map-reading courses out in the country which was enjoyable. Sometimes we would spend the whole day out in the country doing the map-reading courses, which was enjoyable. And other than that, it was back and forth to the office. When we went up to Niagara Falls, [Ontario] we had to be in uniform, yeah, because we were... But when I come home you had to leave the base in uniform, but after you got home you didn’t have to wear your uniform, unless you wanted to, but you had wear your uniform to go back, had to be in uniform to go back to the base. Well, there was four bunks to a room, four in a room. And we didn’t have too much space, but we had our barrack box at the end of the bunks. So if we get up in the morning we had to make our bed roll, make sure that was all done, because it was inspected every morning. It was a good time in the barracks. It was the, the barracks was the “H”. It was like an “H,” that what ours was. But then when I moved to the other side of the street, it was all one big building. I think the first was the “H”.