Norma Hariet Dillon

One day our ship, we had a whole lot of Russians come onboard at HMCS York. And we were all given papers, Russian words and the Russians had English words and we had to kind of talk. And one day they, they came over to pick up a minesweeper [HMS Jaseur], I have pictures in here of this. And they asked for volunteers to go around the gun trials of the minesweeper and I went out on the gun trials. And it was very exciting. And there was very rough seas. It was on Lake Ontario but the seas, very small waves, not like the ocean. A lot of people got sick. But I didn’t get sick and then my picture was taken so a Russian sailor had to work a sewing machine on this ship and then my future husband was overseas and he got this, I guess it was a naval newspaper or something and there was my picture on the front page. And he saw it overseas. Well, I used to write every night, send him a letter and just whatever was going on in the daytime, whatever we did and then he would write back and tell me where, well, he couldn’t say too much because they were censored. And then he went off on trips up to Russia and all over the place and then he’d come back to port and he’d collect all these letters. I’d get a whole bunch of time when I received his letters, he’d get a whole bunch at a time. He didn’t write every day because he didn’t have the time for that but he’s kept in touch and I remember with him, when he said it was D-Day [the Normandy invasion], that everybody took off and I was on duty, I had to stay there that night so they were all partying out in the streets in Toronto and I didn’t know where they’d gone but I had to stay, so I was on duty that night. So then I went back to Howard House and there was only one person there. I don’t know where they all were, out celebrating. Then so there was a petty officer, so she said to me, well, everybody’s out celebrating, let’s you and I go raid the kitchen. She had the key to the kitchen, so I thought, well, she’s the petty officer, I’ll go with her. So we had our own little party. Yeah, everybody was out celebrating, yeah.