Dad’s uniform

“I hated the night raids. If I was going to kill someone, I wanted to see their uniform and their weapons. I always had horrible dreams after a night flight. It was awful.” My Dad rarely had anything to say about his time as a Flight Sergeant during World War II. He was the kind of guy who didn’t think his kids needed to hear any of it but, near the end of his life, while he was a patient in the Toronto East General Hospital, he spoke of his time “overseas.” I tried not to let him see me taking notes, but I know he did.

When I was a kid, I remember Dad’s uniform hanging in their bedroom closet, way at the back. A scratchy, woolen tunic and pants, shiny boots on the floor and his cap, clothespinned to the hanger. Once, when my brother was about 12, he tried the tunic on. I watched the stairway because we knew we’d be in big “heck” if we were caught digging around in “their” closet. The tunic fit my brother like a glove. Well, maybe the sleeves were a bit long. I don’t remember my brother being particularly large for his age and in an instant I realized my Dad couldn’t have been very old when he enlisted. During my days with him at the hospital he told me he was “right out of St. Mike’s, senior matriculation, just 17 years old” when he headed to the recruiter’s office. He told me how every day the telly, The Star and CBC radio covered the war as it unfolded in Europe. It must have been hard for a young, healthy, outgoing guy to sit back and do nothing. Patrick Joseph Durning was all but okayed for service until someone asked for his birth certificate. The jig was up. “They told me I had to get my mother’s permission to enlist. I thought I was old enough not to need my mom’s permission to do anything. I was wrong. There wasn’t a draft and you know your grandmother would never have signed those papers. I just went home and got a job at Lever Brothers the next day.” But, before his 18th birthday, my Dad was in uniform. He didn’t say how it happened, perhaps my grandmother signed the paper or he, more likely, forged her signature. The uniform hanging in my parents’ closet for so many years was on his back and he was on his way to flight training in Edmonton. “Edmonton was an okay city, if you could call it a city. Small enough for a guy to get around by foot. Not much to do, but we didn’t have much spare time anyway. I liked Edmonton and I liked flying. I was good at it but, the instructors wanted me to go to bombing school in England. I wasn’t sure speaking your mind was a good idea in the Air Force.” When Dad finished his flight training he was sent back to Toronto to wait for his “call up.” Mom and Dad were married during the wait. She, a beautiful bride in a handmade silk dress and he, a handsome young man in uniform, standing on the steps of St. Paul’s Church like the first chapter of a wartime love story. Less than a week later Dad was on a train to Trois Rivieres and shipping out to England and bombing school.

I can’t imagine one of my sons in uniform at that age and off to fight in a war that was only a story in the newspapers or on the evening news. It was what young men, and women, did in the late thirties and the 1940s. In late 1946 or early 1947, Dad returned to his home and family. His love of flying had all but been wrung out of him. He never got to pilot the Lancasters; he had the precision to be a bomber and that’s where he spent his night flights, in the bomb bay. Like a lot of men who’d signed up and been “overseas” Dad had little to say about his time in armed service. For some reason his confinement to a hospital bed in 2009 brought out the “stories.” I figure he knew his time was coming. One evening he told me, “It was what I thought I was supposed to do. I learned how to fly but, never got to pilot. But, I could hit a target, I was told. When the bomb doors opened, I felt the icy cold air and saw only the blackness of the night. Sometimes at night I can still feel the plane surge upward when the weight of the bomb was released. I learned to hate people I never met, our targets. Hating people made me afraid of what I couldn’t see.”

During the month of November, I often think about the thousands of young men and women, like my Dad, who “did the right thing” for their family, their friends and their country. Wear a poppy. Listen to a story. Take a moment to be grateful.

theresa@wellingtontimes.ca