I will remember them

Patrick Durning, 2008: “I arrived late in the evening. It was dark, damp and cold outside. I was assigned a bunk in a Quonset hut. All of the guys were out already on a night mission over Germany. It was just me and a cat, sitting in the dark. I rolled and smoked a cigarette and wrote a note to my wife. I didn’t feel very lucky, getting in late and missing what would have been my first real mission. I wished I’d had something to drink. You know, a real drink. I had a mug of warm tea. I thought about how far away I was from my home and family in Toronto and how close I was to my birthplace of Port of Glasgow. It was very quiet. I don’t know when I finally went to sleep. The last time I looked at the Oyster Raleigh my wife had given me for my eighteenth birthday it was three o’clock. The next thing I remember was someone shaking me awake for breakfast and telling me I’d have to move to another hut after breakfast. None of the guys had returned from their mission that morning. All of them shot down over France. All of them. I should have been with them. I would have been with them if the trains had been on time. Maybe I was lucky. I felt bad for it for years. Even today, I feel bad about those guys. I always felt like I didn’t deserve to be spared.”

My dad, who passed away in 2009, was a veteran of World War II. He joined the R.A.F., became a bomber, and his home for the next 20-plus months was either a quonset hut on an airbase in England, or in the belly of a Lancaster. The bomb bay. In the weeks before and after my mom, the LOHL, passed away in 2008, he opened up to me and to my brothers about his experiences during the World War II. Dad didn’t have too much to say about the whys or the wherefores—the politics of the fight. Sometimes he’d just start talking while he stirred his tea and looked out the back window. The man couldn’t remember to put on socks or wear gloves against the bitter winter of early 2008, in Toronto, but he remembered the night missions. He remembered the practice runs across the fields of northern England and he remembered being on leave and visiting his beloved uncle in Scotland, then missing the train back to the airbase and spending an evening in the guardhouse. My beloved brothers and I understood his feelings about doing the right thing. Doing the right thing was “his thing”. Near the end of his life, I had the privilege of hearing his stories and quietly making notes. My father often said how horrible it was to bomb towns and cities where so many innocent people lived. “The kids, the women, the old folks. They didn’t deserve to be in the middle of the war.” This bothered him the most. Not the politics. Not the politicians. Not the tyrants. Not the so-called enemy. Innocent, unarmed people being sacrificed during an armed conflict. He hated the night missions, but as he said, “I knew what I was getting into when I signed up. I wasn’t afraid of dying. I was afraid of killing.”

My father stayed in England until December, 1946, in the “non-offensive” operations, dropping tons of food and supplies to the bombedout and starving in Holland. As a young girl, I remember my dad being an overgrown teenager of sorts, handsome, fun loving, perhaps given to a few too many beers when the occasion was just right. He loved to be with his kids. He loved having his family around him. The more the merrier, it seemed. My father passed away in July 2009, just a year after the love of his life died. We were fortunate to have had such a kind man, a veteran of World War II, as our dad. Today, as I write this on November 11th, I think about the young man who wanted to do the right thing. He, like thousands of other men, and women, saw their duty and did it.

I will remember them.

theresa@wellingtontimes.ca