THE AUSTRAILIANS AND NEW ZEALANDERS:

In the last blog I commented about the Aussies and the New Zealanders doing their flight training in Fort Macleod. They were full of fun and a "devil may care attitude". Perhaps it was the knowledge, that the war was going on, and that they soon would be part of it; they wanted to live life to the fullest, before putting it on the line. Whatever it was, they had lots of joy of living, making it fun to be around them. Take their training for instance; they started their training in a great little by-plane called the Tiger Moth. Later they graduated to the Avro Anson bombers. They were pretty careful with the bombers, but with the Tiger Moths, as soon as they could solo it, they wanted to have some fun.

The Macleod to Calgary road was a one hundred and six mile ribbon across the flat prairie without any telephone poles and very few trees. In those days, there was very little traffic, so the trainees thought it would be fun to fly a few feet off the ground, then pull up and over any vehicle they encountered. This scared the hell out of the motorists and a few even tried to pull off the road and ended into the ditch. This was great fun until one of them did this to a car that contained the commanding officer. He got the tail number and grounded the pilot. This stopped the practice and motorists could drive the highway without staring out the windshield at an oncoming plane.

Two Aussies were courting a young lady from an outlying farm. They both decided to take two Tiger Moths and fly out to the farm. They must have been rivals, as they started to do some aerobatic's over her home to impress her. Unfortunately, they collided in mid air and both were killed. Not a nice story, but a true one. This led to the banning of all aerobatics except while training with an instructor. Lastly, when flying along, if they saw some farmer up on his haystack, they thought nothing of diving down, and although not that close, frightened the farmer into jumping for his life.

Telling these stories now, years after they happened may make many think that these trainees were pretty stupid. But these same men gave their lives in bombing raids over Germany, or, as with Walter Buckwell, were shot out of the sky by some enemy fighter. Telling these stories doesn't have much to do with life on the farm, nor does it? Just one more story…

Not far from Ft. Macleod was a prisoner of war camp. Many German army and air force prisoners were shipped over there for detention during the war. Many of them volunteered to work on local farms, under guard of course. Guarding was not a big deal as the prisoners were happy to have a chance to do some farm work, were fed very well by the farmers and were not too anxious to get back home to Germany. The prisoners made good workers and at the end of the war, many plead with the Canadian Government to let them stay in Canada as free men. I understand that although they were all repatriated to Germany after the war, many found their way back to Canada at a later time.

Just as many Canadian and American service men and women went back to the farm after the war, so did the Germans. It's too bad they couldn't have stayed on the farm in the first place.

What a waste of human life is war, and we are still doing it. I doubt it will ever end; it has been going on for thousands of years. My mother used to say. "Put all the old men and politicians in the trenches and wars will soon be outlawed".

 

FARM LIFE CONTINUES

The decision was made; I believed that it was a waste of time to continue with school when I was just repeating what I had already learned previously. I was also finding myself wishing that I could get into the Army and do my part. I was just 16 and not able to join up on my own until I was 18 years old.

One of the reasons that I wanted to get into the war was Walter Buckwell. One day, after breakfast, Leighton and I were sitting in the kitchen when the phone rang. Mrs. Buckwell answered the call, turned to Leighton and said the call was for him. When he got on the telephone you couldn't make out who he was talking to. It was just a lot of yeses, no's, and silence. When he hung up he turned to his mother and said: "Mom, it's Walter. His plane has been shot down and he's confirmed dead".

Mrs. Buckwell started to cry. Leighton took her into the sitting room and I went outdoors. Later Leighton joined me. He told me that it would be best if we just left his mother alone to read her Bible. She needed to come to grips with the reality that Walter would not be coming home. He also told me that he was going to miss his brother, but that Walter had been doing what he wanted to do. I guess that was one of the saddest days I had ever seen. It did bring home the fact that we were in a war… and I should be in it, too.

One day Leighton said that it was time to do the wool shearing. We would have to bring in the sheep to a large holding area near the barn. This was a whole day event; we had to go out to the field where the sheep were, round them up, and drive them back to the farm. The farm had two men who were the herders and a great sheep dog. The dog's job was to keep running around the herd and keep them moving in the same direction. We finally got all six hundred penned up, ready for the shearers who would be coming the next day.

The shearers, all four of them, would cut the wool from the sheep with hand shears. No fancy electric clippers in those days. Although it was a hard job, they could shear a sheep in about three or four minutes. The wool was put into large sacks about eight to ten feet long. The sacks had to be hung from a platform and someone had to climb up on the platform and slide down into the sack. After that, big bundles of wool would be tossed into the sack. Then they had to be trampled down, in order to get as much wool as possible in each sack.

I thought this would be a good job for me, I soon found that it was a dirty job. As the wool was tossed down on top of me, I found out that lamb's wool was full of oil. It didn't take long until I was covered with lanolin from head to foot. I also found out that freshly sheared sheep wool had ticks in it. Soon they were crawling all over me. Also, if the sheep struggled during the shearing process, the shears would cut the skin; causing some wool to be kind of bloody. Believe me; I thought the day would never end. I took a large bar of soap that night, went down to the river and scrubbed and scrubbed.

 

Not long after that event, it was time to cut the hay and stack it. As there were quite a few Australians and New Zealanders training at the local Air Force Base, Leighton hired some of them to help us out with this chore, taking advantage that some of them had had experience as farmers in their own country. The Aussies and the Kiwis enjoyed helping out and were very happy to earn a little money to supplement their military force pay.

The Aussies had a great sense of humor. They were always singing and telling jokes. They were also hard workers and very easy to make friends with. One of the highlights of being in Macleod was to meet these young men and see how gung-ho they were about flying. They were also daredevils and in the next blogs I'll tell you more about them. For instance, the prairies are so flat and treeless; the students would try to fly back to base with some hay in their wheels. They would swoop down over the fields and skim haystacks with their wheels. Real daredevils, they were…

Life on the farm

Farm life was so different from what I had been used to prior to moving to Macleod. I enjoyed helping out though and learned how to run a hay rake and make a hay stack, round up the milk cows, and bring them in for milking. Feed the pigs and clean the hen house were also part of my new duties. What I didn't like was killing any animals, yet it was an important facet of farm life and had to be done. Leighton had no trouble in butchering pigs, sheep, calves, chickens etc. That was just part of being a farmer and had to be learned from an early age. Sometimes animals got sick and had to be disposed of. To my relief I was never asked to participate in these sad events.

Not long after arriving on the farm, I enrolled in the local high school, and was placed in the eleventh grade. The high school was about five miles from the farm. They had no school busses and nobody had time to give me a ride. Gas was rationed by the Government; however farmers were able to get a supply of gas to run their farm equipment. The only way the Government was able to control its use was by putting a color dye in the gas. Using it to run your car was forbidden. The Mounties had check points where they would siphon gas out of your tank to check its color. You had to pay a very heavy fine if they caught you. So I had no choice but ride the bicycle that Leighton loaned me. It was not fun in the rain, wind or cold.

I got pretty fed up with riding a bike every day. A lot of the students came to school on horseback. There were several horses available on the ranch but I didn't expect the Buckwell's to lend me a horse. I did a lot of riding and Leighton had taught me how to ride a Western saddle. I had taken riding lessons in Vancouver, along with my sister, but we used the English saddle that was very flat and had no horn.

I decided that I wanted my own horse. My mother gave me some money and I set out to buy a horse. Leighton and I saddled up and rode way out to the Indian Reservation. He thought that an Indian pony would be a good buy. Indian ponies are pretty rugged and almost as big as the ranch horses. When we got to the reservation the Indian agent said that Chief Big Swan had some horses he would sell. We located the Chief and we sat down to talk. Chief Big Swan knew Leighton. He had often hired some of the local Indians to help bring in the crops. It took a little bargaining with Chief Big Swan, but we finally settled on the price of twenty five dollars. I had my pick of several horses in the corral. With Leighton's help, I picked out a reddish brown Indian pony that looked about three years old. We put a bridle on him and led him back to the farm. I still had to buy a saddle, bridle etc.; in the meantime Leighton loaned me a saddle. From then on, whenever the weather was bad, I rode my horse to school.

At school I had been passed up to the 12^th grade, however, I was not too happy with my school. It seemed that everything they were teaching, I had already learned. I had discussed this with the school principal, who concluded that apparently the boarding school back in Vancouver was teaching far ahead of the Macleod local high school. It was a long way to get to school every day. I was riding a bike and on occasion was riding on horseback.

Winter was coming, and I didn't relish doing this in below zero weather. I spoke further with the principal to see if I could get a graduation certificate. He told me that this was impossible unless I finished the school year. He acknowledged that I was far ahead of the class; however, his hands were tied. He suggested that if I wanted to leave, I could. If I returned in the spring and took the exams he would do his best to provide me with a graduation certificate. But, it would be up to the Superintendent in Calgary. I decided to discuss this with the Buckwell's and my mother. I was not sure what I should do…

Fort Macleod

The Town of Macleod:

The town of Macleod is actually called Fort Macleod, as it was the first Northwest Mounted Police outpost in Western Canada, established in 1884. It was named in honor of Col. James Macleod of the Mounted Police. When I arrived in Fort Macleod in 1943, it looked to me just like the frontier towns I had seen in the movies. There was just one main street lined with sandstone and brick buildings along with few old wooden buildings, and there were many hitching posts to tend to all the horse riders. One building of notice the Empress Theatre, built in 1912. You'll read more about the Empress Theatre later, as it became an important part of my life. Another particularly interesting sandstone building was the Silver Grill Bar and Restaurant. It was told that the large mirror over the bar was shattered by a bullet, back around 1912.

There were many private homes, some with picket fences, on the side streets. Several churches were in the neighborhood and three cemeteries with markers dating back to the late 1800's. On Main Street, you found tackle shops, clothing stores, hardware, grocery, and general merchandise stores. There were two small hotels in town: the Queen's hotel, built in 1903, and the American, built in the 1890's. Both had around 40 rooms. I can't say for sure, as I never got to stay in either one.

I always enjoyed going into town. There were always horses at the hitching posts; a number of colorful outfitted Indians would be standing along the wooden raised boardwalks, farmers were doing their shopping in the tackle shops and hardware stores. One particular noticeable group of people was the Hutterites. They were of German extraction and lived together in a commune. They made their own clothes, which were always black; the young men were clean shaved and the married men all wore beards. It was very interesting to watch the elders shopping. They were forbidden to purchase anything that they could make or grow themselves. They kept to themselves, and their farms were showplaces of neatness. They were very hard workers and very courtly to all. Some of the townspeople disliked them because of the ongoing war and their German background.

On Sundays, the Buckwell's attended church in town. They attended the Episcopal Church and I would always attend with them. Mrs. Buckwell was very religious and every Sunday evening we would all gather in the sitting room at home and Mrs. Buckwell would read a number of passages from the Bible. After Walter left for England and was flying in the war, we would all offer a prayer for his safe return.

Fort Macleod was a friendly town. It seemed that everyone knew everyone else. As I mentioned earlier, the population was only around 1,500. The airmen and airwomen from the airbase were always treated very well. Townsfolk would invite them to their homes and were always ready to extend a friendly handshake. Unfortunately, there was not much to do in this small town. The Empress Theatre was always full, but that was about the extent of off base entertainment. Training at #7 SFTS was very intense and really didn't leave much time for anything else.