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…
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