Regular readers of my weekly column will know I rode the rails across Canada for the last two weeks, visited many significant people and places on Vancouver Island and ate some very expensive meals, quite contrary to my usual habit and means.
Why did I ride the rails?
Very good question.
First, going by train seemed easier than planning and executing a motorcycle journey to British Columbia.
Second, such a journey allowed me to walk, to some degree, in my father’s footsteps, and to understand him and his role in WWII a bit better, perhaps as much as any 62-year old can understand a father who has passed away without leaving behind a complete personal history.
Chasing my dad for information, or for one reason or another, is not a foreign activity for me. I recall, as a five-year old with very short legs, chasing after him once I’d spotted him driving a familiar truck out of a feed mill in Burgessville and heading south out of the village. I ran and ran, and grew frightened when I spied several trees in a nearby field trying to catch me, like some living creatures with long black arms. I ran and ran and kept pressing toward my goal, i.e., the farmer’s driveway my father had entered, the truck he was driving, my dad.
Fortunately, the chase for some information about my dad has been easier. For example, he left behind many stories of his adventures in the Royal Canadian Navy Volunteer Reserve, from 1941 to 1945. He recalls the following from his time on the beaches of Sicily in 1943:
“Stukas blew up working parties on the beach once when I was only about one hundred feet out. Utter death and carnage.”
And of his time at Comox on Vancouver Island in 1944 and ’45 he says, “It was absolute heaven there. Just normal routine. I trained a few zombies on cutters and played ball five or six times a week under a good coach.” (From “Dad, Well Done”: The Naval Memoirs of Leading Seaman Coxswain Gordon Douglas Harrison)
In December, 2011, while compiling dad’s navy memoirs or stories into the small and aforementioned book, I felt a thirst for adventure grow within me. I began to save money for a trip to western Canada, even though I well knew his service to the navy and Combined Operations began in Hamilton, Ontario in 1941 and took him to Halifax in eastern Canada and then to Scotland, England, North Africa, around the continent of Africa by sea and on to Sicily, Malta and Italy, all before his final year and a half on Vancouver Island. However, when dad wrote in 1975 that “it would cost a small fortune today to retrace the places I had been to and seen under the White Ensign,” he was correct. I’ll try to get to Europe in the future, if my savings can stand it. After all, I hear, according to one who should know, there are some fine pubs there.
In the days that follow I will attempt to provide an accurate but brief summation of my trip west and back, and share personal highlights through both words and photographs. I will introduce you to women who once knew my father as a young man and can still recall travelling with him - almost 70 years ago - by navy barge to Tree Island for afternoon picnics. I will also share my own opinions about why he considered Vancouver Island a heaven on earth.
Yes, it was then, as today, a beautiful place, with beaches that stretch for miles, with lovely hills and mountains in plain sight. And it was also a world away from the beaches and bomb blasts of Sicily, from which dad had escaped with his life a month or two before the end of his two-year long ‘HO’ or ‘Hostilities Only’ term.
Please stay tuned.
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