A conversation with Doug

For four years, I worked in the kitchen at Lookout Ridge Retirement Home. The best part of the job was the hour or so I spent per shift talking to residents while serving meals. One particular favourite of mine was Doug Drew.

I first spoke at length to Drew several weeks after I began work, when I saw him coming out of an elevator wearing a military uniform, and I asked when he had served.

“Air Force mechanic,” he told me. “North Africa and Italy, and then for more than twenty-five years after the war was over.”

He was then on his way to his 90th birthday party, and was wearing the uniform to mark the occasion.

Once Drew knew that I was interested in hearing about his time in the Royal Canadian Air Force, every so often in the dining room he would beckon me over to his table so that he could tell me a story. For such a sombre matter as war, most of these stories were humorous, and as we laughed together I felt a certain complicity.

From time to time, Drew would drop a few words of Italian, which he learned a little while living in the country for a year during the war. “Do you have any vino tonight?” he’d ask. People like Drew made it difficult to stop working at the residence.

Last Friday, just over a week before Remembrance Day, I went for a visit. Drew is tall and jolly, and when I asked how he was, he said, “Pretty good. I’ve got a sore on my rear. It’s been there for a month—every time you put some stuff on it, your underwear takes it off. But I’m old, so it’s all right.”

After idling for a few minutes in his La-Z-Boy recliner, where I had interrupted his nap, Drew came to life.

“How you getting on with the girls?” Drew asked, a favourite joke of his. I told him that he still had to teach me a few lessons about courtship.

“Don’t ask me,” he said. “In my entire life, I took a girl to the movies exactly one time. I did get married, of course, but that’s something different.”

Drew, who grew up in Guelph, was eight when his mother died during the birth of his brother, and 14 when his father died too. He was taken in by his grandparents, and put to work in the garage where his father had been a mechanic.

“Living with my grandparents—that was probably why I was always scared of girls. My grandmother said to me all the time, ‘Now Douglas. Don’t you have anything to do with any girls, or there’ll be big trouble.’ You can’t get that sort of thing out—it’s stamped somewhere inside of you. She scared me so good that when a group of girls came walking down the sidewalk toward me, I’d swerve way over to the side to get out of the way.”

In 1940 Drew joined the RCAF, and went for six weeks of basic training.

“I’d never even heard of Brandon, Manitoba, before, and there I was, marching, for six weeks.”

After more training in England and Scotland, Drew was shipped with his squadron to North Africa, the only RCAF division to be stationed there. The convoy left Britain in April, and didn’t arrive in Egypt until June. “A convoy is only as fast as its slowest ship,” he said. “We had thirty-five boats, and a few of them were just little steamers that plugged along at six or eight miles an hour.”

“How did you pass the time?” I asked. Drew put a hand to his forehead, pretending to block the sun.

“Looking for periscopes. Down near the equator, the water is flat like this floor here. When the ocean is choppy it’s easier to see the submarines because the waves go up and down and you can get a look at some of it. When the water is calm, they just poke up a few inches. Those guys are scary.” But the convoy encountered no U-Boats during the trip.

Along the way, the entire squadron was lectured by officers. “They said, ‘You’re going to be here for three years. So there’s no use crying about going home, because you’re not going to go home for three years.’”

I asked whether this particularly bothered him.

“No. It might have been different if I’d had parents. But my grandmother died while I was away, and so it was only my grandfather at home.”

Over a decade ago, Drew had his wartime journals printed into a few copies for his family. Even though he left school when he was 14, he writes clearly, without ornament. “When I was old enough to drive, my grandfather, who did not drive, bought a car so that I could drive him. During one of our outings in the car, he asked me to drive him to York Road [in Guelph] so that he could show me where he was born. Had he not done so, I would have no knowledge of my family roots.”

It certainly wasn’t the food that kept Drew from being homesick. Most of the time there was just bully beef and hardtack to eat. I wondered what hardtack was made of. “Flour, I guess,” he said. “And cement. I don’t think you can even buy it anymore. I used to keep a piece in my overalls and break off little bits to suck on while I worked. You had to soften it up with saliva.”

He preferred Italy to North Africa. “It’s not fit for a man to live there,” he said. “You leave food out for fifteen minutes and it’s rotten from the sand and heat.”

Finding food in Italy wasn’t easy either, and Drew often went scrounging outside the base in search of something else to eat.

“My friend Jim Baird, who was in the RAF, and I used to go out looking for stuff. But there wasn’t much to be had. One time, a little boy came up to us and said, ‘Do you want my sister?’ They were all so desperate. They’d have done anything for some money or food.”

By 1944, Drew had finished his three-year stint that had been promised by the officers on the way over, and he was shipped back to England for a month’s leave.

“Jim was in the RCAF, and their term was five years so he couldn’t leave when I did. He said, ‘Doug, you have to go and visit my mother.’ And I said, ‘Oh sure Jim, yes I will, of course.’” Drew nodded his head, miming a feigned earnestness. “But what did I want to see his mother for?”

He arrived in England a week later.

“We had so much money. My pockets were full. My coat pockets were full. My wallet was full. We had been working for three years with no place to spend what we were earning. So in England, we found a nice hotel. Behind the desk was a real starchy Englishman. He said, ‘What do you fellows want?’ We said we wanted a room. He said, ‘Oh no, you can’t be in here, this is for officers only.’ He was lucky we hadn’t had anything to drink, because we’d have pulled him over the counter and roughed him up. For officers only. There we were with enough money to buy the place, and he wouldn’t even give us a room. But we hadn’t been drinking, so we just said, ‘Piss on him,’ and found another hotel.”

Drew said that they had passes allowing them to travel the full length of the island, all the way to northern tip of Scotland.

“But we stopped in Glasgow. I figured that I better go and visit Jim’s mother, since he lived pretty close to there. I took a bus to Hart Hill—only they don’t say it like that, it’s like, ‘Hawwt Hill.’ I found his house and rapped on the door, and his sister answered it. As soon as she saw my uniform, she yelled out behind her, ‘Ma, Colonel Drew is here.’ And Jim’s mother came out and invited me in and said that she’d put on the tea. Tea—the first thing they do is put on the tea. I needed tea like a hole in the head. I wanted a couple of shots.”

After a few hours at the Bairds’ house, Drew rose to leave. You’re not going anywhere, Mrs. Baird said. She told him to go get his kit and stay with the family.

The first thing they do is put on the tea. I needed tea like a hole in the head. I wanted a couple of shots.

“I ended up staying the whole month with Jim’s mother. My friends couldn’t believe it at first. But I had a good time. Jim had a brother who worked down in a coal mine, checking for gas. Every day he’d come home black as the ace of spades, and we’d go out in to the little town. There were about five places to get a drink. We’d go into the first one, and someone called Jock—I call them all Jock—would see my uniform and send two drinks over. They have this thing called a ‘half and half,’ which they call a ‘hoff and hoff.’ A shot of liquor that you wash down with a pint of beer. They’d send a ‘hoff and hoff’ over. And I’d say, ‘Oh, thanks for the drink, Jock.’ We’d get two there, and then go over to the next pub and get the same thing from other Jocks. Then we’d eat fish and chips on newspaper at the end of the night.”

After the month with the Bairds, Drew was sent back to North America. He was in a doctor’s office in Toronto, receiving his discharge physical, when the sirens began to sound and church bells gonged. “You better go home,” the doctor told him. “The war is over.”

While he was overseas, Ruby, the sister of a friend of Drew’s from Guelph, started writing him letters.

“She was getting quite chummy in those letters,” Drew said. The two married in 1946 after he’d left the service. Every month or so, the RCAF would send him a letter, asking him to rejoin. Drew eventually told his wife that he was going to go and hear what they had to say.

“She told me to go and ‘get it out of my system,’” he said. “I went and talked to them, and by the end of the day, I was back in the service.”

Drew stayed in the RCAF until 1973, working and living on bases around the country.

His apartment is full of paintings and photographs. On one wall, there is a line of pictures from his days in the air force. One of them is of the entire mechanic crew on that RCAF squadron in North Africa.

“Did you keep in close contact with any of them?” I asked.

“A few,” he said. “I didn’t join the Legion though. If I’d been on my own, I probably would have. But Ruby’s father was a member, and he was a man who liked his beer too much. So Ruby said that there’d be no Legion business. There was one mechanic who lived out in St. Thomas, but he died a while ago. Half of those guys are gone now.”

“Probably more than half,” I said.

Drew nodded. “Right. Remember, I’m ninety-six.” He was quiet for a minute, and looked up at the photograph.

“All of this feels like it happened a hundred years ago.”

“It almost did happen a hundred years ago,” I said.

“Yes,” said Drew. “I guess that’s true.”

I thanked him and said my goodbyes. After I closed the door, I think that Doug reclined his La-Z-Boy again, settled in, and went back to sleep.