It was 1939 and Canada had declared war. Minoru Yatabe remembers Latin class at that moment. His teacher, Ms. Crawford, gathered the boys in her class. She explained she would be forced to return to Glasgow, Scotland, to take care of her elderly parents.
“I know many of you boys are going to come overseas in uniform,” she had said, “so if you ever get to Glasgow, come and see me.”
Lawrene Arsenault and her brother Bill McDonald were always close, but when McDonald went overseas with the Canadian Army in the Second World War, Arsenault really felt the distance. “We didn’t hear from him much,” Arsenault said. “The part of the army he was in was the artillery and he was on the front line all the time, so I never got to really write to him.
Enid Elford’s wartime experience gave her access to guns, but nobody was shooting back. “I was in what they called Tin Pan Alley, where they worked on the Bren-gun magazines,” Elford said. “They had to bang them into shape and it was noisy.”