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In honour of Remembrance Day, the MQUP presents an excerpt of Occupied St John’s: A Social History of a City at War, 1939-1945, edited by Steven High.
In January 1941, the hulking twenty-one thousand ton troopship Edmund B. Alexander docked in St John’s harbor, carrying a thousand American soldiers sent to join the thousands of Canadian troops protecting Newfoundland against attack by Germany. France had fallen, Great Britain was fighting for its survival, and Newfoundland – then a dominion of Britain – was North America’s first line of defence. Although the German invasion never came, St John’s found itself occupied by both Allied Canadian and American forces.
At Christmastime the local press encouraged the “[m]others of lads who are now abroad …to fill in the empty chair at the dinner table on Christmas Day” with “some other mother’s boys,” couching its appeal for wartime solidarity in the language of universal motherhood, replete with the slogan “Let us invite a Service man.” Each year, on Christmas day, as Patricia Winsor remembers, “my father and I and my brother would walk down to Caribou Hut” to “take these gentlemen” home for Christmas dinner. In the privacy of their homes, children caught intimate glimpses of the sailors and soldiers stationed in town. In meeting servicemen up close, children were impressed with gestures and appearances. As adults, they would recall the politeness of a British officer who, even “in the stormiest days …always took off his hat before he came in through the door,” or the hairy chest of the Canadian soldier who boarded with Patricia Winsor’s family and stitched together a raincoat for his own little boy back home.
Visiting servicemen acted as surrogate brothers for the young, cutting down a Christmas tree in the woods, pulling it home on a sled, and stuffing the children’s Christmas stockings with forbidden treats. When young Ann Abraham found chewing gum in her stocking on Christmas morning, it confirmed her belief in Santa Claus, since her mother would never have bought her chewing gum. “My mother did hate chewing gum …It was like a cow, chewing gum. It was a terrible thing.” “It never entered my mind,” she adds, that the “six burly sailors” who had walked into the house on Christmas Eve “had brought a whole lot of stuff for our stockings.”
Click to read more about Occupied St-John’s.
For more Remembrance Day reading:
In Montreal on Remembrance Day? The event will be marked with a ceremony on McGill University’s downtown campus Thursday morning.
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