Ruminations

Wartime Flash

"It was so sad, because the men were all yelling and happy and you knew in another couple of weeks they wouldn't be so happy. Some would be under ground and I would be taking pictures of their funerals."

Irene Ogilvie, right, during the Second World War

"(The photographs) were so awful ... (they) had these bodies lined up like matchsticks. I remember looking at them and thinking it was just terrible. I never dreamed Belsen was as bad as it was."
Irene Ogilvie, 94, Perley and Rideau Veteran's Health Centre, Ottawa

Back then, during the Second World War, the Royal Canadian Air Force offered the young woman living in London, originally from the Canadian prairies, a job as a war photographer. With her Speed Graphic camera, courtesy of the Air Force, she became one of a group of other young women tasked to chronicle the lives of Canadian troops in film.

They were never dispatched to Europe, to the war zones. London itself became a war zone, blitzed from constant German fighter raids meant to demoralize the civilian population and destroy the government's will to resist Nazi Germany's determination to make of Britain what it had already managed in most of the rest of Europe on its way to establishing its thousand-year Reich.

She took photographs of the arrivals of Canadian troops off ships, she ventured out to hospitals and special war-time events, to funerals and weddings, wherever her presence and her camera could take photographic mementos of events later to be recalled with pride, nostalgia and regret. Some of her photographs remain with the Air Force, and some of them accompanied her to her room at the Perley.

There is another elderly woman with memories, Squibs Mercier, 89, married and widowed during the war years. Squibs Mercier was married at 18 and the war gave her widowhood by the age of 19. Her first husband was shot down in action. She met another pilot after the war, and outlived him, another resident of the Perley and Rideau Health Centre who predeceased her.

Irene Ogilvie on the other hand met a Canadian airman through an acquaintance. "It was love at first sight", she said. This was the man destined to become her husband. She and he planned a night out at the American Eagle Club in London. She dressed herself to the nines, but he simply didn't show up. And then she heard from his commander he had been shot down and presumed dead.

Eventually they learned he was in a POW camp. They met again, in Canada after the war and in 1946 they married, began a life together and had two children. Of life, says Squibs Mercier: "I don't know about staying calm, but you carried on or you sank. Whatever happens in life, you have to deal with it and carry on."