By Terrie Todd
Walking down the High Street in Epsom, Surrey, England with a friend one day in 1940, seventeen-year-old Doris Rhindress’s friend introduced her to a Canadian soldier named Bob. Bob, eighteen, soon became a regular visitor at Doris’s home and was nicknamed “Bobby Dazzler” by her mother. Having won the family over quickly, Bob and Doris married in November 1941.
By July of 1943, Doris was expecting a baby. She was working as an usherette at the Whitehall Cinema in East Grinstead where they lived when tragedy struck. At 5:20 PM on July 9, 184 people—mostly children—were watching a film featuring Hopalong Cassidy when the Germans dropped a 500-pound bomb directly on the theater. Injured, Doris was taken to a hospital. In all the confusion and chaos, no one told Bob where she was. He spent hours helping to carry bodies from the theater, frantic that one of them would be Doris. When he finally received word that she’d been taken to a hospital, he went from hospital to hospital searching.
Bombing of Whitehall Cinema, photo courtesy Spartacus-educational
At 8:30 PM, Bob found Doris. “He looked far worse than I
did,” she said. While her injuries were minimal, both of them feared for their
unborn child. One hundred-eight people were killed in that raid and 235 were
seriously injured. It was the largest loss of life in any air raid in Sussex.
Four months later, Bob was sent to Sicily with his unit. Shortly after, Doris set sail on board the RMS Mauretania for a relatively safer life in Canada. She found saying goodbye, especially to her mother, traumatic. Although Bob’s family waited for her in Nova Scotia, they were strangers. Would her new family and community accept her? In her nervousness, Doris did an unusual thing. For her last meal in England, she took herself to “greasy spoon” on a dark London street and ordered rabbit stew—which she had always hated!
When her train pulled into the station at Amherst, Nova
Scotia, Doris spotted Bob’s family on the platform before she even disembarked.
From photos, she recognized her new mother- and father-in-law, two
sisters-in-law, and one brother-in-law. What a relief it must have been to be
welcomed into their arms. She adored them immediately, and they her.
RMS Mauretani, photo courtesy Sandy Hook (scan), CC BY-SA 3.0,
https://commons.wikimedia.org
 |
| Train station at Amherst, Nova Scotia |
With joy on March 5, 1944, a telegram was sent to Bob in Italy. Doris had delivered a healthy, 8 and ¾ pound baby girl.
Sources:
Promise You’ll Take Care of My Daughter: The Remarkable War Brides of World War II, by Ben Wicks, Stoddart Publishing, Toronto 1993
Bombing of the Whitehall Cinema, https://spartacus-educational.com/2WWwhitehall.htm
Bitter war might be raging overseas, but Rose Onishi is on track to fulfill her lifelong goal of becoming a dazzling concert pianist. When forced by her own government to leave her beloved home to work on a sugar beet farm, Rose’s dream fades to match the black soil working its way into her calloused hands.
When Rusty Thorne joins the Canadian Army, he never imagines becoming a Japanese prisoner of war. Only his rare letters from home sustain him—especially the brilliant notes from his mother’s charming helper, which the girl signs simply as “Rose.”
Rose Among Thornes received the 2022 Debra Fieguth Social Justice Award as well as Best Cover Award from The Word Guild.
Follow Terrie here:
Quarterly Newsletter Sign-up
Thank you for posting this encouraging story today.
ReplyDelete