I have harbored a deep love of the sea and the ships that sail upon her for the best part of my life. My enlistment into the Royal Canadian Navy in the 1960’s was fuelled by this desire alone and the fresh memories of living aboard a yacht on the south coast of England before emigrating to Canada. I signed on with memories, still fresh, of being tethered to the mast in a sudden English Channel gale, as well as a reckless excursion of rowing beyond the limits of an lsle of Wight harbour, along with another little girl, out to sea to get a close-up look at either the HIVIS Queen Elizabeth or Queen Mary as she passed.
Needless to say, that adventure ended happily with a little help from the Royal Lifeboat National lnstitution. I would sit for hours listening to stories shared by a Royal Navy Chaplain who secretly delivered mail to ships off the coast of the lsle of Wight as they covertly awaited their orders for the D-Day invasion. I would spend hours looking at the wonderful ships he made from match sticks and boxes: contributing to his OBE from Queen Elizabeth. I treasure to this day, paintings that he gave to me, a child. My earliest writing was focused on the sea and reflected my love of all things maritime. By age twelve, I had devoured Rachel Carson’s ‘The Sea Around Us’ and Sir Francis Chichester’s ‘Gipsy t\/oth Circles The World.’ I sensed early that I was destined to live on or near the sea. All this would seemingly come to an end when my parents announced that we were emigrating to Canada and would be settling ‘inland’. For a few years I plotted every means to a return to my great love but ultimately was stymied at every turn. It would turn out, a short time later, the opportunity arose. I would join the Canadian Navy as a teenager, and it was still even permissible to serve as a British subject at that time. Finally. This is how, some fifty plus years later, near an inland sea, I found myself browsing through Ottawa’s Canadian War Museum website and recalling that it had been fifty years since our one and only Canadian aircraft carrier, HMCS Bonaventure was literally scrapped. Bonnie, as she was affectionately known by those who served in the Royal Canadian Navy in the 1960s, is inextricably linked to my memories as a WREN in the Royal Canadian Navy, in fact, as I scrolled through the War Museum site, I discovered that I was also immortalized there and I can thank HMCS Bonaventure for that!
