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Jim Hume: A long-ago Sept. 1 dawned on a very different world

Seventy-four years ago, the weather on southern Vancouver Island was pleasant with overnight lows of around 11 C, rising to 18 or “slightly warmer” during the day. A few scattered clouds rode on gentle winds from the southeast. The Sept.
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Columnist Jim Hume

Seventy-four years ago, the weather on southern Vancouver Island was pleasant with overnight lows of around 11 C, rising to 18 or “slightly warmer” during the day. A few scattered clouds rode on gentle winds from the southeast.

The Sept. 1, 1939, front page of the Daily Colonist did not reflect nature’s gentle end to summer. It was jammed with bulletins flung from half a world away way “by wireless” from London, Paris, Brussels and Warsaw. They informed readers of “unconfirmed reports the Germans have begun an offensive against Poland.” One brief eyewitness account from the Polish-German border read: ”An army ambulance arrived at the emergency hospital at 9:10 a.m. The men carried in a wagon were on stretchers. One had on a first aid field bandage.” Within days, casualty reports would be listing the dead in thousands.

In England, the evacuation of women and children from London had begun. The nation was not yet at war with Germany, but a British promise that it would defend Poland against German aggression made conflict inevitable. The world worried and waited.

In Victoria, news of the gathering war clouds dominated, but the city, as befits a capital city, was putting on a brave face and carrying on life at a normal end-of-summer pace.

A Mickey Rooney movie was showing at the Capitol; Shirley Temple was gracing the screen as Susannah of the Mounties at the long gone Atlas; Ginger Rogers and David Niven were being offered in The Bachelor Mother at the Capitol. Admission ran between 10 and 30 cents downtown. The Oak Bay Theatre offered a double feature of Let Freedom Ring with Virginia Bruce and Victor McLaglen and Calling Dr. Kildare with Lew Ayres and Lionel Barrymore. It cost 25 cents or 35 cents for a “loge,” which provided a cosy privacy for back-row courting couples.

Friday, Sept. 1, came and went, and Saturday’s Colonist readers were met with the eight-column headline ALLIES DECLARATION OF WAR IMMINENT. The front page carried its first story from blacked-out London: “London tonight is hushed, dark, grim. A sultry drizzle is falling on the murky streets.” And those of us who lived in England not far from London remember going to bed that second of September night embraced by the solemnity of parents who had survived the First World War and remembered its terrors. British Columbia went to bed aware that Canada could be dragged into the looming abyss — but still waiting and hoping. The people well understood what “WAR IMMINENT” meant. They had read the display ads calling for volunteers to join the Princess Patricia’s Light Infantry: “Men of good character between 18-35 years of age, over 5 feet 6 inches in height and physically fit.” Many remembered answering a similar call little more than 20 years earlier.

There would be no shortage of volunteers for the army, navy or air force when the West Coast awakened Sunday morning, Sept. 3, to discover war had been declared while they slept and their government — with the rest of the Commonwealth — had pledged to stand with Britain and other allies against Germany.

Those of us dwelling in England’s different time zone had already lived through the solemnity of a story recorded that Sunday morning in the Colonist: “11 a.m.: Britain falls silent. Soft music plays on BBC.” When I read that line today, my heart catches a beat and I’m back in my mother’s spotless kitchen listening again to our new radio, BBC music playing, our wall clock seeming to tick much louder than it had ever ticked before.

11:15 a.m.: The music fades and we hush to silence as prime minister Neville Chamberlain in his high-pitched voice says he is speaking to us from the cabinet room at No. 10 Downing Street. As he tells us “we are at war with Germany,” my mother sighs and sheds a tear, but no one speaks for what seems a long time.

And then my old soldier father, seriously wounded at Gallipoli in the First World War, bravely told us not to worry. ”We’ll be safe in the Midlands,” he said. “The Germans don’t have any planes that can get this far.”

Seventeen minutes later at 11:32 a.m., the wail of our first air-raid warning sends us scurrying from the kitchen to the garden to scan our Midland skies. Ten minutes later at 11:42 the all clear sounded, and father said “I told you nothing could get this far.” We never mentioned his brave prediction when a few months later we were under nightly siege, or when little more than a year later we watched one Noverber night as our neighbour city Coventry was destroyed.

Today, events of 74 years ago may sound to many like bad dreams best forgotten. But to those who lived through those times and survived the terrors that fly by night, they seem like yesterday — dreams or nightmares to be remembered and by remembering, hopefully, never repeated.