Hugh Rayment had a pass on the Second World War. Part of the team running Vancouver’s airport, he was considered among the essential services necessary to keep life flowing in Canada, so there was no need to put his life on the line.

By Jennifer Smith

This article is from the November 2009 issue of Forever Young

And so he didn’t until his brother, who was in the Royal Canadian Airforce, was killed.

“I guess guilt got the better of me,” he says, recalling how he tried to get onto the airforce, the navy and, finally accepted a posting with the army, which would place him square on the frontlines, all in an effort to enlist as fast as possible.

The description of life he’s preparing to give on this fall day, as an archival effort called The Memory Project: Stories of the Second World War pulls into Kelowna, just south of his Vernon home, is frightening at best, and pretty horrifying when one stops to really think about what he’s saying.

But clad in his veteran’s uniform, a lunch in front of him and the book he penned sitting beside, the 85-year old has an almost excited air about him.

“It’s a pretty complete history,” he says of the book, Camp Vernon, which he published through a local printer in 2003. “It’s in schools in Vernon, but I would like it to be in schools in Kelowna too.”

He wants the next generation to realize what the war was about, the sacrifices his generation made. There are only 175,000 people left in Canada who can tell these stories first hand and, now averaging in their mid to late 80s, the country loses some 500 of its WWII veterans each week.

The Memory Project is funded by the Historica-Dominion Institute and is trying to record their stories on a cross-country venture over to digitally record oral histories from men and women like Hugh Rayment and post them on-line at www.thememoryproject.com so children in schools from Kelowna to Thunder Bay have equal access to the information.

“It will be an unprecedented resource of Canadian history,” says Jenna Misener, project manager.

She came to the team from a job with History Television and says her hope is that she, and the other 12 people working on this endeavor, can bring the war to life, taking the story off the textbook page for a generation who might not get to meet men like Mr. Rayment.

The oldest person the project team has interviewed is 103, she says, noting while he’s still full of stories, it’s not really possible for him to go and speak to a class full of children at this point in his life; although, the project team can come to him.

Their goal is to talk to every living veteran with the physical and emotional capacity to tell their story and on their first day in Kelowna, they comb through the local retirement homes where veterans like Elsie Johnston can sit and wait for a turn to speak without ever having to leave home.

Johnston is a card; a very funny lady, who is busy teasing and jabbing at the other veterans while they wait. When she gets her chance to speak, it becomes pretty obvious this has been a lifelong disposition.

“Now Elsie stop your tirade. Your demeanor is so sad. You’re still alive and kicking. You should be feeling glad,” she says, reciting a poem she’s written since her husband passed away. She has a whole book in her room.

Elsie joined the war in England where she learned to drive.

“Best years of my life,” she says. Breaking into her story, she tells those listening she once drove a Major in the English army, which she more or less signed up for on a whim.

The driving might have saved her, she explains. Her father, in particular, was furious when he learned she had enlisted and refused to speak to her, even kicked her out of the house, until he found out she would be driving the Major everywhere he needed to go.
“We didn’t even have a car in those days and here I was driving,” she said with a little chuckle.

“Best years of my life,” she repeats, running through the tale of how she met her husband and was looked up to be men and women equally, everywhere she went.

Some, like Mr. Rayment, are not lucky enough to say the same.

In his book he can show the archivists a handsome photo of himself taken when he was fighting in the trenches in Holland.
The photo, he says, came after a long day in the mud and muck on the frontlines where he and the rest of the infantry he ran with were stationed.

His unit was about to charge into battle on the day the photo was taken, but a jeep pulled up, his name was called, and he got to go for a full day’s leave instead.

Sitting in the Okanagan Military Museum, he re-enacts how he cast off the flamethrower on his back, and his daughter looks over with a little concern. He has just undergone heart surgery to replace a valve and had been on oxygen, permanently, until a few weeks before The Memory Project event.

Mr. Rayment recalls jumping into the jeep from the depths of a trench filled with water waist-deep and taking off for the showers. He was greeted with a nice clean uniform at the end, which must have been heavenly from the description.

After cleaning up, he stumbled upon a photo shop and recorded his shiny good looks for posterity before heading out for a nice lunch and a day of dancing.

He’s interrupted, gets off track, but eventually returns to the story in which he has to go back to the frontline lest his buddies be left to die.

The man he had given the flamethrower to is now missing the palm of his one hand; it’s been blown off in the day of fighting he missed.
“It was pretty serious stuff,” he says simply, folding his own two good hands on his lap.

He’s had a wonderful life, he adds, listing off a string of children, grandchildren, and great grandchildren, which could easily fill the museum he is sitting in.

The new heart valve should keep him alive to see several more, he adds, and he plans to keep telling his story.

Information on The Memory Project can be found at www.thememoryproject.com. The team will spend another two years travelling the country for similar events.