I joined the CWAC in December, 1942 at the Vernon Military Camp. I was sent to Vancouver to the old Vancouver hotel which was headquarters to Pacific command. Our barracks for the CWAC were in the Vancouver hotel also. Almost immediately I was sent to Basic Training at Vermillion, AB.

After Basic Training I went on an Instructor's Course to MacDonald College in Quebec and after that I was sent to Kitchner, Ontario for nine months.

Posted back to Vancouver, Pacific command, CWAC Records Dept. In the spring of '45 I was then sent to the Officer's Training Centre at Brockville Ontario. At the end of this course I returned to Vancouver and worked in the Orderly Room as Orderly Room Sergeant.

Do you remember in the Service where booze of any kind in the barracks was not permitted? I was a Sergeant in the Orderly Room at th time, and my friend and I decided to smuggle in a "mickey" of gin. Now where to hide it?? I thought I had come up with a perfect solution.

At this time my room mates and I had our own bathroom. To save time we used to soak our laundry in the bath tub. Wash, rinse and hang everything up right there. Most often when we came to take our clothes off the clothesline everything would be bone dry. We would lay our shirts in the dry bath tub and sprinkle them with water from a beer bottle fitted with a sprinkler top. We kept this bottle on a shelf in our bathroom. I looked at this bottle and thought, It's a perfect place to put the gin, no one would EVER suspect.

To make a long story short, one of my room mates who was unaware of the contents of our sprinkler bottle thought she would do me a favour and sprinkle my very dry laundry for me. Have you ever tried to iron a sticky shirt dampened with Gin?

We may have got away with smuggling the gin into the Barracks but cleaning my iron, rewashing everything, not to mention the loss of the gin was, in a way, cruel and unreasonable punishment.