Away from the fly-sweep, an hour let it rest,
the woods are calling me.
While memory fails where the flies are a pest,
the woods are calling me.
How could I live in the great busy town,
‘thout the breath of the wildwood and leaves fluttering down,
The great trees might miss me if I wasn’t around,
the woods are calling me.1
From early days in Hamilton the family moved to Oshawa. Here Frances attended King Street School and ultimately the Oshawa Collegiate and Vocational Institute, where her growing artistic talents were recognized and encouraged by her art teacher, Dorothy Van Luven. Frances graduated from Oshawa Collegiate in 1944, and won the award for Most Outstanding Girl of the School.
Friends indirectly fostered Frances’s own artistic inclination. Una Brown Noble, a neighbour and a painter, became a great friend. For two summers, in 1934 and 1935, she took Frances to Algonquin Park, the beautiful nature reserve 145 kilometres north of Oshawa, Ontario. “I don’t know why anybody would want to be bothered by a scruffy little kid hanging around all the time,” said Frances, “but she did.” Una Noble had a small cottage on Canoe Lake, where memories of the painter Tom Thomson’s death were still fresh. But Frances’s intimate contact with Thomson was still twenty years in the future. As an eleven-year-old girl vacationing with her friend, she spent six to eight weeks in Algonquin Park during those two wonderful summers. It was her first contact with the park, a contact she was later to renew for many years as a counsellor at a summer camp.
Una Noble died of kidney failure at the age of thirty-nine. This was the first big tragedy in Frances’s life. Her mother said, “Never mind, you’ll see her in Heaven.” This did little to relieve Frances. “Yeah, but I might be eighty and she’ll still be thirty-nine!” she wailed. “What kind of a relationship will we have?!”
Up to this point in her life, Frances felt a lack of what she called “structure.” There seemed an absence of organization in her days; all things seemed unplanned, without scope or goals. She felt, not so much a need for someone to tell her what to do and when, but rather recognizable rules to which she might willingly adhere, rules that had a sound reason behind them.
The summer of 1943, the year before she graduated, she worked at odd jobs here and there. But she sensed that nothing had changed; she was drifting, directionless. She worked for a while in the Ontario Parks and Recreation Department and found some of the structure she lacked.
Early in the war, if a young person did well in school they were allowed to work on a farm, so she worked for the Ontario Farm Service for part of that summer. Here, also, she found that structure. She was told to get up at 5:00 a.m., pack her lunch, and go out into the fields. She would return at noon and actually catch an hour’s sleep because it was such hard work, but she found it immensely satisfying. Later, she worked for E.D. Smith, grafting, planting, and filling orders for fruit trees, and not incidentally discovering a lifelong passion for trees, plants, and all growing things. She was taught to care for plants, and learned the names of trees; she felt she was learning and doing something useful, both for herself and for others. She was finding new dimensions within herself, and she loved it.
On the heels of self-discovery came a degree of confidence and determination. Germany still controlled Europe, Japanese forces were spreading across the Pacific, and the Normandy landings were still a year away. Frances celebrated her nineteenth birthday that summer, and with that milestone the future opened before her. When she graduated in 1944 she made her decision.
She joined the navy.
1 Laura Kelly Collver. Independently published, posthumously, circa 1940.
2 A SAILOR’S DAYS AND POLITICAL NIGHTS
BY THE SUMMER OF 1942, the tragedy that was the Battle of Britain had passed, at heartbreaking cost, and England was still there, though standing on the edge of the abyss. The war brought a lack of manpower in many essential areas. The WRCNS, or Women’s Royal Canadian Naval Service, was formed to assume the roles men were not available to perform. While many in those years would have looked puzzled if you mentioned the WRCNS, the affectionate sobriquet “Wren” was immediately recognized. Thousands of Canadian women answered the call, and by the time the service was disbanded in August 1946, nearly 7,000 young Wrens had taken over such jobs as sick bay attendant, cook, mail sorter, truck or ambulance driver, radar operator, and, in Frances’s case, telegrapher (communications). And these were just a few of the dozens of services provided by the Wrens. The young ladies earned — and earned is the very word; they earned their pay — about one-third the money paid their fellow (male) sailors. It was felt, in those misguided days, that it took three women to do the work of one man, an assumption the Wrens quickly disproved.
The Ontario government had provided a school in Galt for the use of the new women’s naval service, and by the close of 1942, the initial contingent of Wrens had arrived. In June 1943, the training base was commissioned HMCS Conestoga, under the command of the executive officer, Lieutenant H.M. Macdonald, and quickly acquired the nickname “The Stone Frigate.”
Marjorie Jordan, one of Frances’s old friends and an officer in the Wrens, had persuaded Frances that the navy was the best of the services, and Frances was easily convinced. Marjorie was a very attractive woman, and even more so in her smart uniform.
Life in the navy gave Frances more of the structure she did not see in her life at home. She was never keen about being told what to do, preferring always to do what she felt was right, what she knew was good for her, what she wanted to do. Her first hours in the navy brought a glint of revolt to her eye; anyone who has been part of the military knows that if you seek common sense, you’ll not find it there. The military bureaucracy has more rules and regulations than a dog has fleas, and anyone who is prone to do as she pleases and follow the sensible dictates of her own intelligence will quickly find she is in the wrong place.
Frances spent four weeks in HMCS Conestoga, undergoing the standard drills and lectures. From there, sixty Wrens were sent to the Canadian Signal School in Saint-Hyacinthe, Quebec, to become visual signallers. Twenty of these, including Frances, then transferred to become TSOs (Telegrapher Special Operator).
During Frances’s time in the navy, she was in Intelligence, specifically monitoring Japanese ships and submarines. But she didn’t know she was working for the secret service until she was discharged. “We were getting an extra seventy-five cents a day,” she said, “and couldn’t figure out why.” But in 1945, six-bits was six-bits, so you didn’t ask questions.
Once, when monitoring a particular frequency, Frances heard a strange and continuous beeping. She and the other Wrens tracked it right across the prairies. They couldn’t understand what it was. Eventually they learned it was a weather balloon; one came down over central Canada and the authorities were able to identify it and determine its use. It was Japanese, and had apparently been sent over to test air currents. Some, according to Frances, were armed with small bombs, and all had transmitters and were sending back weather patterns to Japan. “The theory was,” said Frances, “they were going to send more powerful bombs and release them in the right place at the right time. Which they didn’t, thank goodness!” Frances estimated the balloons were thirty feet in diameter and made of rice paper. “Must have been quite an engineering feat,” she said. “I imagine it had ribs and stuff made of bamboo. It seemed beyond belief: a rice paper balloon, borne on air currents, making its way across the Pacific Ocean!”
For the remainder of 1944, until the middle of March 1945, the Wrens’ days were an unending series of studies