At 99, Essex County woman is one of the oldest war brides in Canada
Kay May threw up for the first three days on the ship that was transporting English war brides to Canada in January 1946.
She was seven months pregnant and just beginning her week-long voyage across the ocean to Halifax, N.S., followed by days trying to sleep in her seat on a war bride train before arriving in Toronto. She got off the train and met her mother in law for the first time.
May is now 99 years old and one of the oldest living war brides in Canada. As she thinks back 67 years, she doesn’t remember being anxious about starting a new life so far away from home. She remembers pastries. “Being a Norwegian boat and I have a very sweet tooth, the desserts were terrific,” May said from her home southeast of Harrow Friday.
“Going around the bottom of Ireland it’s very rough and some of the girls at the tables said ‘you’re not going to eat those are you?’ And I said yes I am. I’d eat them and I’d go up on deck and be sick, just for about three days.”
She is one of 43,454 war brides who came to Canada between 1942 and 1948 with the travel cost covered by the Canadian government, according to the Canadian War Brides website.
Most were British. There were more who married Canadian servicemen but not all of them came to Canada. Many of those who did, came with children.
May had something as she came over the frigid waters of the North Atlantic Ocean that makes her story a bit different from other war brides: the return fare to England. Her mother had given her that just in case.
Other war brides arrived to discover their man had a wife in Canada already or life in Canada was not what they expected. Many would have left Great Britain or Europe knowing it could be years before they might have enough money to go back to visit family.
May’s daughter Carolyn Daley said she doesn’t know if she could have done it.
“I think they were very brave women, leaving home, everything they knew to come to the unknown, a country they really didn’t know anything about,” Daley said Friday.
In May’s matter of fact way she tells her war bride experience where little seems to have rattled her. She found it odd that teacups and saucers didn’t match the pattern on the plates and it being so cold she could hear the trees cracking, a sound she doesn’t remember in southern England.
May was living in Bournemouth when she met John May on his birthday at a bar Jan. 30, 1942. She was 28-year-old office worker. He installed radar in planes for the Air Force. He called her the next weekend and she’s not sure how he managed it but he kept coming to see her on weekends.
They were married July 18, 1942. She wore a blue dress which upset her mother but Kay didn’t have enough war ration coupons to buy a white dress. She could have bought a lace dress but without enough coupons for a slip that wasn’t going to work either.
As the war ended in 1945 her husband returned to Canada and she followed in January 1946. She had received a letter suggesting she not make the trans-Atlantic trip while pregnant but she told officials she was fine.
The Norwegian ship left Liverpool and after a week-long journey, the boatload of English war brides and their children arrived in Halifax Jan. 14, 1946. She said it was so cold the steam was coming off the water in the harbour.
The couple stayed with his parents for about 18 months before they moved to Lake Simcoe where they begin their life together in Canada running a grocery store. They had two children.
Her husband who later worked for the government died in 1978. She has seven grandchildren and 14 greatgrandchildren and moved to Essex County with her daughter.
“I think you sort of walk into it,” she said of the changes she faced as a war bride. “It depends how you take it.”