Weekend Write-In Story Collection

Battle of the Atlantic

In 500 words, tell the story of how a character won a prestigous award. Written for the Weekend Write-In prompt themed "Medal", 6-8 November 2015.

Just thinking of my father and his medal.

Merchant Marine

After my father had done a science degree at Saint-FX and a post-graduate degree in Agricultural Sciences at Guelph, he looked around. The Great Depression was still too depressing to search for employment, so he made his own. He went into debt, bought a hundred-forty-foot Lunenburg schooner and headed off with it. He tramp sailed the coast to the Caribbean and back, taking what loads he found to determine his next port. He had accommodation, adventure, exercise and margin to pay down the ship's mortgage.

In 1940, early in the Battle of the Atlantic, the Canadian Government took both my father and his ship in secondment into the Merchant Marine. Dad much later, when pressed, talked of U-boat sightings and watching ships being sunk in the Gulf of Saint Lawrence as he shilled as a fishing schooner, transporting munitions for the convoys. He talked of pulling bodies from the water. This was more difficult after he lost his brother, Francis, who perished in a life raft following an enemy engagement.

I was conceived aboard the schooner mid-war and was born in the summer of 1944.

At the end of the Battle of the Atlantic, Dad was relieved of his duties. He couldn't remember being thanked for his services. At the end of the war, his friends and neighbours who had served in Navy, Army and Air Force, mostly at the local supply depot and the repair facility, and the few who had gone overseas, were all awarded medals, medical benefits, house mortgages, education...

Dad was broken from the trauma of his service and retreated. He sold the schooner and with the proceeds, bought a piece of land in the middle of nowhere, New Brunswick. We called the place The Farm. I know basic rural life well... My conscious life began in a one-room log cabin with no electricity, a pump outside the door and a pit in the back to dump the chamber pot. We had chickens, ducks and geese for eating, a few cows for milk, butter and cheese, a large garden, an apple and pear orchard and a root cellar.

The cabin sat up a mud lane far back in the fields on two hundred acres, three-quarters of it old forest. We had a Belgian mare and a Clydesdale stallion to snake logs out of the woods. This was 1945 and Dad was still running from the horrors of the War. I was seven when we got electricity and an outhouse; eleven when we got running water, a flush toilet and real bathtub. I grew up knowing self-sufficiency. So much for dad's post graduate degree.

Dad was eighty-seven when the Government finally recognised his contribution to the War effort. Without the Merchant Marine and their convoys to Europe, the war would have been lost, or it would have ground on for many more years.

Dad and all the other participating Merchant Mariners were finally awarded the War Medal, the lowest medal for their highest bravery and sacrifice.

Thank you, Canada.