Description
Mr. Jackson describes returning to England and marrying his former nurse.
Donald Jackson
Mr. Jackson was born in Field, British Columbia on August 25, 1915. He was well educated, having completed high school and three years of university where he studied accounting. A friend convinced Mr. Jackson that he could earn a better living in the air force, so he enlisted. Unlike most Canadian pilots, his war experience started in Southeast Asia, where the Allies tried to stem the Japanese advance. Mr. Jackson was then deployed to India and flew bombing sorties into Afghanistan. He became ill, shipped back to Canada and then joined a bomber squadron, piloting a Halifax plane. On a bombing mission over Peenemunde, he was shot down, captured, and remained in a POW camp until war’s end. After returning to England, he married the nurse who had cared for him in India. Mr. Jackson remained in the RCAF after the war, taking part in the aerial mapping of Canada’s North. He is a member of the Royal Canadian Legion, and still dabbles in accounting. Mr. Jackson resides in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan.
Transcript
I went to visit cousins in Scotland and I phoned her mother. And when we did get back to England, to get out of the air force, I went to live with my wife’s brother and was back to normal life pretty well. She was in an organization called the Queen Alexandra’s Imperial Order of Nursing Sisters. And they had a hill station in India. And of course, all the white people go to the hill stations for the summer months there, to get away from the heat and dust of the country. So she was in this station, and when I got to Vashar and got into the hospital, she was in the hospital that I went to. So she was one of about, I think, half a dozen British nurses. As RAF people will tell you, they look whiter every minute. We kept in touch more or less from there on. So we eventually got back to England and we got married before we went back to Canada. She came back to Canada in January of 1946. First thing I did was buy her a pair of boots because she didn’t have any. They didn’t need them in England.