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Description
Ms. Rapp describes how cold it was in Kitchener Barracks and often snow was in the H-hut where they slept.
Transcription
After our basic training in Kitchener we walked into the First World War barracks in Kitchener and that was an experience and you talk about bonding. You get so many women in an H-hut and it was a terrific experience. And it was rough, we didn’t have battle dresses. We still had our, we had our uniforms and we had our lisle stockings and our great big galoshes that came up to just below our knees, but boy on that drill square with the great coats we were just freezing. Pot bellied stoves in the middle of the H-hut and we all had to take our turns about filling the
H-hut. And that’s a funny story too because we did it in pairs. So that we’d stay awake but we’d have to go out with a bucket, out to this little shed that had the coal and so it was either you know, you’d say, “okay, it’s your turn to do it.” You had to get down on your knees and pull that coal out so we’d take turns doing that. So there were a lot of funny things that happened. And we wore everything to bed because the snow, there were no storm windows on these huts and the storm, you’d wake up and there’d be a pile of snow on the floor. But we survived.