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My name is Nina Rumen. I was a nursing sister in the R.C.A.M.C. and then C.F.M.S. from ‘51 to ‘74.

My first posting was in Kingston, Ontario, in 1951. I was assigned to a lovely lady who died just recently, and the first thing she asked me to do was to give penicillin to twenty-five young men at the back of this surgical ward. Well, of course I knew how to give penicillin. “Why are they having it?” “Because the doctor prescribed it.” “Why did he prescribe it?” “Because they have gonorrhea!” We didn’t have outpatients in those days and they had to be given every three hours, so there were twenty-five bottoms up. And they were quite literally prisoners there, because they were in the army and they had to do as they were told. The song, “I’m a prisoner of love,” was popular in ‘51, and they called themselves the, “Prisoners of Love.”

Another posting that I had was to Churchill, Manitoba, at the Hudson Bay, and the C.D. Howe medical hospital ship went out there to tell the natives - the Eskimos, we didn’t have Inuits in those days - what they needed. They decreed that every plane that went up to an Eskimo settlement that they would bring pregnant women to Churchill military hospitals. And we had quite a few “Ladies in Waiting.”

It was important for medical people to know when their expected due date was, but we couldn’t speak Eskimo and they couldn’t speak English. So we got the Catholic priest who spoke Eskimo and he would ask them when their baby was due. They would hold up their fingers, and we would have a ruler and measure, and they would say, “When the ice is so thick.” So we would measure it and phone the meteorologist, and it was very effective.

A young Eskimo was expecting her first baby, and she was a beautiful young woman. In the middle of the night I was called because I was on call for all maternity and obstetrics 24×7. So I got this woman on a stretcher, took her from the ward, and managed to get her transferred from the stretcher to the delivery table by myself. And I was trying to get her feet up in stirrups for delivery. The nurse on duty was calling the medical officer, Bob Elliot. He was there very shortly afterwards, and she was still resisting this business of having her legs put up in stirrups. So Bob came in. I said to him, “Bob, would you just keep an eye on her? She’s resisting the stirrups. I’ll get ready for delivery because she’s ready to go.” I sort of turned my back to deal with what I had to do, and she slipped the delivery table and squatted in the corner. And Bob Elliot was… he believed in showing, so he gets up in stirrups. And in the meantime I was watching her. She was laughing away, gave one grunt, and I caught the baby with her squatting in the corner. So of course the next day I didn’t keep my mouth shut. I told everybody what happened. There were a number of young doctors there who said, “Bob, you may be our boss, you may be senior, but we have to tell you… It’s the Patient that goes up in stirrups, Not the Doctor!”

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I was born in Regina and I went to Saskatoon, and I went to school for first year university. While there, I was in the Reserve, because I joined the UNTD – University Naval Training Division. I didn’t bother going further in school; I wanted full time. I was barely eighteen.

At Unicorn in Saskatoon, after some more training there we had a train trip down to Cornwallis in Nova Scotia, then went to Stadacona in Halifax. My training in Halifax was to be a torpedoman, which is a bit of a joke because we really didn’t have too many of them. Instead, we were put in charge of the depth charges. It ended up that I now have ear plugs because of it. I should have got them earlier.

The ship I went on was the Brandon. It was sitting down at Liverpool, Nova Scotia, being redone – boiler, engine and everything else. When it was all fixed up we went down to Bermuda, because at that time in the war, what was happening was that Canadian ships were going down to practice up on the equipment with some of us new guys that were there. One of the funny things about it is that on Christmas, they used the naval tradition, and I being the youngest guy on board, I was Captain for the day.

While I was there, there was an Italian sub that was being used for us to practice… not charging, but following in the water. So I went through an Italian sub. I’ll tell you, I’m glad I was never on those.

On the way back up, I got an infection in my leg so I was yanked off and stuck in hospital in St. John’s, Newfie, and when I came out, the ship had gone. At that time, they weren’t even getting a lot of people in the forces because they had enough bodies, but I was lucky and I guess I came in under the wire.

I went on the Fennel, which is a Corvette also. It was a British Corvette. I had one trip over to Londonderry in Ireland, and back. Back into Newfie, but thank gosh got out of there again. I went on a Frigate called the Eastview. That’s a suburb of Ottawa. I had two trips over and back to Liverpool. When the war ended in Europe, we came down to Liverpool to pick up the ships in the convoy. We had to wait a day because the British merchant sailors, I think most or all of them were drunk, celebrating the end of the war.

As far as I’m concerned, war is a horrid thing. There’s no glory, no glamour. War matured a lot of us, especially those who went in fairly young. Coming out of it, I feel like brothers to the other services. Not just Navy, but Navy, Army, Air Force.