Colborne resident shares story of remembrance

Colborne author and educator, Pat Calder is known in the township for her insightful contributions to the community.

She wrote this touching article about her Uncle Jack and has generously allowed us to post it for our readers on Remembrance Day.

The Shadow of My Uncle
by Patricia Calder

I hold in my hand an airmail letter, so fragile and brittle it nearly tears into pieces along the sixty-four-year-old creases. It was written by Uncle Jack to my grandmother three days before he was shot down in World War II. Part of it reads:

Mom, a lot of the boys leave letters behind to be sent to their people if anything should happen to them. I never have written that sort of letter to you and never will. I feel quite strongly that I am not going to be killed; and, because we shall be travelling much higher and faster than I ever have before, we shall be ‘safer.’ But I don’t want to preclude all possibilities and I know that you can be told these things now: That I am very happy. That if we should be attacked I am better informed and more alert than ever before about getting out of trouble. That if I should go missing then I would want you to be very quiet about it – particularly when the newspapers phone – because I probably would be walking back to you. And if I should fail to get clear, I would want you to think of me as walking towards you anyway, for that is what I would want to be doing.

Love to all, Jack.

I know this letter by heart. Now it belongs to me in that odd way that other people’s treasures are passed on to the next generation. The power of the writing has turned Uncle Jack into a voice in my head who speaks not only on Remembrance Days but every time I stand on an overpass along the Highway of Heroes for the repatriation of a soldier killed in Afganistan.

Although I am second generation from those who lived through Word War II, I know what families of the lost ones suffered then and I know the grief that families of fallen soldiers suffer now. The cost doesn’t change with a different geography. Three times my grandparents received the dreaded telegram that Jack was missing in action. Three times my mother was taken into a private room by a nun where she was told that her brother was missing, presumed dead.

Even though I never met Uncle Jack, a shadow was cast over my history; the size of his memory has shaped who I am. The personality of this larger than life hero mesmerizes me just as the legacies of today’s servicemen and women will affect the lives of their sons and daughters, nieces and nephews.

Uncle Jack was a legend. I have only the airmail letter and one Maclean’s magazine featuring the story of his capture by the Irish.

Returning from a mission in 1941 his crew became lost in the fog and didn’t know whether they were over England or Ireland but, low on fuel, realized they would have to bail out. None of them had actually jumped before, so they were all a bit nervous. Jack shouted, "Cheer up, lads. Last one down buys the first round. If it's England, it's Newcastle; if it's Ireland, it's Guinness. "(Grounded in Eire, 10) He was taken captive and remained a POW in neutral Ireland for two years.

He became notorious back home. Having been a Canadian Press editor and sports writer before the war, during his internment he wrote stories of the boys at the front and smuggled them out to be published in the Toronto Star, the Montreal Gazette, and most Canadian dailies with headlines like: 'I BOMBED THE GNEISENAU' (a German battleship) DEATH CLOSE EVERY SECOND; BROKEN LADDER FOILS ESCAPE OF CANADIAN INTERNEES IN EIRE; FORMER MCGILL FOOTBALL STAR ESCAPES INTERNMENT IN EIRE; TWO CANADIAN WAR FLIERS ESCAPE FROM IRISH CAMP; CALDER MUM ON HIS ESCAPE.

After two years Uncle Jack got out of Curragh prison by faking a suicide attempt. He had helped all his buddies escape one night but, being the last one holding the barbed wire for the others to slip through, he was caught. Alone now he drank heavily for months, wrote compulsively on a history of Ireland, and convinced the commandant that he was depressed. When he drank cyanide, they shipped him to a psychiatric hospital in England, where his task then became to convince the Air Force that he was, in fact, sane. My grandparents received another wire from the R.C.A.F.: "Pleased to inform you your son safe in Great Britain."

Jack went back into service where he had to retrain to upgrade his skills for the new faster aircraft. His plane crashed into a hillside; only two of the five fliers survived. Multiple surgeries for compound fractures left half his face scarred, one eye, and pins holding his leg together. He said to his buddy, the pilot Keefer, "Don't worry, Bobby. One more graft and I'll still be better looking than you."

After a long recovery he couldn’t wait to rejoin his unit and navigated bombers for the next six months. As he wrote to his mother:

Well, I’m back because I wanted to come back to it. I wasn’t born to failure and disappointment. Quite a bit of me was broken up last time. But the realization of what is within us all wasn’t broken, thank God.

His legs were shot on a mission to Hamburg, and the plane went down. Jack drowned in the North Sea. His body washed ashore and is buried in the British Military Cemetery at Kiel.

Jack became a skeleton in the closet because neither my mother nor my grandmother could talk about him. The few times I tried asking, my mother’s eyes would fill with tears and she would turn away or leave the room. My grandmother’s eyes would mist over, her face would smile a certain special smile, and she would rock herself in her chair.

My curiosity grew heavier with the years but their grief was so profound and enduring that I was prohibited from asking questions. I did not know my uncle, Jack Calder, personally, so I am surprised by my own emotion whenever I look at his writing.

The Calder brothers


I wonder what makes a soldier. I ponder whether the soldiers who have been repatriated are heroes not because they died, but because they were willing to go. Three died just miles from the site on the same highway in Afghanistan where three of their comrades had been killed a few days earlier. Like Uncle Jack, they wanted to be serving with their fellow soldiers regardless of danger. Many veterans of Afganistan have volunteered for a return mission.

The children of today’s soldiers who die will grow up with ghosts, just as I have.

The code of the military is much more than team spirit. War is not a sport. These soldiers, male and female, make a total commitment, whatever the outcome, to obey senior officers and politicians who craft their fate. Where does the courage come from? I can’t even imagine.