Post by merc on Oct 3, 2019 6:43:15 GMT
"Wait For Me Daddy!" - 1 October 1940
Depicts a young boy (Warren Bernard) in Eighth Street, New Westminster, B.C., reaching out to his father, as he marches off to serve in the Second World War.
When Canada declared war against Germany in September 1939, the Bernards were living in Summerland, a community in B.C.’s Okanagan Valley.
His father was in the militia and was a sergeant and an acting troop sergeant major for the B.C. Dragoons, a senior rank for non-commissioned members.
But the unit was not activated, and Bernard said his father decided to drop his rank and enlist instead as a private with the British Columbia Regiment, Duke of Connaught’s Own Rifles, which is based on the coast, and is also known as the “Dukes.”
“Therein lies the rub,” said Bernard, noting his mother didn’t want his father to join up, at least not yet.
“He was 33 years old, he had a dependent child and she was madder than a hornet and she wanted him to wait until the BCDs, the B.C. Dragoons, were called up as a regiment and then he would have gone into the army as a sergeant, and of course a sergeant’s pay was twice what a buck private’s pay was.”
Bernard said his mother never forgave his father, adding their marriage was “never made in heaven.”
So the Bernards uprooted themselves from their little brown house in Summerland, and their neighbours, their family and friends. They headed to Vancouver, where his mother – who had been orphaned as a child – had no relatives and needed to find a job and a place to live.
“It ain’t easy for single women today,” he said. “In those days there was no support whatsoever.”
Then came Oct. 1, 1940, when the Dukes marched down Eighth Street in New Westminster, greeted by family and friends and a photographer from The Province newspaper named Claude Dettloff.
Just as a little boy broke away from his mom and ran to his marching dad who cocked his head to the right, transferred his rifle to his left hand, and reached out to his son with his right hand, Dettloff took a photo.
His parents split up, his father returned once for compassionate leave in 1943 but didn’t return for good until October 1945, said Bernard.
(Claude P. Dettloff/National Archives of Canada)
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