In a rec room at Ottawa’s Perley Health, balloons line the walls, a piano player sings the jovial 1920s hit Five Foot Two, Eyes of Blue, and residents mingle over cake and tea.
It’s a birthday party for 14 seniors living at the centre who turned at least 100 this year, welcoming them into Perley’s “Century Club,” a tradition that began nearly a decade ago.
But Wednesday afternoon’s celebration was bittersweet for some, as they reflected on a very different anniversary.
Eighty years after D-Day, veterans in the crowd shared their wartime memories with the CBC.
‘It haunts you’
At 19, joining the army was something Roland Lalonde felt he “needed” to do, so in 1942, he joined the Royal Canadian Ordnance Corps as a clerk typist.
For a year and a half, Lalonde was stationed in England, but a few months after D-Day he was deployed to Italy with the Royal 22nd Regiment, Canada’s famous “Van Doos.”
“From a typewriter to a .303 rifle, that’s quite a change, I can tell you that,” Lalonde recalled.
From there he went on to France, Belgium and finally Germany where his regiment participated in the Liberation of the Netherlands.
It’s not a time he likes to think about.
“Everything comes back to you,” he explained. “It haunts you.”
But when Lalonde does reflect on his service, he does so with pride.
“It was quite a life,” the 101-year-old said.
Beryl Vignale joined the Royal Canadian Air Force (RCAF) with her late sister Daphne when they were 18.
Vignale says she remembers being the first pair of twins to join the RCAF, and doing a variety of jobs at the Mountain View airfield in Prince Edward County.
“The equipment section and the hospital orderly room for a short time,” she recalled.
They were important jobs, but Vignale said what she and Daphne really wanted was to go overseas.
“They wouldn’t post us,” she said. “They kept us together on that station.”
This year she shared her birthday not with her twin sister, but with the RCAF, as they both turned 100 in April.
Betty Phipps was born in England and served in the British military as a radar operator with the Royal Artillery.
She was in London a week after D-Day.
“The rockets started to come over from Germany and we couldn’t shoot them down because they were going so fast and they would come everywhere,” she said.
“I remember being terrified.”
Soon after the war ended, Phipps moved to Canada with her husband, a Canadian soldier she met at a canteen in an English village.
“I’m a real Canadian now, I’ve been here for so long,” she said.
Lucille Lane was 21 when she joined the Women’s Royal Canadian Naval Service in Halifax.
Now 102, she still remembers the stress of her job decoding messages from ships in the North Atlantic.
“I was called in one day because I’d made a slight mistake,” she said.
Lane was told that a convoy might have gone to the wrong place because of her error.
“Oh boy, I felt terrible,” she said with a nervous chuckle.
But in the end she says the convoy was brought home.
For Lane, serving in the Navy as a woman at the time was a “privilege.” But she says it also prepared her for life as a “Navy wife” for nearly 70 years.
“I knew what it was all about,” she said.