Yarmouth Common

Margery Henderson, my Aunt Marge, Dad’s sister, has lived in Canada since she married a Canadian soldier in WWII and went out as a War Bride. She’s in her nineties now and has children and grandchildren there.

Recently she told me she wished she’d never gone out. She can remember going across the Common in an Army wagon with her husband and couple more of the Canadian soldiers who were over here, and thinking, ‘What have I done?’  But she said in those days, you didn’t admit it. Her mum would have been horrified.
Her father, Vic Henderson, my grandfather, came off his bike through Wilmingham one frosty morning, coming back from coastguard duties. They thought he’d cracked his ribs, had this terrible pain, and Marge was sent for in Canada. Her husband worked for Canadian Pacific, up in the logging camps right up north. It took her two days to get to a train to take her to get a boat and they were becalmed coming across. It took her two or three weeks to get home.  When her mum met her at Liverpool she thought, ‘Why’s Mum meeting me?’  By that time he’d died, but her mum, my Gran Henderson, didn’t tell her till they’d travelled back to the Island.
Mary Henderson b 1954