Maureen Bicknell had just settled into bed when she heard the roar of an engine.
She looked out the window. It was dark, but the lights of an airliner were visible as it took off from nearby Heathrow Airport.
The three-year-old was almost asleep a few minutes later when an explosion on the street jolted her out of bed. It was the unmistakable sound of a German air raid.
Her mother, Irene, ran into the room. She threw herself on top of Maureen as the ghastly air raid sirens rang out.
“I’m protecting you,” Irene said.
London had underground bomb shelters, but Irene refused to take her daughter there. People had been killed in stampedes before.
“People panic down there when there’s bombs. If we’re going to go, we’ll go above ground,” she told Maureen.
Maureen’s father, Victor Bicknell, was a bombardier in the British army with the 74th field regiment. He had been stationed in Egypt as part of the North African campaign, which began on June 20, 1942.
Shortly after Winston Churchill and Franklin D. Roosevelt signed off on the campaign, the German and Italian forces pushed the front from Libya back into Egypt.
The fighting resumed on June 27 in the Egyptian city of Mersa Matruh.
Bicknell was killed in action the next day. He never got to meet his daughter.
Two years later, Irene married Arthur Craig, a corporal in the Canadian army. While he fought on the western front, she worked in a shop making guns and ammunition for the war effort.
By 1945, Nazi Germany was on its last legs and the time had come for Irene and her daughter to board a ship to Canada with other war brides. Maureen was three months shy of her fourth birthday when she left England forever.
They arrived at the port of Liverpool on May 17, ready to board the RMS Queen Mary.
Maureen looked up at the ship. It was an enormous ocean liner, a thousand feet long with three stacks.
There was only one problem. Irene was eight months pregnant. Women that far along in their pregnancy weren’t supposed to travel on the ship.
She remembered the advice her doctor had given her.
“When you board, wear a large coat, suck in your stomach and stick out your butt.”
It worked.
Inside, the vessel was not short on entertainment options. There was a cinema, a squash court, a library and drawing room, restaurants and a cocktail lounge. The Queen Mary even had a furniture store.
Irene had taken her wooden racket and used it at the tennis court.
She and Maureen had a cabin to themselves during the nine-day journey. Maureen spent a lot of her time sitting on the top bunk.
She looked out the porthole. There were several battleships in the ocean beside them. Each one had a battery with guns.
“They don’t look that big to me,” Maureen thought.
The warships escorted the Queen Mary on both sides to protect from enemy attacks.
Maureen’s mind wandered to the porthole itself. Small and round, she wondered what would happen if she opened it. Would she fall out?
A few days later, she got seasick. The ship’s nurse came along with medicine, but Maureen refused to open her mouth.
“I don’t want it.”
The nurse returned. Maureen looked up.
It was the biggest orange she had ever seen.
“If you take the medicine, this orange is yours.”
She did what she was told. Fruit was a rare treat.
The ship was crowded. There were 102 children on board, along with their mothers. Some of them were teenagers.
Maureen felt intimidated, but she did befriend one boy her age.
It was May 25. Eight days had passed since they left Liverpool. It was time for lunch. A waitress passed out the menus.
Maureen looked down at the kids menu. There were lots of options, a far cry from the food rationing in London. She ordered boiled eggs and peach cream cake.
Irene ordered potage minestrone soup and coffee from the adult menu.
The next day, May 26, Maureen looked out the porthole. The shores of Nova Scotia were visible in the distance.
After nine days on the North Atlantic, the Queen Mary docked at Pier 21 in Halifax harbour.
Irene and Maureen made their way off the ship and were herded into a two-storey brick building housing the immigration offices. When that was done, they went to the assembly hall on the second floor.
Maureen looked across the hall. A large man dressed in a dark blue uniform and cap was approaching them.
“I’m Gilbert Bell, Arthur’s brother-in-law,” he told Irene.
He was a captain on one of the ferries that operated between Borden, P.E.I., and Cape Tormentine, N.B.
Bell drove them to their new home on the Point Road in Tryon, P.E.I., where Arthur’s parents lived.
Maureen's new grandparents ran a large farm. She looked out at the property. There were cows, hens and geese, which she had never seen before.
Her brother Jimmy was born less than a month after they arrived on the Island.
When Arthur came home from the war, the family bought a mixed farm on the Branch Road. They owned two horses and a cow, and geese that were fattened and sold to pay for groceries.
Irene and Maureen became Canadian citizens on Nov. 16, 1976.
