Sinclair MacKenzie. He was Roddy MacKenzie’s brother. And his sister Liza: she was a doctor, Liza, but she was an intern then. She come over and found out it was me. She knew my father and mother and so when Sinclair was killed she came over and told me.
When I got back to the Battalion, there wasn’t very many left. They were killed in the raids. It was, oh, about the end of October and the war ended in November. We went on into Germany and was up there for a while. Then we come back to Belgium. I was about four or five months in Belgium, outside of Brussels. We had good billets. The only thing was you were waiting to get home. Then we come to England; we were there for a while. I didn’t get home till June 1919.
There wasn’t that much change [in the Island]. They still weren’t running cars you know. Well, there was three days a week or something shortly after [when they were allowed to run]. I left in 1920 and the next
year they got running.
Railroad
I went out on the railroad in the fall of 1920. I went out to Prince Albert. Got hired on in Edmonton with a construction outfit. Stanley Dingwell, from Morell and I, we went out, and we were in tents, and, oh, it was cold. It was just after Christmas. We threshed up to December on the Prairie and then we moved into Edmonton. And Stanley and I, we got this job. Frank and Bill MacNeill was working for this outfit and we went out. I was driving a team. Cold: 40 and 50 [0 Fahrenheit] below zero... . I was getting 40 cents an hour.
The horse tent would be 30 by 30 [feet] or better: big. Three or four poles. And then the cook tent; it was about 24 by 24. The sleeping tents held about eight men, I guess; probably 12 by 12 or something like that. Just a stove in the middle. You slept with your feet towards the stove.
Blankets, you had to buy your own blankets. Sometimes you had mattresses, sometimes you didn’t. The first year we went out we didn’t
have mattresses. Well, we worked at Prince Albert that winter and I wasn’t there very long
till I got out on the pile drives. I got more money — I got 80 cents an hour — and we worked 10 hours a day, rain or shine, Sunday or Monday. Didn’t
matter how cold it was. We moved from there up to Whitecourt [Alberta]. We moved in at night
and we went up about seven miles ahead of the steel with horses, teams. We shovelled off the snow; there was an awful lot of snow. Set up the cook
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