No Flying Tonight Ch. 03-05

The train arrived at Moncton in the early afternoon. One thing which could be said for the administration was, they were efficient. By six-thirty p.m. he had been received and processed, allotted accommodation and fed. He stayed for two days; watching as another group of men arrived and was processed and then, along with the other men headed for Ontario, he was given a rail pass and a ride to the station in a RAF lorry.

The trip to Hamilton was almost as slow as a train journey in the war-torn UK. The train seemed to stop at every little town at which, like Adlestrop, 'No-one left and no-one came'.

He changed trains at Montreal and, during the six hours he had to wait for the Hamilton train, he took the opportunity to look around the downtown. He had been to London, Manchester and most of the other major cities of Britain, but couldn't remember seeing one where the roads were so wide and buildings as tall as those in Montreal. Other than a few men in uniform, there was very little evidence of war. There were no sand-bagged buildings, no civilians carrying gas masks and, most of all, no bomb damage.

Almost two days after leaving Moncton he arrived in Hamilton, an industrial city with giant steel mills, located on the south-west corner of Lake Ontario and the home of his destination; an Elementary Flying Training School.

Located on an escarpment, some twelve miles south of the city centre, RCAF Mount Hope was part of the Commonwealth Air Training Plan. In comparison with Fulnetby, the facilities in Hamilton were Ritz-like. The officer mess was comparable to those in England but the sleeping accommodation was far superior. The quarters were warm and spacious; he even had a wardrobe and gentleman's dresser in which to put his uniforms and civvies. The food was superb and plentiful - he had more than enough to eat and never had to guess the origin of the meat course. If there was one drawback to the facility, it was the lack of women on the base. Fulnetby had been home to a large contingent of the WRAF and there had been numerous other stations in the vicinity with similar contingents. Mount Hope was isolated and, while there were a small number of women performing, mainly clerical jobs, on the camp, the numbers were much smaller than those on RAF stations in Britain. Still, there were lots of women in Hamilton and, as training wasn't a seven day week occupation, reasonable opportunity to go down into the city.