Fort Churchill, Manitoba

I was born and raised in Victoria, British Columbia, and had never been to a place like Fort Churchill before. My first trip to the townsite of Churchill after arriving there from Victoria was when I had my first doctors appointment on the base. I was told to walk through the native village into the town and catch the bus from there out to the base, and to ask the driver to show me where the hospital was. The doctor's office was in the hospital.

I started off down the trail but in the middle of the trail I could see that one of the natives was having trouble with his dog team. He was cracking his whip at them and they were yapping and barking back at him. I had never seen or heard anything like that before. He was right in the path that I was told to go along. I tried to make a detour and got myself lost. Walking along a trail that went between a couple of ponds I came upon two native women who appeared to be washing clothes in the pond. I am not sure what they were doing actually. I asked them if they could tell me how to find my way to the town of Churchill. They looked at each other and laughed and laughed. I must have looked pretty dumb, but I did not know that I was already almost there. I still had to encounter another dog before I actually got to the bus stop.

I got to the hospital, did the routine of getting into a gown and such that I have previously described. When my name was called I went in to the office to meet Captain Truin. When I told him that I was pregnant I was told that this is not maternity day and that I would have to come back on the day that they look after maternity cases. Jack did not think to tell them that I was pregnant. He just made an appointment for me and figured that I would tell them that myself. So I had to get dressed, catch the bus, and head back home the same way that I got there. That was my introduction to life in Churchill. I was sure upset for a while, but then I got used to it.

The hospital had civilian, Eskimo and Indian patients, some of them were flown in from very isolated areas in the north. One time the cast of the Tommy Hunter Show visited patients at the hospital.

This is a picture of the PMQ 55. This building, and rows of others like it, had four apartments. They had a long hallway going down the middle. Each family had to take a turn keeping that hallway washed, waxed, cleaned and dusted on Sunday evenings and ready for inspection on Monday mornings. On Monday morning the officers would come and walk through these hallways (or tunnels) and inspect their condition and then they would leave a grade mark on the door of the apartment that had been responsible for cleaning it that Sunday.