The Great Escape - A Canadian Story Sample

Chapter 2 Bond of Wire

Frances mccormack got her first letter from her imprisoned fiancé, a downed Spitfire pilot, just before Christmas 1941. She had met John Weir on a blind date a couple of summers earlier, when friends in Toronto arbitrarily matched them for a night of dancing at the Palais Royale on the Toronto waterfront. Weir cursed his friends for tricking him into the double date, but fell in love with Frances as the pair embraced on the outdoor terrace dance floor overlooking Lake Ontario. The war broke out in the middle of their courtship and because the Royal Canadian Air Force (RCAF) sent John to Winnipeg for elementary flight training, the couple began a long-distance relationship by correspondence. Even when John suc- cessfully soloed and graduated to service flight training, the air force posted him to Borden, Ontario, more than an hour’s drive north of Toronto, where Frances lived. Still, the two managed to communicate in creative ways.

On a day when John planned to dodge the curfew at the train- ing station and drive to Toronto for an evening date with Frances, he decided to alert her to his plans for a rendezvous. During the day’s instructional flight near Toronto, the young pilot trainee simply detoured over the Forest Hill area of the city and “bombed” his girl- friend’s residence with a message wrapped in a handkerchief. Neigh- bours picked up the note attached to a small parachute and rushed it to the addressee: Miss Frances McCormack, 61 Heathdale Road.

“Be down about 8 o’clock or 8:30. If not, I’ll phone,” Weir said in the note. “No news about a 48 [hour leave of absence]. P.S. Don’t say anything about this to anyone.”1

“You should be a bomber pilot, not a fighter pilot,”2 Frances later told him.

As much as Weir’s after-hours dash to Toronto illustrated his youth- ful exuberance and ingenuity, it nearly ended his air force career. His Borden flight instructor found out about his student’s illegal antics. He lambasted the sprog (novice) pilot about his disregard for the King’s Regulations and lack of respect for his fellow pilots. Then he told Weir he’d be reassigned—i.e., washed out of pilot training. When Weir pleaded his case, the instructor decided to redirect his student away from the multi-engine training that would have streamed him toward becoming a bomber pilot. Instead, Weir would train to eventually fly the single-engine, solo cockpit Hurricane fighter aircraft. John Weir couldn’t have asked for a more appropriate punishment.

Collisions with authority and protocol seemed routine for Weir, but they never clouded his drive or independence; among many things, he was an avid outdoorsman capable of fending for himself if and when he had to. Later that year, during an instructional flight at Trenton, the young trainee had struggled to bring a Fairey Battle bomber with a burning engine down to earth safely. The episode left his uniform singed, covered in grime, and stinking of glycol from the Battle’s burst coolant system. No one bothered to acknowledge that young Weir had chosen to save the King’s property and put his own personal safety at risk; nevertheless, when a visiting RAF officer spot- ted him in a parade lineup with a glycol-stained uniform, he pointed him out as “a rather scruffy looking individual.”3 The nickname stuck.

Frances McCormack felt so moved by Scruffy’s passion to join up and serve his country that she decided to resign her paying job as a personal shopper at Simpson’s department store to look for war work herself.4 She found it at Research Enterprises, the company manufac- turing ASDIC, the navy device that used sound waves to detect other ships—principally enemy submarines—at sea. Frances knew how to drive so she landed work as the company chauffeur and took great pride in contributing to the war effort this way. Meanwhile, the couple received their parents’ blessing to marry and were engaged October 2, 1940, a few weeks ahead of Weir’s overseas posting. The two trav- elled with friends to Ottawa and shared final words at the train station. Frances knew her fiancé felt an allure for the excitement of the war.