Everyone had to register at the Millstream store (located where Pioneer Centre used to be) and ration books were issued. These books had coupons inside and when you purchased a rationed item you forfeited the required coupons. Meat, butter, tea, coffee and gasoline were rationed or unobtainable. A sugar coupon was equal to one pound of sugar that had to last a month.
Little was allowed to go to waste — not even cooking fat and bones. There was no making soup when a pound of household fat could provide “enough glycerine to fire 150 bullets from a Bren gun,” and two pounds could “fire a burst of 20 cannon shells from a Spitfire or 10 anti-aircraft shells”. Long before today’s green bin recycling program, Canadian housewives were encouraged to be a “munition maker” in their own kitchens and reminded over and over again, that food was a “weapon of war.”
Which isn’t to say that restrictions on sliced bread, iced cakes in bakeries, chocolate bars, soft drinks and meatless Tuesdays and meatless Fridays in restaurants were popular. Making home life even more difficult was the prohibition of the use of tin cans for commercially produced fruits and vegetables — tin was too precious for the Home.
It wasn’t just eating habits that changed. The area was blacked out and people had to cover their windows with black paper screens. If an Air Raid Patrol spotted any light around your doors or windows they would knock on your door and tell you to hang a blanket over the area. Later they would return to make sure you had complied.
If you were going to Victoria you had to stop at Langford and put black oil cloth caps with a narrow slit in the middle over the headlights. As one person commented,” It was an eerie feeling to creep around the city in the dark without even streetlights.”
Many girls and boys from the local high schools joined the armed forces. At school each morning the teacher would read aloud the names of those former students ‘missing in action’ followed by the ones ‘killed in action’.
Fighter pilots trained at the airport in Pat Bay and on moonlit nights training planes could be seen gliding down just over the tree tops. Many planes crashed into the bay or on the hills.
In 1942 a Japanese submarine shelled Estevan Point located north of Tofino and everyone realized we were indeed in the midst of a war.
Finally the long awaited day arrived. Early Monday morning May 7, 1945, the fire siren on Hauk’s garage (now a private home on Mill Bay Rd) began to wail, echoing the sirens at Patricia Bay and Shawnigan. The war in Europe was over.
(‘The Hamlet with an Attitude’ by Virginia Bonner & ‘Along Mill Bay Road’ by Adelaide Ellis)