Local veteran reflects on a life spent with the Royal Canadian Air Force

Esther Packard is reflecting on her time spent with the Royal Canadian Air Force (RCAF).

The 97-year-old veteran is a resident of Sherbrooke Community Centre, where she spends her Saturdays surrounded by family for a coffee and quality visiting.

The final Saturday visit ahead of Remembrance Day allowed for stories of a life shaped by her and her husband’s military service.

A life that may have never happened if Packard’s first application to serve was accepted when was 20 years old.

“When I applied, they didn’t take me. They didn’t want to take girls before they were 22. I had to wait a couple years before they would take me, and then they lowered (the minimum age) to 20. I was provoked because I could have been in there,” Packard said during Saturday’s coffee social.

Packard grew up in Saskatoon with three brothers and three sisters. By the time Packard was 10 she was doing plenty of the cleaning and cooking around the house. As the pressures of the Great Depression increased, Packard was eager to leave the family home and help out the family.

When the Second World War broke out, Packard shifted her focus to bettering the war effort. After her application was accepted the second time, she was sent to Dartmouth, N.S. to work as an administrator, ensuring paperwork was sent to the proper people.

Travelling across the country proved to be an eye-opening experience.

“We didn’t travel,” she said. “It was really something.”

During her four years on the east coast, she happened to meet a handsome armourer named Argyle that was recently sent to Canada to lead training exercises.

“According to legend, dad saw her across a crowded mess hall and said that was the girl he was going to marry…and did. He eventually got the courage to ask her out and the rest is history, I guess,” the couple’s youngest son Roy Packard said during Saturday’s visit.

The chance meeting almost didn’t happen. Argyle enlisted early and was sent over to England with the first Canadian squadron to fight in the Battle of Britain in 1940 to be an armourer. His tasks were to service the guns on the early Hurricane Navy ships Canada sent over for battle.

“At some point after the Battle of Britain dad was trained in bomb disposal,” Roy said.

“Him and another Canadian were sent back to Canada supposedly to train others in bomb disposal. Apparently that never, ever happened. They just got reassigned when they got back to Canada and that was the end of that.”

Within a few months, Argyle and Packard were celebrating a new marriage and the end of a war.

“It was just such excitement everywhere. It didn’t matter where you came from or what nationality you were. Everybody was happy the war was ended. You could settle down and live a normal life,” Packard said.

Packard left the RCAF soon after the war and became pregnant with the couple’s first child.

After a year away from the air force, Argyle signed up once again and was eventually stationed in France after the war, where the now six-person family stayed for four years.

“It was a different feeling after the end of the war, that’s for sure,” Packard said. “We got camping equipment and every weekend we would pile the car full and we would just travel somewhere to see Europe as much as we could.”

The family then moved to Argyle’s home province of Ontario, when complications with Packard’s health forced the family to move back to Saskatoon to settle in Montgomery Place in 1968.

“My husband said, “I like Ontario, but we’re going to Saskatchewan for you,'” Packard said.

After retirement, Argyle was a custodian at Mount Royal Collegiate before his death in 1999.

Looking back on a life that’s taken her to multiple contents over multiple centuries, Packard still can’t believe she never traveled the Canada’s closest neighbour.

“I’ve been all over Canada, we were stationed in France for four years during peacetime, but I never made it to the United States,” Packard said with a chuckle.

“I had a good life, I think.”