Note: Just read a great piece about two war vets in the Globe and Mail. Former Globe staffer Rod Mickleburgh wrote it. I was more than a little interested in the two men he featured because of the story I wrote in 2002. See this as a companion piece.
Photographic memories: When Orme Payne left for the front Nearly 60 years ago, Gwyneth Brazier thought They'd never see see each other again. She was wrong.
Vancouver Courier
Wed Nov 27 2002
Page: 1 / FRONT
Section: News
Byline: Mike Howell
Source: Vancouver Courier
For 59 long years, the name of a young, handsome Canadian soldier has stayed with Gwyneth Brazier.
It's been hard to forget Orme Payne.
The two met in the fall of 1942, in the small English town of Nutley, where Payne and about 800 soldiers of the Canadian army's 17th Field Regiment were stationed, awaiting their call to the front lines.
They dated for several months, part of a small group of Canadian soldiers and young British women who drank at the local pub and picnicked in the Ashdown Forest, which surrounded the country town.
It was an era when the music of Bing Crosby and the big band sound of Glen Miller filled the soldiers' canteen in the town hall, where Payne first met Brazier (nee Rosser) at a dance.
He was 20. She was 21.
A black-and-white snapshot from those days shows the couple arm-in-arm outside Brazier's brick house. In another, Payne is lying on a patch of grass in the forest, his head leaning against Brazier's shoulder.
In both photographs, Payne is dressed in his dark brown khaki uniform, with his wavy hair slicked back, and a cigarette in hand.
A smiling Brazier looks like a movie star in a long-sleeved wool jacket and knee-high skirt that reveals her shapely, slender legs.
Like the two other couples in the photographs, they seem relaxed, despite the war raging in England and the rest of Europe.
Bombs had been dropped in and around Nutley, with German planes regularly strafing the town as they flew back across the English Channel to occupied France, where more than 900 Canadian soldiers had already died in the raid on Dieppe.
Soon, it would be Payne's turn to go to battle.
In the fall of 1943, the young Saskatchewan farm boy left Nutley in the dark of night for what would be a horrible and bloody couple of years of trench warfare in Italy and Holland.
Suddenly, his courtship with Brazier was over; he never got a chance to say good-bye, leaving her to wonder all these years what happened to him.
"Orme Payne, Orme Payne... it's a name I've always remembered," she says today. "I just assumed he was part of the D-Day invasion and died on the beaches. Never would I have dreamed we'd meet again."
It's a Wednesday morning in November, three days after Remembrance Day.
Eighty-one-year-old Brazier, dressed in a sweater, slacks and blazer, is seated in a boardroom at the Courier's office, where there's a buzz among the female staff about today's meeting.
"Is he here yet, is he here yet?"
Brazier is oblivious to the giddiness around her, or pretends not to notice.
She's here because of a story she read in the previous edition of the Courier, accompanied by a photograph of three veterans.
The story was about historian Ken MacLeod, who escorts veterans to historic World War II battlefields in Europe.
Payne, who is pictured with Dan Lee, Al McGuire and MacLeod, went on one of the trips.
Brazier couldn't believe her eyes when she opened the paper.
She immediately called the Courier, telling a reporter, in her soft British accent, "I've been searching for that man for almost 60 years."
Contacted at his home, Payne was shocked that Brazier had been living on the West Side since 1957, and agreed to meet his old friend at the Courier's office.
Payne, dressed in a blue blazer and slacks, drove in from Port Moody, where he's lived since 1946. The solid 80-year-old looked a little nervous but was smiling as he climbed the stairs to the boardroom.
He walked in, a trail of gawkers behind him. Brazier looked up and studied him. There was silence. It had been 59 years, but there was no embrace, no kiss.
"Oh no," she said, "I'm sorry but I think I've got the wrong man. You're not Orme Payne."
Payne laughed.
"Yes I am."
"Are you sure?" she asked.
Payne laughed harder.
Turns out Brazier thought Al McGuire, who was standing behind Payne in the Courier photograph, was Payne.
Taking a chair next to Brazier, Payne produced a war-time photograph of himself. Brazier brightened up as she picked up the photograph.
"Oh yes, oh yes... this is the man I remember. Oh yes, handsome. A young Richard Gere, don't you think so?"
Payne: "Who?"
Brazier: "Richard Gere, a famous actor."
Payne: "Is that right? I've been accused of a lot of things, but not that. You can have that, if you like."
Brazier: "Really?"
Payne: "Sure, sure. I'd be glad to have you have it. Not many girls ask for a picture of me."
So here they were, together again.
For about an hour, the two looked at old photographs, reminisced about Nutley and the war and remarked sadly on how many of their friends had died.
Of the original gang of seven in Nutley, three are gone, including Brazier's sister, Sarah, who used to date the late Kao Laidlaw, part of Payne's regiment.
And only a few weeks ago, on Remembrance Day, another member of the regiment, Bill Stickney, died in Ontario.
Brazier: "I look back on those days as fun times. I shouldn't say that because the war was on, but, yes, we had good times. The music, the soldiers... different times back then."
Payne: "It helped being as young as we were too, you know. I mean look at us now."
Brazier: "Yes, I know. I probably couldn't get down on the grass to have a picnic now."
More laughter.
A lot has happened since the couple parted in 1943--marriage to other people, children.
Both lost their spouses three years ago--Payne's wife Rita of heart failure, Brazier's husband Lionel of cancer.
"Isn't that strange," said Brazier, sitting in her apartment a few days after the reunion.
"We must have been going through grief at the same time, only a few miles from each other. But you know, this has really helped me... going over all these memories. Instead of thinking about the sadness, I'm thinking about the dances back in Nutley and the happy times. I'm feeling 60 years younger."
Since her husband's death, Brazier has had a tough time dealing with the loss.
For 32 years, the couple lived in a house on Trafalgar Street, where they had a big yard and lovely garden--lots of memories, but too many for Brazier to live there by herself.
She still lives in the same neighbourhood, but it's not the same. Lionel was also a soldier, who fought in Burma for the British Army and later belonged to one of the first regiments to go into Japan after the A-bomb was dropped on Hiroshima.
"It haunted him, seeing all those people and the ruins."
They married in 1955 after working together for Alliance Insurance in London, moving to Canada two years later to join Lionel's brother, George.
The couple's only child, Nicholas, was eight months old when they arrived.
Brazier stayed home to raise Nicholas, now a dental technician, and Lionel went to work for another insurance company.
He was a strong swimmer, had a black belt in judo and regularly played squash and tennis.
In the fall of 1999, he was diagnosed with cancer. He died three weeks later at 77 years old.
A nurse at the hospital wondered whether his exposure to the chemicals in Hiroshima led to his death.
"He was so healthy, you wonder how it could have knocked him down in three weeks," Brazier said.
With Lionel gone, she spends more time with her son's family, enjoying her two grandchildren. Brazier is one of five children, all of whom, except for her sister Day Norman, are dead. She called Norman, who lives in Nutley, after the reunion.
"Do you remember a Canadian named Orme Payne?" she asked her sister.
"Orme Payne," she replied, "Was he a famous singer?"
Day never met Payne when he was in Nutley, but was overjoyed when Brazier told her the story of how they'd met after 59 years--and how this past couple of weeks she hasn't been able to sleep because of the excitement.
"My sister said, 'Gwyneth, your life has turned right around for you.' I told her I felt 60 years younger--until I look in the mirror. We both laughed about that."
Payne chose not to move out of his house after Rita's death, even though his three children urged him to.
Rita loved to paint and create ceramic knickknacks that are still prominently displayed in Payne's bungalow in Port Moody.
The couple met in 1947 at a local movie theatre. Payne was going to watch a movie and Rita, who was working the door, punched his ticket, so to speak. Two years later, they were married.
For 30 years, Payne worked for IPSCO, a pipe-manufacturing business in Port Moody, before retiring to a life of travel, snooker and golf.
He still drives, and on the morning of the Courier's visit to his house, he picked up a boyhood friend from the ferry terminal in Horseshoe Bay.
Eighty-one-year-old Gordy Bannerman is to Payne what Brazier's sister is to her--someone to lean on and talk to about old times.
Bannerman lives in Parksville and has known Payne since they were 10 years old, growing up in the farming town of Neville, Sask.
They went to school together, played hockey and baseball together, joined the army together and fought in the same battles in Italy and Holland, promising to look after each other on the battlefields.
Amazingly, neither was seriously wounded.
The reunion of Payne and Brazier has been just as big a deal for Bannerman, who often wondered what happened to the young British women.
Bannerman dated Daphne Clyne, a friend of Brazier's, when the soldiers were stationed in Nutley. (Clyne is married to a British soldier and lives in England).
"I couldn't believe what Payne was telling me when he called about Gwyneth. I said, 'Isn't that the greatest--60 bloody years.' Imagine that," said Bannerman, who appears in several of Brazier's photographs from that era.
Both men describe their relationships with Brazier and Clyne as more casual than serious. Just friends, they say, who used to knock around together and enjoy each others' company.
But Bannerman said the women were a tight-knit group who took dating seriously.
He tells a story of going to pick up Clyne one day, only to be told the gang was splitting up because of a fallout between Kao Laidlaw and Brazier's sister, Sarah.
"I'm not sure exactly what happened, but I think one of the girls wasn't getting along with one us and the next thing you know Daphne's telling me you have to get along with all of us or none of us," recalled Bannerman, who never saw Clyne again.
As they look back on those days, both men laugh a lot about their time in the service.
But when they talk about the friends they lost--particularly Johnny Peltier, who had his legs blown off in Italy, and Dagnall Dempsey, who died in the Dieppe raid in August 1942--their mood turns sombre.
Payne and Bannerman were two of Canada's soldiers who broke through the heavily fortified Hitler, Gustav
and Gothic lines in Italy, fighting with antiquated equipment and spending months hunkered down in blood-filled trenches, teeming with rats.
After that campaign, they were dispatched to Holland, where they became part of the Canadian force that liberated that country, making them genuine heroes to the people there.
They joined the army for adventure and returned home a lot older than they looked.
It remains difficult for them to talk about the battles, and Payne is still trying to come to grips with his time overseas.
"I never thought about it at the time, but after the war I did: How the hell do you take a bunch of guys off of farms or out of offices or wherever, and get them in to such a shape that they go and kill somebody else, and then when that's done, you put them back where they came from and everything is supposed to be all right? Good God, that wasn't right."
Back at the Courier boardroom, Brazier and Payne are gathering up their photographs and planning a lunch date, possibly at Horseshoe Bay, where they can meet Bannerman.
It's been quite a morning for both of them, and it's as if they don't want to leave--but they do, with Payne holding Brazier by the arm as she steps gingerly down the stairs. The women in the office are smiling.
Outside, in the wind and rain, Payne stops Brazier on the sidewalk, squeezes her close and kisses her on the cheek.
"Well, this has just been great," he says, stepping back to look at her.
"You've made my day," she replies.
He escorts her to a waiting car, careful that she doesn't slip on the mess of wet maple leaves along the boulevard.
Fifty-nine years ago, there was no good-bye, which may have been appropriate considering what Payne was about to face on the battlefields.
But then they were never "an item," they say--just good friends who made the best of the uncertain days ahead of them. They never wrote each other, never thought about what might have been.
But quite remarkably, after 59 years, they're back together again, arm-in-arm on a sidewalk in November, the month for remembering.
@Howellings
