“We live in such a free country,” said veteran Elsie Dandy. “It’s unbelievable how free we are.”
Dandy was a nurse in the Second World War, stationed at Basingstoke Neurological and Plastic Surgery Hospital for the Canadian Army, about 60 miles from London, England.
Dandy worked in various wards of the specialized hospital – plastic surgery, burns and brain surgery – treating wounded Canadian soldiers and prisoners of war (PoWs), among others.
The 97-year-old veteran Nursing Sister of Fergus said she was overwhelmed when she had patients so full of hate that they fought the care she tried to provide, including one PoW she recalls as one of her most difficult patients.
“He had a brain tumour (that) was too large for him to live,” Dandy said.
The man, from Italy, was married with two small children and Dandy said she wasn’t sure if anyone explained to him following his surgery that he wouldn’t live.
“He had to have morphine for the pain and when we tried to give it to him he would fight us so that they had two or three people … to hold him down … he would plead with us … ‘Don’t kill me, I’ve got two children and a wife at home and I want to go home,’” Dandy recalled, adding the man died after about two months.
“He wasn’t a bad patient in essence but he had been taught to hate,” she said. “He really believed that we would hate him enough to kill him.”
She had numerous experiences with other young people who had been taught to hate. Dandy said she thinks it’s hate for other people that creates war and one of the ways to prevent that thinking in Canada is to educate young people.
One of the reason’s Dandy joined the Royal Canadian Legion Branch 275 in Fergus about 15 years ago was the support it gives school-aged children.
Years ago Dandy’s granddaughter Adrienne Dandy was the recipient of a Legion bursary for a poem that she wrote when she attended Centre Wellington District High School.
“Every year those children are given a bursary of some sort for what they did at school from the Legion,” she said.
And though she is proud of other work the Legion does, she said, “I’m more interested in what they’re doing for the school children because I think that’s terribly important. It gives the child an opportunity for competition.”
Dandy joined the Fergus Legion after her husband, Jim Dandy, passed away because before then the couple was busy representing the Lincoln and Welland Regiment, where Jim was a reserve colonel.
She said members should consider it their “duty” to attend meetings and contribute to the Legion.
“Why would (you) go and play cards and let other people run the show?” she said. “Because … it’s a business … So I feel it’s my duty to go.”
Past president Greg Manion said Dandy, the oldest living member of the Fergus branch, is an inspiration to other members.
“It’s a thrill to have her there because she contributes, she believes in what the Legion’s all about, she inspires some people,” said Manion. “When she does speak, she speaks very knowledgeably.”
He explained that even when Dandy lived out west with her daughter, she made sure to attend meetings at the Fergus branch whenever she was back in town.
“It’s just amazing … I wish everybody else would really just have half the drive she’s got,” said Manion.
Along with supporting the Legion and its student bursaries, Dandy also volunteers at J.D. Hogarth Public School, where she tries to teach the students about acceptance.
“I want our young people to be free and happy and learn,” she said.
“It doesn’t matter what colour you are or what nationality you are or what religion you are, you’re not all wrong. And I try … to teach [the kids] to look at that and even go home and tell their parents.”
Dandy represented nurses in Holland for the 65th anniversary of the Liberation of the Netherlands.
On that trip she said she saw the rail tracks that took Holocaust victims to their death.
“I’ll never forget that picture I have of the train tracks that they took the people to kill them as turned up,” she said. “So that it wouldn’t happen again but I think if you don’t say anything people don’t … know.”
