The Home Front: Wartime Life in Camp Aldershot and Kentville, Nova Scotia

Ian A. Andrews is a high-school social sciences teacher and editor of the New Brunswick Teachers’ Association’s Focus.

Ripley was a child of the Depression who became a teenager during World
War II. He lived in the small town of Kentville in Nova Scotia’s
Annapolis Valley; a few miles away was Camp Aldershot, a major training
base for recruits entering the Canadian Army and destined for the
battlefields of Europe. At a very impressionable age, Ripley regularly
visited the camp to sell newspapers and magazines; witnessed the
soldiers-to-be at work and at play; and became aware of the changing
circumstances for those left behind when the soldiers went to war.
Memories from these experiences are the basis of this book.

The Home Front is a social history—not a documented academic work but
a series of anecdotal stories recalled by the author and veterans who
were interviewed decades after the events had taken place. While not
claiming to be portentous, it succeeds in portraying a slice of
Canadiana: the world of small-town Canada and its people, who tried to
cope with a major upheaval in their lives.

Writing in a conversational manner, Ripley talks of his own friendships
and experiences; the struggles of his mother to hold down a full-time
job, in addition to looking after her family after her husband went
overseas; the confrontations between soldiers and the civilians of
Kentville; the training regimens at the camp; and the attempts of
energetic young soldiers to seduce local women. He comments on the
racism (especially toward Natives, Blacks, and Japanese), the
bureaucratic blunders and useless training techniques, the excessive
drinking, and the “zombies.” He extols the virtues of persons like
Major Irving Bickerton and Scoutmaster Walter Wood, who were heroes to
the adolescent Ripley and have remained so to an adult Ripley. And he
writes with an insight into and understanding of the human condition.

Aldershot has long been replaced as a major army training area by New
Brunswick’s CFB Gagetown, but the thousands of soldiers who passed
through its gates are well remembered in The Home Front.