Canada's War Grooms and the Girls Who Stole Their Hearts.

Janet Arnett is the former campus manager of adult education at Ontario’s Georgian College. She is the author of Antiques and Collectibles: Starting Small, The Grange at Knock, and 673 Ways to Save Money.

Here’s the drill: British lad enlists in the RAF, is sent to Canada for training, meets and marries a Canadian girl. He is shipped back to Britain to rejoin WWII. She follows, trading free passage for war work in England. War ends. Both return to Canada to live happily ever after. Multiply that outline of a wartime episode by 45 and you’ve got the essence of these mini-memoirs. Certainly there are variations, which can be detected by the especially alert reader. Sometimes the young lad is from New Zealand or Australia. Sometime the gal stays in Canada to await his demobilization. And for a few, it is the happily-ever-after part that provides a challenge and a variation from the cookie-cutter text.

The cultural impact on Canada of war brides is well known and documented. But war grooms? Their obscurity is so considerable that many refer to themselves as “male war brides.” They were shipped to Canada in the early 1940s for training as pilots or flight crew. In late 1945 they chose to follow their brides home, eventually becoming Canadian citizens.

Personal memoirs can be fascinating if they use details to evoke a clear image and are sufficiently distinctive in narrative style to let individual personalities come to life on the page. Approximately 12 of the 45 in this collection meet those criteria. The others contribute little but tedium and should have been cut in the editing process. Their inclusion is an example of the amateurism that runs throughout the book. While the subject offers promise, inadequate research, an apologetic tone, and stylistic laziness weaken the overall impact. The events recalled took place more than 60 years ago; undoubtedly the time lapse explains much of the glazed-over tone. As well, some of the stories show the inevitable vagueness of second-hand reporting as family members attempt to write a memoir for a deceased groom. Even acknowledging these weaknesses, the book contains the buried treasure of 12 dynamic accounts of specific wartime experiences—tales worth seeking out among all the filler.