Remembering the fallen

STELLARTON - Florence Hughes was just three months shy of her 14th birthday when her world was turned upside down. It was Glasgow, Scotland, and the Second World War had just begun.
Her parents began making plans to evacuate Hughes and her younger sister to Canada, but just before she was supposed to leave, she came down with an ear infection.
"The doctor wouldn't let me go," she said, looking out at the sea of faces that had gathered at the base of the Stellarton cenotaph Wednesday for a Remembrance Day service. "It turned out to be a blessing, because the boat I was supposed to go on was sunk by a German U-boat."
Hughes and her sister were evacuated to a small town outside of Glasgow, but Hughes remembers being terrified that her parents would be killed by bombs, leaving her and her sister alone in the world. She begged her father to allow her to come home.
"He said all right, but you'd better plan to get a job then," Hughes remembers. "I was five foot eight - no one asked how old I was."
She first worked putting handles on ammunition boxes and later put incendiary bombs out, surrounded mostly by men in their 70s.
"All of the old men were working, because the young men went off to war," she said.
It was while working there that she met a North Nova Scotia Highlander named Stanley Hughes, "the man of my dreams," she said. Hughes wasn't quite 15 when she was introduced to him.
Stanley Hughes walked her home the night they met, and from then on, her heart was his. Three days after they met, while taking some neighbourhood children for a walk in the park, she remembers him saying, "When you and I get married, we'll have four children."
Their marriage was a long way off - they finally tied the knot on June 18, 1943, making Hughes a war bride - and eventually settled in Churchville, where they raised five daughters and three sons.
"His math was a good ways off," she chuckled.
But before they got there, the duo had to face a number of challenges. Stanley was captured in Normandy and taken to Germany as a prisoner of war, while Hughes faced challenges in her day-to-day life in Scotland, spending most of her nights in bomb shelters as shells rained down around her.
She can vividly recall the first bombing that occurred in Glasgow. She and her father were returning from taking a Polish officer to the train station when the shells started to fall.
"We were running and the bombs were dropping," she said. "There was this little alley and a bunch of people were all cuddled around each other. One man said, 'Let that child in here, put her in the middle.' They were trying to protect me. The men and women around me were all crying, I was petrified."
The same man took charge again.
"He told us to stop our crying, that we weren't going to let that Hitler get us down," Hughes said. "So we sang the Scottish National anthem."
As soon as the bombing seemed to stop, they made a dash for an air raid shelter, but they weren't quick enough.
"A piece of shrapnel hit my dad in the back of the leg, blood was pouring out and I was crying," she said, but all they could do was keep moving towards safety. "Once we got there, the first aid people got it out. The cut wasn't deep, but it did bleed a lot."
She remembers nights spent in the shelters, packed in with 700 other people, as everyone prayed together. But there was also a deeper sense of unity that held everyone together. Everyone would bring tea and soup to share, bringing whatever they had, trying to make the experience easier on everyone.
As Hughes looked out at the hundreds of people who attended Wednesday's service, she sent a special message to the children, urging them to be grateful for what they had.
"We have to talk more to the children and tell them to respect the dead," she said.
Hughes was the first woman to be the guest speaker at the Stellarton Remembrance Day service.