When I heard that a restored Canso airplane was going to be visiting the former air force base in Summerside, I switched a few things around so I could take my mother to see it.

My mother was a clerk in the Royal Canadian Air Force (Women’s Division) during the Second World War, serving from April 1943 to January 1945. She was posted to the RCAF base at Torbay, Newfoundland for 13 months and would have been there at this exact time 80 years ago.

Seeing a Canso, loaded with bombs and depth charges to hunt German U-boats, would have been an everyday thing for her then, nothing special, but today was certainly remarkable. She was interested to see one again, and thought it was smaller than she remembered. This Canso looked very different as it was painted as a water bomber, which was its last role as a working aircraft, and not as a military plane. She found it difficult to believe that 80 years had passed, thought a lot about all the friends she had made, now all gone.

It was windy with rain threatening as I pushed her wheelchair across the tarmac towards the plane. She learned to march on a similar runway in Ottawa, marching back and forth, back and forth. They issued the women shoes that were one size too big because all the marching would swell even the daintiest of WD feet.

It was to that very Summerside runway that she had been headed one day, probably also in 1944, when the plane she had hitched a ride from Torbay to visit her family on PEI spotted a U-boat surface in the Gulf of Saint Lawrence. They scrambled to get out of the area and radio the submarine’s position so bombers could be dispatched. She had been sitting in the co-pilot’s seat, so hopped out pretty quickly and the plane returned to Torbay. She never heard, or has forgotten, if that U-boat was sunk.

The Canso we saw today is one of only 13 remaining of the 3,600 built. My mother, once one of 17,000 WDs, is probably one of only a few still alive. Possibly one of the last people who saw a U-boat. My mother is still very much who she has always been – independent, generous, jolly, disciplined – but she has also morphed into being a living historical artefact, still able to tell her story at nearly 102. Rare birds indeed.