"I Want Mum"

As an adult, Mary Ann Waghorn’s memories came in snippets of black and white and gray. As a seven-year-old, she’d been told she was going on a holiday to Canada. She had no concept that she’d be leaving behind her three-year-old brother or the many aunts, uncles, and cousins who made up her happy extended family in Maidstone, Kent, England. Early in August 1940, she waited excitedly at the Maidstone West Station with her heartbroken mother. Mrs. Waghorn had agreed the evacuation would be best for her daughter but found the goodbye unbearable.

Mary Ann spent two days in the nearby town of Eltham in the care of CORB volunteers (Children’s Overseas Reception Board), until her party of 200 children was assembled. They traveled to Liverpool where Mary Ann remembers feeling nothing but confusion. The voyage across the North Atlantic on the Duchess of York proved no better. Most of the children were seasick and cold. On August 11, they docked in Canada.

The Duchess of York

Although Mary Ann was a CORB evacuee, it was up to the Toronto Children’s Aid to match her to a family. The process took weeks, during which time she stayed at Hart House, University of Toronto. Finally, she went to live with Roland and Coral Mann in Leaside, a small town on the outskirts of Toronto, and their twelve-year-old son, Teddy, and their dog, Sport. Since the Manns’ parents had been born in England and Scotland, they had close ties to Britain and Mary Ann fit in nicely despite her unsettling beginning. Mary Ann was soon calling her foster parents “Uncle Roly” and “Aunt Coral.”

Teddy proved to be an exceptionally patient big brother. He took Mary Ann skating, taught her to row a boat, fish, and bait her own hooks. At one point, Mary Ann announced to Mrs. Mann that when she was twenty, she would return to Canada and marry Teddy.

Although she looked gaunt upon arrival, she quickly gained weight and made lots of friends in her community. She recalled people being nothing but kind and compassionate to this little English girl. While Mary Ann appeared happy and well-adjusted, her inner feelings came out in her drawings. Her foster mother recalled her drawing pictures of girls in various activities like jumping rope or pushing a baby pram. Always, the girl was saying “I want Mum.” She drew great comfort at Christmas when she received some of her familiar toys from home.

The Manns found it a challenge to know how much news about home to expose such a young child to. At first, they never listened to war news on the radio. Later, Mary Ann was encouraged to take an interest in what was happening and to participate in fundraisers. Letters, photos, postcards, and cables kept her in touch with home.

Mary Ann says she’d have been happy to stay with the Manns after the war had they not so carefully kept her family in mind. Almost five years to the day she’d arrived in Canada, the Manns took her to Toronto’s Union Station where they said a tearful goodbye in front of newspaper photographers.

After a week aboard the Louis Pasteur and another train ride, twelve-year-old Mary Ann reached home—much taller and with a Canadian accent but otherwise the same girl with long blond braids. The brother who had been only three when she left was now eight and barely remembered her. Naturally, he resented this sudden intrusion of a big sister into his only-child status. Mary Ann, used to the older Canadian brother who’d doted on her, resented him as well and they fought a lot. She found the adjustment back to British school and life harder than the first change. Over time, she settled in.

For the next forty years, Mary Ann wrote monthly letters to the Mann family. On the four occasions when they met, she admitted feeling closer to them than she did to her own family.