Dorothy Scott has a message for war for all those who haven't lived through it.
"As far as I'm concerned, war should never be. It's a big mistake of mankind," Scott said Sunday during the annual Thank A Veteran event at McCrae House.
"War is something that should be deplored. It does nothing," she said.
The 95-year-old Scott joined Canadian peace keeping veterans Jacques De Winter and Bob Harkness at Sunday's event to greet and chat with visitors.
Scott was a 19-year-old transplanted Canadian attending university in Scotland when war broke out in 1939.
She decided to enlist in the Women's Auxiliary Air Force, a female extension of the Royal Air Force assigned to non-combat duties.
Her roles included "plotting" aircraft, using pre-radar information to track where allied and enemy aircraft were while in the air.
"I worked marking the routes that aircraft took and trying to figure if they were ours or not," she said.
She later rose to the rank of corporal and worked in operations.
"It was much more interesting working in the operations room than pushing arrows around a board," she said of her increased role.
That's what she was doing as D-Day approached, never knowing when the massed soldiers and equipment were going to be sent across the English Channel.
One night she was out walking when she heard a massive roar grow, looking up to see the sky filled with the lights of planes pulling troop-laden gliders heading to France. That was how she knew D-Day had begun.
"It was like a cathedral ceiling with twinkling lights. They went on and on. They filled the sky," Scott said.
Her father, a World War I veteran, served in army intelligence and her brother in the ultra-secret role of trying to crack German codes.
Life during war wasn't all bad, she said.
"People think that living in England during the war was awful all the time, but it wasn't," she said. "There were some good, some bad."
But rationing, restrictions on communication and movement and occasionally coming face-to-face with the realities of war, like the time she saw a Spitfire and bomber collide mid air and was greeted with a wall of fire when she rushed to the crash site to try and help.
She left the WAAF right after the war and finished her education before returning to Canada. After marrying her husband in Toronto, they moved to Guelph where she has lived for many years, teaching the deaf. She still works with a support group of people with hearing loss.
Scott enjoyed the small gathering at McCrae house and the chance to share her stories, which she has done several times in the past in local schools.
"Getting a chance to talk and have people listen, how nice!" she said. "My family has heard it all before."
