Like most people I take photos of for the NOW, Kaye Holmes was a stranger to me.
She came outside on a bright, cold November day to look at the thousands of miniature Canadian flags local elementary school students had poked into the ground around the George Derby Senior Centre to mark Remembrance Day and honour the home’s many veterans.
Staff had convinced Arthur, Kaye’s husband of 58 years and a Second World War veteran, to come outside and pose for a Remembrance Day photo for the paper.
Kaye – using a walker and dressed in a bright red coat – had come with him.
We walked slowly together as staff helped Arthur wheel into the thick of the flags.
I asked about her English accent, thinking she might have been one of the thousands of British war brides who came to Canada after the war. She wasn’t.
I asked if she liked it here. She did.
Her answers were full of life, and I thought, if I had had more time and Arthur hadn’t looked so cold in his wheelchair and thin jacket, I would like to have talked to her a lot longer – about the war, about coming to a new country, about being a woman 99 years old.
But I pulled out my camera instead, a staff member reminded Arthur he was supposed to look like he was having fun, and the couple broke into good-natured smiles at the irony.
Snap.
I had to call the George Derby Centre a few days later to check some details about Arthur’s military service, and learned Kaye was in hospital.
She rallied in time for Remembrance Day, helping Arthur find his medals for the service and standing at attention for God Save the Queen, O Canada, the two minutes of silence and the final post.
But, on Nov. 24, she died.
From longtime friends Bob and Mel Clark, I found out she had been a remarkable woman.
She had volunteered with the Red Cross during the war. Her first husband, a British airman, had died in 1942 in Nazi-occupied Denmark.
At the end of the war, she had travelled to India, Burma, Singapore and Hong Kong with the Women’s Voluntary Services Overseas to work in leave centers for Allied soldiers.
At the end of her two-year contract, she had travelled to Shanghai, Yokohama, Honolulu, San Francisco, and finally entered Canada through a border crossing housed in a wooden shack in White Rock.
She had travelled to Montreal by train and worked as a bookkeeper, before meeting Arthur at the Royal Overseas Club in Toronto.
She had caught his attention because of a story she was telling about Allied engineers blowing up a Japanese victory monument set up in Singapore earlier in the war.
He had been there and witnessed the same explosion. They married in 1956.
Kaye Holmes was a stranger to me, but for a few minutes one day in November, I caught a glimpse of her remarkable story.
That’s the special privilege of this job. Every day, we get to meet all kinds of people from all walks of life and share in their stories.
The older I get, the more I believe that’s the only thing that really matters.
Our own stories may not last even 99 years – we can only see so much, do so much in this lifetime.
But with every new story we hear, every new set of eyes we see through, our own story grows too.
Not all will be happy, and we as reporters hear a lot of stories that break our hearts.
But this time I feel lucky because – for me – Kaye and Arthur Holmes will always be together and smiling in a field of miniature Canadian flags.
