My mother, Gwendolyn Estelle Brooks Waters,
photographed during the war, probably while working in Winnipeg, c. 1942. Born in 1916, she would have been 26 in 1942. She met her first husband at this time, an RAF ace from the Battle of Britain who had been sent to Manitoba as part of the British Commonwealth Air Training program. He was a brilliant pilot, but a broken man, who lost himself to booze. They split up during the war, leaving my mother a single mom, with little means of support. She lost her father in an afternoon to the Spanish flu in 1919 when only 3. She was a great beauty, and my father remained faithful to her in every way until the end.