Oak Bay couple relate their wartime experiences and how they met, years later, to News reporter Erin Cardone

Veronica Bennett answered the knock at the door in the early afternoon. Her mother was busy in the kitchen, cooking for the eight men boarding in the family’s five-bedroom home on the outskirts of Surrey, England.

Her father had been away for some time, fighting in the Second World War as a member of the Royal Air Force.

When Veronica opened the door, there under the grey sky stood the postman, telegram in hand. He passed it to her, tipped his cap and left.

Her eyes fixed to the letter, she shut the door and climbed the stairs to her bedroom. She lit a lamp and flopped down on the bed.

As she tore open the paper and registered the words inside, a sense of numbness consumed her. The page went fuzzy, or maybe she couldn’t focus. She felt distant and disconnected from her pain.

She didn’t cry – not until much later that evening when she returned downstairs for dinner with her mother. She explained to her mother that a former boarder – the young pilot she loved – was dead.

His aircraft, shot down, had sunk into the sea.

Although the war was fully underway at that point, the news lit a fuse inside 17-year-old Veronica.

Almost immediately, she began hunting for ways to fight. Finally, she found she was needed as an aircraft engine mechanic.

• • •

The darkness was fitting for the mood in Ron Butcher’s aircraft.

Ninety-six heavy bombers went down that day. Seven men on each. A major loss for the Royal Canadian Air Force.

It was nighttime as Butcher, the navigator, on his aircraft, and the rest of the 408 Goose Squadron flew back to base in England after a raid on Nuremburg, Germany. At one point the pilot called Butcher to the cockpit. Flares rose from the blacked-out landscape below.

“Don’t worry, they’re our flares,” Butcher said, and went back toward his seat.

He was wrong.

He was about to sit when he noticed his seat cushion missing. Then he saw the hole where he sat a minute earlier, tunnelling through the body of the aircraft.

Wind rushed up at Butcher, though the noise from the engines masked it – just as it had wiped out the sound of the tennis ball-sized shrapnel that would have blown the navigator to bits, had he not been called to the cockpit.

Shaking, he tamped the hole closed with his boot, sat back down, and flew back to base.

• • •

Veronica walked past the window of the Dutch Bakery on Fort Street, with its tiny decorated treats. She ducked into a clothing shop next door to wait.

Ron approached the bakery, eyed the little table out front where, five days earlier, he and Veronica had arranged to meet. The two had found each other in a most unconventional way for people their age – an online dating site.

Ron sat down. Veronica’s eyes widened.

She scrapped her plan of sneaking away if she didn’t like what she saw.

Ron would later describe that moment as love at first sight.

“Wow,” escaped both mouths simultaneously.

The couple (Ron, 81 at the time, Veronica, 77) spent every day together until they were engaged three weeks later.

An extravagant wedding in Sidney followed and the two moved into a Beach Drive apartment.

The relationship progressed, revealing stunning coincidences: both frequented the White Swan pub in Stratford-upon-Avon at the same time.

They were stationed just seven miles apart in England and never met.

Sitting in their immaculate living room seven years later, both agree it was those war-related coincidences that brought them together.

“But why did we have to wait so long?” Ron says.

• • •

Both Ron and Veronica Butcher plan to march in today’s (Nov. 11) Remembrance Day procession that will end at the cenotaph on the legislature lawn.

Ron is scheduled to lay a wreath for the 800 RCAF Wing, Veronica for the 50 Group Women’s Auxiliary Air Force.

ecardone@vicnews.com