When brothers Ron and Ryan Anderson were kids, they would often play “army” in the woods, which didn’t surprise their mother Maureen in the slightest.
“Way back from there, they were destined to go to the army,” muses the 78-year-old at her home in Oromocto, N.B.
After all, the Andersons are a military family.
Maureen’s father, John “Jack” Kelly, joined the North Shore (New Brunswick) Regiment when he was just 17 years old, and fought overseas in the Second World War. Her mother was his British war bride.
Her grandfather served in the British Royal Navy in the First World War. His ship was bombed and he was among the survivors left swimming for their lives.
She remembers watching him habitually rubbing his hands together years later.
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“And I asked somebody, ‘Why?’ And they said he was always cold and maybe it was from [being in the] ocean,” she recalls.
Once she left …