Sixty years ago, Canadian adults looked with alarm as the Cuban Missile Crisis started to escalate. For their kids, the experience was more visceral. We thought this might be interesting perspective, especially given current events.

 Early fall, and a nine year-old girl hurried across a field on her way home from Agincourt Public School in Ottawa.

I was late getting home because I had taken music lessons after school. There was hardly anyone around, and it was just starting to get dark.

Then: this thing went off. It started as a low moan, but it kept getting louder and louder, and I suddenly realized what it was, and I was petrified. They had told us about the air raid siren, but I had never actually heard it. It kept rising and falling, and seemed to get louder the longer it went on. I knew from practices in school that if you heard the siren and there was a bright flash of light, you got under your desk, but if you were anywhere else – like in a field walking home from music lessons – you were supposed to get to your house as quickly as you could. And I thought ‘This isn’t a practice- something bad is happening’.

So I ran. I was wearing rain boots, and I was so frightened that I ran right out of them. I remember thinking ‘that’s okay, I can run faster without the boots’, so I kept running. I was more afraid of what might be coming than I was of telling my mom I lost my boots.  

I knew I would be safe at home because of the ‘root cellar’. It was a tiny cold storage in the basement, right under the front steps. We usually kept potatoes and carrots there, but in the last few weeks, my mom had been cleaning it out, “getting it ready”. She was stockpiling cans of food and bottled water, and if something bad happened, we were supposed to go down to the root cellar.

By the time I got home, the siren had stopped, but I was still frightened. I asked my mom what was happening, but she just shrugged and said it was “a practice or something”. Being very British, she was more concerned about me losing my boots than of impending doom. My parents had both been through the war, and I think they didn’t want to upset me. I remember we trooped down and looked inside the root cellar, but we didn’t go in.

I wondered if a bomb was going to drop on us, maybe an ‘atom’ bomb. Or maybe someone was going to show up and shoot us. In school, they didn’t really tell you what to expect, only that something bad could happen. In retrospect, I realize they didn’t tell us because they didn’t really know.  But I was still terrified. And exhausted. I fell right to sleep, completely forgetting the experience. Probably a very British response called repression.

I never found my boots. The next day, I looked for them in the grass on the way to school, and on the way home, but they were gone. Who would have stolen an nine year-old’s boots!? Obviously the Russians, I thought.

 Early fall, and an eleven year-old boy walked home from Strathmillan Public School in Winnipeg.

It was clear and sunny. I kept looking at the sky over the air force base, wondering if I would see a missile coming, if war would start.

My father was in the Royal Canadian Air Force, and though he tried to hide it, I could tell he was worried. I knew enough from when my parents listened to the radio that something was going on with thosedamncommies in a place called ‘Cuba’, and I wondered if this was the day the bomb would drop.

School had been a little weird. The teachers seemed distracted, and the kids kept looking at one another, wondering what was going on. When we were finally let out to go home, I walked up to Ness Avenue, which ran along the south edge of the air force base. I saw an airplane, up high, and I wondered if it was thecommies. But so far, a bomb hadn’t dropped

For whatever reason, I thought it would happen in the afternoon. We lived on the base, and I figured that it was on the list for them to bomb, maybe even before Ottawa, the capital city. An 11 year-old has imagination.

When I got home, my father wasn’t there, and I wondered what he was doing, and if he would be alright. I remember thinking: maybe, if we were lucky, the bomb wouldn’t drop today. The next day was sort of the same, a little weird, and the next day, too, although my father didn’t seem quite as worried.

But I still wondered what an atom bomb would look like when it dropped.

In 1962, Marilyn Mersereau lived in Ottawa. In 1962, Tom New lived in Winnipeg.