Apparently using a wooden spoon makes it harder to do. But taste better.

I was asked to make cookies. Actually, my wife was making cookies and I stepped in when she had a call with a family member. The call was long enough that I got through the whole batch of cookies. Making these cookies got me thinking…

Thinking about my aunt Hylda. Hylda was my dad’s aunt – his mother’s sister. She took care of my dad and his siblings when my grandmother was convalescing after losing a lung to tuberculosis. My grandmother living into her 80s is something miraculous that I will always be grateful for.

Hylda would take care of us kids, too. When I was young, I never realized how close my dad was to my aunt and how much of a role she had played in his young life – if I had, I would have probably been nicer to her. She and I didn’t have a particularly combative relationship, but we certainly didn’t see eye to eye. She didn’t suffer fools gladly and I was just the right age, and enough of an insufferable fool to, well, you know.

She tolerated me well enough, but she really liked my older sister, Rosemary. This isn’t a case of ‘you were loved better than me’ – it was a point of fact. A fact that I’m happy to acknowledge. They had a great trip to England one time and there were all kinds of fun times which I was pretty happy to just not be a part of.

Anyway, Aunty Hylda would come and take care of us after school. She would make sure we didn’t kill each other and she would keep us fed with all kinds of baked goods. She never married, as she had lost a boyfriend ‘during the war’ and just never really got around to finding another. Can’t say I blame her, after surviving that time in history all bets are off.

We never spoke about it. Not that it was any of my business. We learned that his last name was the same as hers – Chambers – and that he was an air gunner on a Lancaster bomber that was lost over Germany in 1943. She was a Spitfire mechanic and they met at the airfield, apparently. He had asked her to marry him and she had said that she would agree once he met her family. He was lost a few days later in a raid that took the bomber to Munich, which was about as far as a Lancaster could go from an air base in England.

He was her third boyfriend who was lost. ‘Red’, as he was known, (officially Walter Owen Earl) faded away, except in memory. No one knew anything about him. Hylda died in 1988, never having known much more about Red, except that he was gone forever.

He was gone, that was true, but there is a ton of information on him. In a very strange stroke of luck I had a conversation one evening with a fellow and we were talking about wartime service from our families. He mentioned there was a book on Canadian airmen who had been lost and he offered to look Red up.

We found Red. He is buried in Durnbach Cemetery near Bad Tolz, in Southern Germany. He is buried with the other members of his flight crew who perished on the 7th of September, 1943.

My dad and I went to visit in 2007. God, it was a while ago. It was a lovely day in Germany and we found the grave without any trouble. The Commonwealth War Graves Commission does an amazing job keeping the cemeteries in perfect (and I mean perfect) condition.

We brought some of Hylda’s ashes so they could finally be together.

And so every year, about this time (near Remembrance Day in Canada – November 11th) I think about Red and Hylda. And I take advantage of the ancestry.com offer of free access to their war records to see if I can find anything more about him.

This year I downloaded basically his entire military file – mostly forms and details. Red was a typical guy, had a couple of issues with being AWOL but not too bad (docked a day’s pay). He was “Of good appearance. Keen and alert, nervous temperament. Good physique and carriage. Capable of full flying duties. Air Gunner”.

Guess you didn’t have too high a bar to cross to be able to blast away at incoming fighters.

His service record is full of entries, this and that. And, of course, the last one is ‘Presumed Dead 7-9-43’. I fear whoever wrote that entry wrote it often.

Red was a simple guy. Only son of a widow, 30 years old, salesman for a sewing machine company.

When I cream butter and sugar together to make a few dozen chocolate chip cookies to keep my teenagers from starving, I think of Hylda.

I think of how she used to cream the sugar and butter together with a wooden spoon, even though we had all kinds of electrical devices in the house. It was her way of making it just right.

I don’t have the patience for that, I use beaters and suffer the indignity of imperfectly creamed butter and sugar in my cookies. Still an insufferable… Well, you know.

I think I would have enjoyed Red’s company. We probably wouldn’t have much in common, except that we would probably eat too many fine cookies, which is as good a common ground as you can ever ask for.