Love and rockets – Winnipeg Free Press

One of the many horrors of war is the way it tears loved ones apart through displacement, imprisonment or death.

But war can also bring together those whose paths would likely never have crossed, sparking relationships and creating a ripple effect across generations.

The protagonists in Winnipeg-born, Toronto-based Nahlah Ayed’s new book, The War We Won Apart, would likely never have met were it not for the Second World War.

In 1934, at age 17, Guy d’Artois joined the militia through the Université de Montréal and was shipped overseas in early 1940. That same year, when she turned 17, Sonia Butt joined the U.K.’s Women’s Auxiliary Air Force, and began basic training in 1941.

Their paths would eventually cross as part of the Special Operations Executive (SOE), a military British organization established in 1940 to drop behind enemy lines by parachute, organize resistance and undertake acts of sabotage.

The pair married in 1944, shortly before being deployed on separate missions; they would survive the war, eventually reuniting and returning to Canada to settle in Quebec and raise six children.

Ayed, 54, became aware of Sonia’s story while serving as CBC’s London correspondent after having reported on conflicts in the Middle East and beyond for years. (She’s now the host of CBC Radio’s Ideas.)

While covering an event to commemorate the 75th anniversary of D-Day, her producer informed her of a story about one of the people being honoured — a woman from Canada named Sonia d’Artois who was part of the SOE.

“As a foreign correspondent, as a reporter, I’ve always been interested in stories of immigration and war — this story fit into both,” Ayed explains by phone in advance of the Winnipeg launch of The War We Won Apart at 7 p.m. tonight at McNally Robinson Booksellers’ Grant Park location.

“In that sense, it was very much in keeping with the kind of stories that I did, especially women in war — that is a passion of mine.”

That Canadians (particularly a woman) had taken part in covert operations as part of the SOE was news to Ayed.

“We’ve all heard the stories of Canadians bravely landing on Normandy shores, but I had no idea there was a whole bunch of Canadians who went in far earlier — weeks, sometimes months before the Allied landings — to do work behind enemy lines to smooth their arrival,” she says.

In 2019, Ayed produced a piece about Sonia for CBC, but her curiosity about the pair persisted.

“I could not stop thinking about Sonia and being just 20 years old and jumping out of a plane. The reaction from the audience was similar — like how do we not know about these people, Sonia and Guy d’Artois? And so eventually, after months and months, I decided to call the family back and said, ‘Has anyone ever written a book about this story?’” she says.

“And here we are five years later.”

While both protagonists had died many years prior to Ayed starting the book — Guy in 1999 at age 81 and Sonia in 2014 at age 90 — she was able to talk to their descendants, pore over letters and other correspondence, and scour archives and other secondary sources to reconstruct their story.

Particularly useful to Ayed was a 2002 interview with Sonia arranged by her daughter, where she recalled her time in the SOE, including parachuting into France in May 1944 — just days before the D-Day invasion.

“I could hear her voice, I could hear her laugh and her emotion in her stories, but I couldn’t ask her questions … as a reporting enterprise based in the past, this was new for me. It was hugely challenging,” Ayed says.

An additional challenge for Ayed was sifting through contradictory recollections and documentation by many of the key players.

“It was deeply frustrating. Sometimes days would go by when I agonizing over how to reconcile three or four or five different versions of a story and not really coming up with a definitive answer,” she says.

“I’m not a trained historian, I’m a journalist, but I realized that my job as a journalist in this story was closer to that of a historian in that I had to try to find the most plausible explanation for the differences in stories.”

While the pair were separated on their own assignments, Sonia, like many others during the war, began a relationship with a fellow soldier — in her case, Sydney Hudson, who also had a wife in the U.K.

Later in the war, Sonia would confess her indiscretions to Guy, and Ayed’s book recalls a meeting in a Paris café between the three in 1944, where Sonia chose Guy over Sydney.

“I admired Sonia’s courage in resolving this situation … she told her husband about this affair, and wanted to honour their marriage. She had made a mistake, and she wanted to make it up to him. And they remained married and lived together until the very last days of his life.”

For Ayed, the telling of such wartime stories as Sonia and Guy’s is vitally important.

“These stories need to come to light. Every Canadian family, at some point in its history, has some sort of immigrant story that intersects with war. Talking to our elders, interviewing our family members, to elicit whatever we can of those memories … they really inform who we are — not just as individuals, but as a country,” she says.

“Wars change people … children inherit memories of trauma. These are stories not just about war, but about what it takes to find peace.”

ben.sigurdson@winnipegfreepress.com

Ben Sigurdson
Literary editor, drinks writer

Ben Sigurdson is the Free Press‘s literary editor and drinks writer. He graduated with a master of arts degree in English from the University of Manitoba in 2005, the same year he began writing Uncorked, the weekly Free Press drinks column. He joined the Free Press full time in 2013 as a copy editor before being appointed literary editor in 2014. Read more about Ben.

In addition to providing opinions and analysis on wine and drinks, Ben oversees a team of freelance book reviewers and produces content for the arts and life section, all of which is reviewed by the Free Press’s editing team before being posted online or published in print. It’s part of the Free Press‘s tradition, since 1872, of producing reliable independent journalism. Read more about Free Press’s history and mandate, and learn how our newsroom operates.

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