It was a peculiar start to the evening, when Margaret Birnie greeted the crowded room at the Leisure Time Club with "Da da dit, da da dit, dit dit da".

Birnie was a wireless operator in Canada during World War II and she spoke out the Morse code for "Good evening and Welcome everyone."

Birnie and three other ladies were the guest speakers at the November meeting for the Collingwood and district Historical Society. The lady veterans were there in honour of Remembrance Day to tell of their experiences serving in the last World War.

All four are now Collingwood area residents. Two served in the Canadian army, and the other two served in Britain. All four sat at the front of the room in dress uniforms decorated in medals of honour.

Birnie graduated from Collingwood Collegiate Institute in 1942 and signed up for the Women's Royal Canadian Navy Service (WRCNS) in 1943. She learned Morse code and was trained to know a bit about the wireless devices she was going to be working with, and then she began her job transcribing enemy messages from Morse code.

She spent most her time in service at the HMCS Coverdale Naval Station. She and other "Wrens", as they were called, would copy out code in shifts. When they heard the signal for a U-boat transmission, which only happened if the enemy ship spotted a target or was delivering a special weather report, excitement would spread through the station, as officers and Wrens scrambled to copy out the message and send it to other military offices.

They also had a baseball team at Coverdale, and the coach was none other than former Toronto Maple Leaf Jackie Hamilton.

Birnie fondly remembers her years working as a Wren for 99 cents a day.

"These years were the very best years of my life," she said. "You formed real attachments, some of them stayed with you for your whole life."

Birnie was discharged in 1945 and all the Wrens were given the option of going to university or taking cash settlement. Birnie took the cash, bought a sewing machine and returned to "civi" street.

Muriel Poste served in the British version of the Wrens, the Women's Royal Naval Service; she was eventually promoted to Petty officer.

"I was a writer - shorthand," she said. "But I was never, ever dictated a letter."

Poste was moved to several stations in the United Kingdom eventually settling in Greenock and working at a secret registry office close to an admiral's station. All the top-secret papers for the admiral's office came through the registry office where Poste and one other petty officer would catalogue them in a logbook and take them to the appropriate people.

She remembers on V.E. Day and V.J. Day all the ships in the harbour blew their horns full blast.

"It was a tremendous racket," she said.

Poste's fondest memories of the 40s were the recreation activities she and the other Wrens took part in. They went to movies and dances, in fact, they were invited to a Canadian camp for a dance, but didn't join in. The girls had never seen the "Jitterbug" before, and most didn't care to try it.

 "I was 13 when war was declared," said Honor Cubitt, who was living in Britain at the time.

"We all had to be registered ... we were given gas masks, and then we had to live with the blackout."

At the age of 16, she was working at a munitions factory scooping gunpowder in to bullets.

Cubitt was just 17 when she signed up for the Artillery Territorial Service in Britain. She had to work hard to convince her mom to sign a permission form.

"I had six weeks of basic training," she said, adding that she enjoyed every bit of it except the gas chamber. The women had to sit in a chamber remove their gas masks and endure tear gas.

Cubitt's father was killed by gas in World War I just three weeks before she was born. It made the gas chamber training exercise all the more terrifying.

Cubitt was transferred around Britain to different placements, eventually being housed at the Shorncliffe Barracks near Dover. There she nursed the minor wounds of everyone at the barracks, including the prisoner's of war who did the cooking. She remembers they wore special patches and were shot if they tried to escape, but they didn't ever try to escape.

"They knew they were onto a good thing," she said, smiling.

Toward the end of the war, Cubitt said one of the fears at the barracks, because it was so near the coast, were the unpredictable "doodle bugs" - unmanned planes carrying explosives from the enemy lines in Europe. The engines would cut out, and the plane would dive, exploding on impact.

"As long as the engines were going, you were safe," said Cubitt. "But as soon as they stopped, you ran for cover."

Elsie Cruikshank smiled as she remembered the peculiar times of the 1940s.

"From depression to a war," she said, remembering people knocking on doors looking for work during the depression and how quickly that changed when the war started. "There weren't enough people to fill the jobs."

Cruikshank was born and raised in Collingwood and when she turned 18, she, like the three women surrounding her, joined the war effort. She signed up for the Canadian Women's Army Corps in London, where she handled top-secret mail and worked in military offices in Ontario.

"I enjoyed my time in the service," she said quietly. "It taught you discipline, and how to get along with other females. Although, eight to a room didn't leave you much choice."

The crowd gave the veterans a standing ovation, and thanked them for their presentation and their service.

One member said their stories gave a face to Remembrance Day and would serve to prove the importance of the day.