Читать книгу Bird's Eye View - Elinor Florence - Страница 10

I didn’t have much to compare it with, but Touchwood was the loveliest town I had ever seen. It lay gracefully along a high river bluff overlooking the sandy valley bottom where the shallow Tim River meandered into the deeper and swifter Mistatim. From this summit, there was a striking view of the two rivers and the low, rolling plains.

Early settlers soon discovered that the rusty clay along the riverbanks was ideal for making brick. The red-brick post office with its stately clock tower, the town hall, the high school, and the court-house were a source of local pride. Beside the red-brick train station, two russet grain elevators soared against the sky: prairie cathedrals, some called them, or prairie sentinels.

There were handsome three-storey wooden homes, painted in pastels, distinguished among the dark spruce that grew thickly along the ridge. Farther back the smaller houses were laid out in a surveyed grid as precise as a checkerboard. On the sweep of flat prairie west of town, thanks to a former mayor with a passion for flying, was an airfield with three grass landing strips.

One Sunday evening after supper I saddled my pony, Buckshot, and went riding down to the Tim, which flowed through the rolling prairie two miles south of our farm. The delicate edges of the willow leaves, tinted with gold, were mirrored in the smooth, swift-flowing silver water. A late tiger lily was scarlet as a drop of blood in the dense yellow virgin grass along the banks.

As the sky darkened, I watched the changing panorama in the four corners of the heavens: purple streaks of rain falling to the south, towers of white clouds piling up in the east, ruby twilight in the west, a few early stars sparkling in the north.

The pony ambled along while I thought enviously of all the girls who were leaving Touchwood. One of my classmates had gone to New Brunswick to stay with her new husband until he was shipped out. Two others were in Vancouver working in factories, one welding some mysterious piece of equipment — I couldn’t remember what it was called, but it sounded impressive — and the other sewing uniforms.

The women at home were behaving differently, too. Now that they were filling the jobs left by men, I saw them downtown, shopping for new clothes, eating lunch in restaurants, chattering and laughing, flushed with newfound independence.

Even I had mustered up my courage to ask MacTavish for a raise. “I suppose you think you can take advantage of me now that all the men have left!” he shouted.

“I’m worth as much as Pete Anderson,” I retorted, having learned painfully over time that my boss enjoyed a good argument. “He didn’t even know how to spell accommodation!” MacTavish grudgingly raised my weekly salary to fifteen dollars.

“It’s amazing what the war has done for the women around here, even Freda Schultz,” June had remarked the day before. “They dragged her father off to prison camp because he painted a swastika on his barn door, and he was so worried about losing the farm that he transferred the title into Freda’s name before he left. She came into the post office and told me she and her mother are going to run the farm themselves.”

“Good for her!” I said. “Old man Schultz should have gone to jail for the way he treated them, not because he was a Nazi. Remember the time Freda came to school with a black eye? She said she ran into a branch, but nobody believed it.”

“Do you think they’ll make a go of it?”

“I don’t know why not. They’ve been doing all the work for years anyway, while the old man sat around drinking in the Queen’s Hotel.”

I certainly didn’t want to take over anyone’s farm. I didn’t want to be a man, or even to be treated like one — at least, not all the time. I tried to imagine holding my father’s rifle and pointing it at another person, pulling the trigger. I knew what the carcass of a gut-shot deer looked like. I shuddered as I turned the pony toward home.

But I did wish with all my heart that Canada would allow women to enlist and go overseas. I kept reading stories about the courage demonstrated by British girls, and it couldn’t all be propaganda, as MacTavish claimed. Every time I thought about it, my stomach was squeezed by a jealous fist.

I arrived at work the next morning in low spirits. The office seemed more dismal than ever. Dust motes floated in a shaft of weak sunlight that penetrated the grimy front window. I sat down heavily and began to slit open a stack of mail with my bone-handled letter opener.

Five minutes later I was racing down Main Street toward the post office as fast as I could run in my high heels and pencil skirt. “Guess what!” I practically shrieked when June’s golden head appeared behind the wicket. “You can get out your dancing shoes, Prune!”

“You don’t mean they picked Touchwood!” June staggered back, both hands clutched to her throat.

“Yes! We just got the press release in the mail!” I waved a sheet of paper over my head. On it were listed dozens of Canadian towns, most of them on the sky-and-dry prairies, chosen to train Commonwealth aircrews for the Royal Air Force.

“The men destined for Touchwood have already finished their first two phases of training,” I read aloud. “Only the pilots and ground crew will take the final six-month phase called Service Flight Training School. Those pilots with steady nerves will be streamed into bombers, the heavy aircraft that carry tons of bombs into enemy territory. Those with keen eyesight and lightning reflexes will learn to fly fighters, the smaller aircraft that shoot down the enemy in mid-air.” I lowered the paper. “It sounds pretty serious, doesn’t it?”

“Pilots!” June sighed rapturously. “I must be dreaming!”

I returned to the office and found my boss in high dudgeon, having discovered the front door standing open and the place deserted. “Read this, Mr. MacTavish,” I said, thrusting the paper under his nose.

He snatched it from my hand. Then he broke into a rare grin, revealing snuff-stained teeth. Without another word he went to his desk and wrote an editorial entitled “Let Them Come.”

“If there’s one thing Canada has in abundance, it’s blue skies and wide open spaces,” he wrote. “Now our great nation can honour its commitment to Britain without the shedding of Canadian blood!”

Within days, a contractor arrived from Ottawa to expand Touchwood’s airport. “What’s wrong with our local guys?” MacTavish fumed. “We have to pay through the nose so some crook from down east can suck the public tit!”

“Not to worry, Mr. MacTavish. He’s already signed up every working man in the area, and he’s paying top wages. I haven’t heard any complaints.”

“He’d better get the lead out, whoever he is. There’ll be a hard frost one of these days. By the time he gets the foundations poured, the Thousand Year Reich will be over!”

But even MacTavish couldn’t complain too loudly. Over the winter signs of a booming economy showed up in the newspaper: the “Help Wanted” ads tripled, and two new restaurants were already in the works.

With my camera slung around my neck, I clambered onto a stack of packing crates so I could have a better view of the biggest crowd I had ever seen. One of the most significant events in our history, and Mr. MacTavish had stayed back at the office. There was no limit to the man’s pig-headedness.

The rest of Touchwood had done itself proud. Six Royal Canadian Mounted Police officers stood at ease on the station platform, gold buttons glittering on their scarlet tunics. Chief Sam Whitefish, with his feathered headdress, was nothing short of regal, surrounded by his party of young braves in beaded buckskins. Ladies in their best hats wove through the crowd, handing out cups of coffee and homemade cookies. When the band played “Roll Out the Barrel,” several people linked arms and danced a lively polka.

I saw a hand fluttering from the upstairs window of the post office, kitty-corner from the railway station. Torn between seeing and being seen, June had decided to take up a vantage point where she wouldn’t miss anything. I waved back.

As the train pulled into the station, the crowd broke into a cheer. Every window was filled with a dozen blue-capped heads as the men strained to see their new surroundings.

The new air base commander came down the steps and posed in a frozen handshake with the mayor while I took their photograph. Chief Whitefish stepped forward and raised his right hand in greeting. “Crikey, a Red Indian,” I heard someone mutter from a window on the train.

The doors banged open and began to disgorge the airmen in a steady stream. Blue uniforms carrying kit bags overflowed the platform and swelled into the parking area, and still the doorways continued to empty and fill again.

The crowd of civilians, which had appeared so large a few minutes earlier, seemed to shrink before the flood. The townspeople were still smiling but they looked a little staggered. Touchwood’s population was only four thousand on a Saturday afternoon when the farmers were in town. Now twelve hundred strangers had swelled their ranks.

From my position on the packing crates, I surveyed the sea of blue caps, many of them bearing a strip of white fabric tucked into the brim that meant they were aircrew rather than ground crew. A few of the newcomers were eyeing my legs, while others stared down the main street with an expression of disbelief. But most of them were looking up, squinting into the sunshine. Surely they couldn’t ask for a better training field than this. Above their heads lay a blue dome so vast and empty that even the prairie dwindled in comparison.

But as I focused my camera on their faces, I couldn’t help feeling a little disconcerted. I had expected members of the Royal Air Force to look more like fighting men. These boys were pale and exhausted, their faces just as youthful and timid as all the others that had left from this very spot.

“Well, I hope you’re satisfied,” MacTavish shouted when I got back to the office. “Now we’ve got the cursed Brits in our own backyard!”

I was far from satisfied. Over the next few weeks I was gripped with feverish anxiety. The whole town went plane crazy. The skies were filled with the buzzing of bright yellow training airplanes and everyone for miles around knew the difference between a Harvard and an Oxford.

Much to MacTavish’s horror, the presence of the Royal Air Force caused local enlistment to skyrocket. “The air training plan, meant to substitute our land for our lifeblood, is nothing more than a thinly disguised recruiting scheme by the RAF!” he thundered in an editorial. “Canadians are outnumbering the British recruits two to one!”

I tried in vain to reason with him. “But Mr. MacTavish, everybody is on the same side at last. We haven’t heard a word about those idiot politicians or those arrogant Easterners lately. And our local boys want to do their part, too!”

“Bushwa! Nothing but a bunch of sheep following each other off a cliff!”

Sheep or not, I knew how they felt. I had hoped that the presence of the base would lessen my desire to go overseas, but the opposite was true. Boys hardly older than me were being trained under our very noses, then sent away to fight while I was forced to stand and wait. It was sheer torture.

The summer days lengthened. There was another flurry of excitement when Hitler declared war on Russia. Now Germany was facing a war on two fronts. Chortling, MacTavish sat down and banged out an editorial: “Hitler’s Ego Has Lost the War!”

Unfortunately Russia wasn’t making any progress. Instead, it was losing ground. However, the Russian people were fighting back furiously in what Stalin called his scorched earth policy, burning their own crops and villages rather than leaving them behind for the Germans.

“Even Russia allows women into the armed forces,” I told June one evening, returning to my favourite subject as I put the last knot in a pair of socks. “I saw a photograph today of a woman driving a tank.”

“You’re knitting beautifully now, Posy.”

“Well, you know what they say. You can take up either knitting or drinking, and so far I’ve stuck to knitting.”

I found the rhythmic clacking of the needles helped my jitters. Besides, I didn’t want to be the only woman in Canada who wasn’t knitting. Even female convicts and mental patients had learned to knit. Thousands of socks formed a blue mountain at the town’s collection depot. After June finished each pair, she tucked a good luck note into one toe. “Sort of like putting a message in a bottle,” she said.

The town launched a metals and rubber drive called Scrap Hitler with Scrap. I photographed a team of horses hauling away the souvenir cannon from the Great War Memorial. It would be melted down and used to fight the Germans again.

One morning Jack came downstairs with his beloved collection of lead soldiers and asked me to drop them at the depot. “Jack, surely not your soldiers,” Mother said sadly.

“I reckon I’m too big to be playing with toys now. I’d rather they were part of a tank than sitting in my bedroom.” After he left, Mother put the lead general in her apron pocket.

Touchwood

July 1, 1941

Dear Charlie,

I was thinking about you today and decided to drop you a line. Remember that Dominion Day when we lit the firecrackers and almost burned down Dad’s haystack? I hope you’re enjoying it, wherever you are.

Touchwood is the same — boring as ever. The last two boys in our class have joined up, all except for Jake Jacobs. I guess he has flat feet. Funny, isn’t it? He was always the big baseball star and now he has to stay home and milk the cows.

I was admiring your oat field yesterday on my way to work. It’s the best crop I’ve ever seen, about shoulder high, must be forty bushels to the acre. Your father says those two young cousins of yours are good workers, but of course they’re just itching to join up, too. Jack has a calendar in his bedroom and he’s crossing off the days with big red Xs until his eighteenth birthday. I think it’s giving Mother the heebie-jeebies!

I’m still working at the newspaper and saving up to go to university. My job is okay, but how I envy you! Are you doing any sightseeing? I would love to hear all about England.

Best of British luck, Charlie, and keep your head down.

As always, Rose