Читать книгу Bird's Eye View - Elinor Florence - Страница 11

I sat at my dressing table, wishing I had something new to wear. The wartime motto was “Make it Do or Do Without,” but I was tired of doing both.

Oh well. At least my clothes were all new to the boys in blue. I stepped into the dark red taffeta circle skirt I had sewn myself and slipped a string of Mother’s garnet beads over my white rayon blouse. Pinning back the sides of my hair in a Victory Roll, I applied bright red lipstick, trying unsuccessfully to even out my crooked mouth.

When June and I arrived at the hangar an hour later, we could hear the beat of the music and the laughter streaming out across the dark tarmac, overhung with millions of bright stars. “Who’s playing?” asked June, snapping her fingers.

“It’s a group from the base called The Blue Aces.” I admired the way June’s new ankle-strap shoes set off her shapely calves. I wanted a pair, but Mother wouldn’t hear of it. She thought they looked cheap.

As soon as we set foot inside the door, we were nabbed for a tag dance. The cavernous hangar with its bare walls and concrete floor was crowded with hundreds of blue tunics, their brass buttons glittering in the light from the bare bulbs dangling overhead. The scent of men’s hair pomade, so popular among the British flyers, thickened the air. I changed partners nine times before the number was over.

Panting, June and I sank into two metal chairs at the end of a long table. A young man named Chopper who had attached himself to June went off to buy drinks. While he was gone the band struck up again, a fast number. Couples surged onto the floor. Six or seven airmen headed toward our table.

“Dance?” A smallish flyer reached me before the others. The top two buttons of his tunic were undone and he was flushed, unsteady on his feet. I guessed he had already been drinking. In my high-heeled pumps I was several inches taller, my shoulders just as broad.

The airman led me into the crowd. Grabbing me roughly, he swung me so hard that my skirt belled out and my feet left the floor. He pushed me away with one hand, then yanked me back again and twirled me around. He was surprisingly strong. My blouse began to work out of my waistband.

“Come on, put some life into it, girlie!” Placing his hands on my waist, he lifted me into the air with a visible effort and dropped me heavily. The sweat poured off his forehead and a few drops flicked me in the face. His feet kicked wildly out from side to side, and he wasn’t following the music at all.

Spinning me around backwards, he put his shoulder blades against mine and hooked his elbows through my bent arms. “Wait a minute!” I cried, but it was too late. He threw himself forward and lifted me into the air. I knew I was expected to roll upside-down over his back and land on my feet, but mid-point during the roll he hesitated.

I had a split second of excruciating embarrassment as I realized that my legs were pointed straight up into the air and my skirt was around my waist, exposing the tops of my stockings, my garters, my bare thighs, and even my white cotton underpants. Then I felt the airman buckle underneath me. He went down with a crash and I landed on his back. I heard him grunt as the air left his body.

Instantly I leaped to my feet, smoothing down my skirt. I bent over the airman. “Are you all right?” He shook his head and groaned. His friends gathered around and helped him limp off the dance floor. I stalked back to my chair, cheeks burning. As I passed the band, the saxophone player winked at me.

June and Chopper were seated at the table, convulsed with laughter. “I say, you’re supposed to entertain them, not render them unfit for service,” Chopper said. I took a sip of my drink and tried to look nonchalant. People were peering over at our table and snickering. The airman had disappeared.

When the band leader announced a break, the musicians set aside their instruments and headed for the bar. “That fellow wants his head punched for treating a girl like that.” I raised my eyes and saw the saxophone player. He was tall and thin, with a narrow face and a droll expression.

I smiled at him. “I hope I didn’t break his back.”

“He bloody well deserves it. Can I buy you a drink?”

“Thanks. A lemonade.”

When he came back with the drinks, June had gone outside to have a nip from Chopper’s hip flask and three airmen had already taken the chairs around me.

“Shoo, flies!” The sax player waved them off with long, elegant fingers and pulled an empty chair close to my side.

“You’re an Aussie,” I said, stating the obvious. He was wearing passionate purple — the dark blue uniform of the Royal Australian Air Force.

“Actually I’m a Tazzie, from Tasmania. That’s an island south of the Australian mainland, in case you didn’t know.”

“Yes, I did know.”

“You must be one of the few. I’ve had to explain hundreds of times.”

“I must confess I have no idea what it looks like, though.”

“It’s marvellous.” His comical face became animated. “Forests in the interior, with waterfalls and flowers as big as your head. Beaches along the coast, with white sand like powdered sugar.”

“You sound like a tourist guide.”

“That’s because I am one. I worked for the tourist board in Launceston, that’s the capital, before I joined up.”

“My name’s Rose Jolliffe.”

“Max Cassidy.” We shook hands. Max had a firm grip and he didn’t try to hold my hand too long as some of the others did.

“If it’s so beautiful there, you must miss it.”

“It’s not so bad for me. I’ve been away from home for six months now. But most of the Brylcreem boys, this is their first time out of merry old England.”

“And they have their families to worry about.”

“Too right. Some of the boys — when they see all the food in the mess, they just break down. People aren’t eating very well over there right now. There’s one bloke who cries himself to sleep every night in his bunk.”

“What do the others think of that?”

“Usually someone tells him to put a sock in it. We’d all end up blubbering if he went on!” Max laughed.

The band members began to resume their places on the stage. Max drained his beer. “Do you ever go into the canteen?”

“I’m there Tuesday and Thursday evenings. That’s when Mother and I do our shift.”

“I’ll see you there, then. Cheerio!”

I danced every dance. Whenever I caught Max’s eye, he was watching me. I noticed the airman who had dropped me jitterbugging wildly around the floor with a slip of a girl. He scowled at me as he bounded past.

The following Tuesday, Mother and I entered the former downtown furniture store that had been converted into a servicemen’s canteen. Every woman in town took her turn behind the small lunch counter, serving sandwiches and cake and providing a friendly shoulder for the homesick boys.

Someone was playing the piano expertly while several airmen and girls sang less expertly, but with great enthusiasm. The pianist performed a jazz version of “Don’t Sit Under the Apple Tree,” with plenty of rippling chords. He finished with a flourish and spun his stool around to face the room. It was Max.

Immediately he jumped up and came over to me with a big grin on his face. “Hello! I was hoping you’d turn up!”

“Mother, I’d like you to meet Max Cassidy.”

“How do you do, Max? Will you help us make coffee?”

“Sure thing, Mrs. Jolliffe.” He began to run water into the coffeepot. “It’s a right treat to have real coffee again. I used to drink gallons of the stuff back in Taz.”

Robbed of their accompanist, the singers drifted off to play ping-pong or darts. Someone had pinned a cartoon of Hitler’s face over the dartboard. Applause broke out whenever a dart pierced Hitler’s nose or eye.

“Do you live around here?” Max asked.

“No, we live four miles out of town. My father’s a farmer.”

“Funny, you don’t look like a farm girl.” He squinted his eyes as if examining a rare butterfly.

“How many have you known?”

“Come to think of it, none. You’ll set the standard.”

While the coffee was brewing we returned to the piano. I leaned over Max’s shoulder while we sang all of my favourites. He had a clear tenor voice.

“There must be a song about Rose,” he said at last, trailing his long fingers over the keyboard and smiling up into my face.

“My father named me after his favourite song, ‘Rose Marie.’”

“That’s a lovely song. It suits you.” Max played while we sang together: “Oh, Rose Marie, I love you, forever thinking of you.…” Mother’s soprano joined in from the kitchen.

I finally dragged myself away long enough to wash the dishes, but Max followed me into the kitchen and insisted on tying an apron over his uniform and drying them. When the last saucer was put away, it was time to go.

“See you on Thursday?” Max asked.

“I’ll be here.” I glanced over my shoulder as we left the canteen. He winked and waved.

Unlike June, who had already fallen in love half a dozen times, I tried to keep my distance from the airmen. I knew there was an uncertain future in store for these boys, not to mention anyone who cared about them. And I shrank from the way some girls openly pursued the pilots, bagging them like trophies. Their mothers weren’t much better. Mrs. Cooper, for instance, never invited anyone but officers to her house, practically shoving her unmarried daughters in their faces.

But I knew I was in trouble one sunny Saturday, when Max made the long walk out to our farm. While Mother baked cookies in the kitchen, Max and I fooled around on the piano. I could play, although not nearly as well as Max, and he was showing me a new duet. We had never been alone in the house. In fact, we were never alone at all unless we went out for a walk. Mother was quite firm about that.

“Are you going back to the tourist business when the war is over, Max?”

“I’m hoping to conduct.”

“Conduct?” I asked, thinking about trains.

“Righto, conduct an orchestra. I practise all the time.”

“How do you do that?”

“Give me a piece of paper and a pencil, and I’ll show you.” He took the paper, tore it into bits, and wrote on them.

“Now some pins, please.”

I fetched my mother’s sewing basket. Max pinned the pieces of paper in neat rows along the back of the blue mohair chesterfield.

“I need some music. I’ll take a gander at your records.” Max bent over the wind-up gramophone in the corner and searched the small record collection. “Hmm … Harry Lauder, John McCormack. Here’s a good one: Glenn Miller, ‘In the Mood.’”

He put the record on the turntable, wound up the machine, dropped the needle onto the edge of the record, tapped his pencil on the back of a chair, and stood poised in front of the chesterfield, arms raised to shoulder height. I came closer to see what he had written: First Strings. Second Strings. Clarinet. Saxophone. Drums. Then his paper orchestra began to play.

I stood beside him, entranced, as Max conducted the Glenn Miller Orchestra flawlessly. When it was time for the saxophone, he pointed his pencil at one piece of paper and the saxophone came in right on cue. When the music hushed and the piece seemed to be over, his pencil was still. Suddenly he raised his arms again and the instruments rushed back in a crescendo of sound for the grand finale.

He stepped back, turned to me and bowed from the waist. I clapped until my palms stung. “Max, that was terrific! How did you learn to do that?”

“Every night I put my bits of paper up on the wall and have a gay old time. The problem is that I don’t have any records so I go through the pieces I already know. Once in a while I even try a new arrangement.”

“Can you actually hear the music in your head?”

“If I’m not too fagged out from studying. Then all I can hear when I go to bed is the sound of the engines in my kite. We’re coming up for finals, you know.”

I knew Max would return to England and begin flying operations soon. “Do you think you’ll pass your exams?” Suddenly I wanted him to say no.

“I expect so. I’m doing quite well in most of my classes.”

I reached out my hand and drew him down beside me on the chesterfield. We sat silently for a few minutes, me thinking of the half-life that awaited Max in England, far from home and family, risking his life for freedom.

His arm slid around me, and we kissed. My cheeks flushed and the strength drained from my limbs. Even my fingers felt weak, the way they did sometimes when I woke up in the morning and couldn’t make a fist.

“I never wanted this to happen, you know.” My voice was trembling. “I didn’t want to … to … you know, get attached to somebody who was going away.”

“You’d better not, then.”

“I can’t help it.” We kissed again.

“When the war is over, I want to take you home to meet my mother and my sister, Kathleen, and show you all over Tasmania.”

“I’d like that, Max.”

Neither of us spoke for a moment. “I’m very lucky, you know,” he said suddenly. “I once won five pounds in the mess. I’ll probably live to be the most dreadful old man. You’ll have to throw me down the stairs to get rid of me.”

I awoke with a tremendous start, my eyes wide open and staring. I had dreamed that German Panzers were rolling across the farm, but the real nightmare was waking up and remembering that Max was nearly ready to leave for England.

I buried my face in the embroidered white pillowcase while my mind roved over some unlikely possibilities. Disguising myself as a man and enlisting. Smuggling myself aboard Max’s ship. Arranging an accident that would leave him unfit to fight. A wave of shame engulfed me and I groaned into my pillow. Millions of women all over the world were sharing this same dread. What gave me the right to be so selfish?

I jumped out of bed and began to dress. I was so restless that I couldn’t sit still. At the breakfast table my father asked me if I had St. Vitus’s Dance. At the office, I did my work in five-minute bursts, pacing between my desk and the front counter.

“You’re worse than a flea on a dog!” MacTavish said. “It serves you right for getting mixed up with one of those guys. He’ll be gone in a few weeks, and then you’ll be moping around here with a face like a wet dishrag.”

Every evening I went over to the airfield after work to watch the pilots practise. I asked Max so many questions about lift and drag and altitude that he finally told me to knock it off. “I’m a good pilot, Rose. If you don’t believe me, I’ll get my commanding officer to write you a letter,” he joked.

I was only partly reassured. I knew Max’s quiet confidence would make him a good bomber pilot. It was the rest of the air force I wasn’t so sure about.

At last a press release arrived that practically transported me out of my chair with joy. The Canadian government had caved in, but only after the British government requested permission to send members of its own women’s air force to work on our air training bases.

Embarrassed and beleaguered, Parliament finally voted to allow women into the Canadian armed forces.

I rushed out of the office and rode my bicycle out to the Fisher place, where I found Monica in the barn shovelling pig manure, an expression of rapture on her face. When she saw me, she dropped her pitchfork and gave me a hearty embrace that almost knocked me off my feet.

Her drilling and letter-writing had borne fruit. She had already received a telegram from Ottawa asking her to train as an officer in the newly formed women’s division of the Royal Canadian Air Force.

“Are you going to enlist, Rose?”

“I’m not old enough yet, but I’ll join up on my twenty-first birthday next May if I can go overseas!”

“I wouldn’t count on it. Every girl in the militia is hankering to get over there.”

“What are the chances, do you think?”

“Not so good. We know the government only wants us to scrub floors at air bases. It could be years before we convince them to let us out of the country.”

I pedalled back to the office, my face streaming with tears. When I came through the door, MacTavish asked me why the waterworks. “I figured you’d be happy!” he shouted. “If there are going to be females on stations, God forbid, they might as well be Canadian!”

His words were infuriating. “There’s no reason to assume women can’t do the job, Mr. MacTavish! Even the supreme British air commander supports women in uniform. Listen to this press release: ‘Members of the women’s air force have raised the standard of efficiency, discipline, and morale on air bases all over England!’”

“Well, the poor devils are in a different boat, aren’t they? They have to use every warm body, like it or not!”

Time was the enemy now. Each red dawn brought Max closer to the day he would leave for England. I felt frantic inside, the way I had when Buckshot ran away with me.

There was frost at the beginning of September. “I say, is it almost time for the snow to come?” Max asked. “I can’t wait to see that. It must be fantastic, everything covered with white. Kathleen made me promise to send her a snap of myself standing in a big pile of it.”

“I wish you’d been here last winter. It was so deep you could climb right onto the roofs of the granaries.”

“I wish I’d been here every winter.” He squeezed my hand.

“Where do you think you’ll be stationed?” Lately I was torn between never mentioning it and talking about it constantly.

“I hear they’re sending a lot of us wild Colonial boys out of England. The Brits want to be at home, defending their patch of God’s green earth, and I can’t blame them. I just want to be where I can do the most good, so we can get this thing over with.”

I was brushing under the wavy ends of my thick hair, getting ready to go to the picture show with Max, when the telephone rang. Captains of the Clouds was showing at the Empress Theatre, starring Jimmy Cagney as an RCAF pilot.

“Rose, it’s for you!” Jack called from the bottom of the stairs.

“Coming!” I tied the sash of my housecoat. I ran down the stairs two at a time and lifted the heavy earpiece off the wall.

“Hello?”

“Rose, it’s Jimbo.” His voice sounded faint and distant.

“Hi! How are you?” Jimbo was a friend of Max’s on the base, one of the boys who liked to pull practical jokes.

“Is your mother there?”

“Yes, do you want to talk to her?”

“No. I’m afraid I have some bad news.” He paused. “Max isn’t coming tonight.”

“Don’t tell me his leave has been cancelled again!”

“It’s not that. Rose, there’s been an accident.”

“Oh, sure.” I laughed. “Pull the other one, Jimbo.”

“Listen, I’m not joking.” Jimbo’s voice broke. “His Harvard went down this afternoon.”

I didn’t reply. If this was a joke, it wasn’t funny.

“It was the ruddy kite, Rose. He told me it was acting up, but the mechanics couldn’t find anything wrong. It pranged ten miles out of town.”

My legs felt weak and I sat down on the bottom stair. There was a draft coming under the door. I tucked the hem of my robe around my bare feet, which were suddenly cold.

“Is he hurt?”

“He bailed out, but not soon enough. His chute didn’t have time to open. A farmer saw the whole thing. He reached Max a few minutes later. But he said Max was … was … dead as soon as he hit the ground. I’m awfully sorry, Rose.”

For a moment I felt, heard, saw nothing. Then I gave a harsh, guttural cry. I didn’t even recognize my own voice. The kitchen door flew open and Mother came running into the hall. “Rose, what’s the matter?”

The receiver fell from my hand and banged against the wall. I flung myself into Mother’s arms, crying like a child with my mouth wide and square.

For a long time, I could not forget the image of Max falling through the sky, his soft body striking the hard ground. It was shocking how grief felt, how crushing and how relentless. “I’ll grind his bones to make my bread,” said the giant in the fairy tale, and I felt as if giant hands were grinding my bones.

“He never saw the snow,” I wept every night. Snow symbolized everything that Max and I had wanted to do together. He would never see the leaves fall on the Touchwood Hills, would never feel the touch of snowflakes on his warm skin.

It still hadn’t snowed when they buried Max in the stone cold ground. The young airmen stood at attention, pale and solemn in their dark blue greatcoats, as the twenty-one-gun salute rang out over the cemetery and echoed back from the hills across the river.

When the first snow fell, I stayed home from work and locked myself in my bedroom. In the long, silent hours, I wrote a letter to Max’s sister, whom I would never meet. I thought about the thousands of other women who would share this pain before the war ended. But mostly I thought about Max’s talent and courage and how they would never be used in the way he had hoped. The sense of waste was unbearable.

Three days later I came home and told my parents I had found a way to go overseas.