Читать книгу Bird's Eye View - Elinor Florence - Страница 14

I sat on my cot in the drafty wooden barracks and pulled on a pair of woollen bloomers called passion killers that hung to my knees. A pale pink cotton brassiere followed, with wrinkled, oversized cups. Over that, a woollen undervest.

I pulled up the ugly grey lisle stockings one at a time, and fastened them to the garters dangling from my suspender belt. Then I buttoned my shirt and slipped the black necktie over my head, still knotted from yesterday because I hadn’t learned yet how to tie the knot.

Next I scrambled into the scratchy blue woollen skirt and battledress tunic, belted around the waist. The wool had the texture of an old horse blanket, but I was pleased that the air force allowed me to wear my Canada badge on each shoulder, thanks to Mackenzie King.

Tucking my thick shoulder-length hair into a roll, I secured it with bobby pins before putting on my peaked cap. Rather than cut off my wavy hair, which was maddeningly unmanageable, I had decided it would be simpler to keep it pinned out of the way. Finally, I tied up the laces on my thick black leather shoes.

“Where are you from?” asked an English girl, in the midst of the same procedure at the next bed.

“Touchwood,” I said, as I slipped a string around my neck bearing two metal identity discs. “That is, I mean Canada.”

“You have a boyfriend over here, I suppose.”

“No, I don’t know anyone in England, except my mother’s cousin in Cambridge.”

“I say, you are a plucky one. The Women’s Auxiliary Air Force has become very unwaffy since conscription came in — the last stragglers flocked to volunteer so they wouldn’t be sent to work at a factory or a farm. This scruffy lot would rather be in the pub, most likely.”

She gestured to the photograph one girl had hung above her bunk: wearing brief shorts and a midriff-baring sweater, she was making the V-for-Victory sign by lying on her back with her legs spread-eagled in the air. “I mean, really. So common.”

I secretly agreed. Nothing had prepared me for the vulgarity in the barracks. I had never rubbed shoulders with the English working class, whose manners were quite different, to say the least, from those of my mother.

I literally gasped when I first heard several girls singing, to the tune of the “Colonel Bogey March”: “Hitler has only got one ball; Goering has two, but very small; Himmler has something similar, but poor old Goebbels has no balls at all!”

Even that paled compared to the song I heard the following week, a parody of the popular “Bless Them All,” in which the word “Bless” was replaced with a word starting with F that I had seen only once before, after Ernie Snyder carved it on the barn door and was soundly strapped by our teacher.

“What about you?” I asked the friendly girl.

“I’ve wanted to volunteer ever since the war started, but I had to take care of my mother. She’s gone to live with relatives in Ireland now, so I took my chance. No matter how bad it gets in the service, it can’t be any worse than home life.”

I thought sadly of my own happy home. Having never spoken to a woman in the armed forces before, I had no idea of the humiliations that were in store. The first was a medical inspection, stark naked, for “scabies, babies, and rabies.” And my life was now controlled by a bell or a bugle or a shout. Going to lecture, going to grub, going to briefings, going on parade; it was like being a trained poodle in a circus.

And that first awful night, the sound of muffled sobs all over the room after lights out. Homesick is a good word, I thought as I wept into my pillow, because I’ve never felt so sick in my life, not even the time I had blood poisoning from stepping on a rusty nail.

I remembered that dreadful two weeks each spring when Dad weaned the calves by penning them into the barnyard. The cows lined up along the fence, groaning in pain and frustration, while the poor calves gathered on the other side and cried: “Maa, maa, maa!” The din lasted for several days and nights while we covered our ears and suffered along.

In fact, I heard someone sobbing “Mama, mama,” in the bunk below me. It was Daphne, the frightened child I had met on my first day. She doesn’t look a day over fourteen, I thought, feeling almost matronly now that I had left my teens behind.

Poor little Daphne had made herself into a laughingstock by entering the showers in her bathing suit. I didn’t blame her. I showered quickly in a room full of naked girls, my eyes averted. Even worse, the toilets had no doors. The ablutions, as they were called, faced the entrance so that anyone could see you sitting on the toilet. I was deeply offended. I may have grown up using a biffy, but at least it had a door.

After breakfast we lined up in crooked rows on the parade ground for our first marching exercise. The burly, red-faced RAF drill sergeant looked as if he enjoyed his job even less than we did. Maybe he was being punished for something.

“Swing them bleeding arms — they won’t drop off!” he yelled at Daphne, who was mincing along self-consciously as if she were strolling through the park. She stopped dead and burst into sobs, which made the ready tears spring into my own eyes.

“Jesus bloody Christ!” he yelled. “What do we have here, a bunch of crybabies or members of the King’s Own? Get back in line or I’ll put you on notice!”

Don’t cry, don’t cry, don’t cry, I told myself fiercely. I stared straight ahead, trying to harden my face into a mask of stone. Fortunately, thanks to Mr. MacTavish, I was accustomed to being yelled at. Unfortunately, thinking of him made me want to cry again.

The next six weeks were the worst I had ever known. Time after time I asked myself whether I was crazy. Most of the other girls thought so. “You want your head examined,” said a coarse-looking girl, when she found I had come from Canada to enlist. “I plan to fall pregnant on my next leave. That’s the only way out of this hell hole.”

I suffered from fatigue, sore muscles, blisters on my feet, and a gnawing homesickness that was worse than physical pain. I woke each morning with my eyelids swollen from weeping. After five weeks, I checked the calendar and discovered that I had skipped my period. Off I went to the medical officer.

“No chance that you’re expecting, I suppose?” he asked.

“None, sir!”

“You do know where babies come from?”

“I have a pretty good idea, sir,” I replied stiffly. “I grew up on a farm.”

“Well, I have to ask. It’s surprising how many girls don’t have a notion. Anyway, it’s nothing to worry about. The combination of hard work and emotional stress causes many girls to stop menstruating. Carry on.”

I was surprised he didn’t mention the food. It’s enough to throw anyone off.

Somewhere in England

December 15, 1941

Dear Mother and Dad and Jack,

The meals here are disgusting. You hold out your tin plate, and slap goes a piece of liver with a greenish tinge. Then a ladle full of Brussels sprouts is piled on that, then a helping of stewed prunes, and finally runny custard poured over the whole thing. Breakfast today was pancakes with one lonely sardine on top!

In spite of the horrible food, I scrape my plate clean. After marching ten miles I’ll eat anything. Our parade drills are quite professional now. I’ll bet I could take a step exactly twenty-seven inches long if I were walking in my sleep! I can also snap out quite a smart salute. I’m not sure who deserves one, so I salute everyone in uniform just to be on the safe side.

You should see the shocking way some girls behave. They “go out saluting” for the fun of it — marching up and down the street, giving the officers the old one-two, because it forces the officers to salute back! They swagger around with the top two buttons on their tunics undone, copying the pilots. And they hate our regulation hats, so they wear their tin helmets instead whenever they can get away with it. It looks like a shiny halo, a lot more flattering than the standard pie crust. Most of them don’t even want to be in the service, but of course we aren’t allowed to quit now. I can’t wait to finish my training and get out of here. I’m praying for an operational station.

Did Mr. MacTavish put a banner headline on the front page after Pearl Harbor? He’d better have, or I’ll write him a stern letter. Everyone here is just giddy with delight. I think some of the Brits would like to send thank you letters to Hirohito for forcing the Yanks into it at last! Everyone is saying how Uncle Sam will show the Krauts a thing or two.

I’ll spend Christmas Day here in the barracks. Those of us who can’t go home will have a special dinner and show provided by a London troupe, but I’ll be thinking of you every minute.

All my love, Rose

I tried to make my letters cheerful. Terrified that I would humiliate myself by crying, I found a trick that helped: I placed my hand to my throat, fingers spread, and bore down with my thumb and index finger just below my collarbone, pressing hard enough to cause pain. The tears still came into my eyes, but they didn’t overflow. After a few seconds, the impulse to cry went back to its hiding place.

Touchwood

December 28, 1941

Dear Rose,

I hope you had a happy Christmas, my darling daughter. Did you receive my parcel in time? It was the one with soap and stockings and fruitcake. I’ll mail one parcel each month and number them, so you can count that as number three.

We did our best to make merry, but it wasn’t the same without you. On Christmas Day we listened to the King’s message and felt pretty gloomy when he said the war might go on for several years. George Stewart came over for turkey dinner and I sent him home with a big box of leftovers. He’s very lonely. Charlie was invited up to Edinburgh to spend Christmas with his navigator’s family, so that’s a relief as I hate to think of you young people so far from home at this time of year. His father is very proud of the boy, as we all are.

On Boxing Day we heard about the fall of Hong Kong. Bill Allen is over there. I saw him at home on leave before he sailed. The Allens are in a bad way but they are hoping that if Bill is alive, he will be treated well by the Japs. Sixteen hundred Canadians were taken, poor boys.

Last week the Touchwood girls decided to challenge the Australian airmen to a hockey game. Of course they could skate circles around the boys — most of the Aussies couldn’t even stand up on skates. Finally they just gave up and scooted around the ice on their behinds. We almost died laughing.

Mr. MacTavish has hired a lady named Ida Flint. She’s a widow, with one son in the navy. I met her when I dropped into the office last week to give Mr. MacTavish his fruitcake. She’s a stout lady, quite red in the face, but pleasant enough. She said she’ll type, answer the phone, and make coffee for “the old man,” as she called him, although I doubt if he’s older than she is.

We read in the Times that Anthony Davis was awarded his stripes, a nice Christmas present for his parents. But when I congratulated his mother at Red Cross yesterday, she said her husband — who was a conscientious objector in the last war — is ready to disown Anthony. “Nothing will convince him that Tony isn’t a coward, running off to join the air force like the other lemmings,” she said. It takes all kinds, I guess.

It’s minus thirty but I see that your father finally got the truck started so we can drive into town to pick up the mail. It really brightens our day when June hands over a letter from you. We think of you so often, Rosie, and miss you so very much.

All our love, Mother XXOO

From the very first, I loved to march. It was like dancing, planting my feet in measured lengths, swinging my hips a few inches to make my skirt sway back and forth, lifting my arms to shoulder height. When I caught a glimpse of the other girls, wheeling and turning together like a ribbon tied to a stick, I saw their shining eyes and rapt expressions.

On this frigid January day, we drew up before the examining stand in perfect formation. My eyes were full of tears but my head was high, my jaw clenched and my arms ramrod straight by my sides. When the last pin was presented, I whooped and tossed my hat into the air along with the others.

“Oh, Rose, you’ve been a brick.” Shy little Daphne hugged me. “I wish we had gotten the same posting.” Daphne had been assigned to work as a laundress, but she was ecstatic because her new station was only three miles away from her home.

“Don’t remind me, Daffy.”

Yesterday the other girls had ripped open their envelopes with feverish haste. I heard cries of glee and dismay around me as I fumbled with the flap. My heart sank as I read the terse message: I was ordered to take another three months of training.

“But nobody else in the class has their props already,” said Daphne, referring to the tiny set of propellers, which as Leading Aircraftwoman, I was now entitled to sew on my shoulders. “You skipped a whole rank! And nobody else had 98 percent in the technical exam! Lots of other girls wanted to train in photography.”

“I guess so,” I said doubtfully. “As soon as they found out I could use a camera and develop my own film, I was sunk.”

This is only a temporary setback, I told myself. The men posted to air bases had to train for months. And there was certainly a lot to learn, just to become a lowly darkroom technician.

We began with instruction in the assembly of a camera, characteristics of film, types of paper, and properties of light. Then we went to work in the laboratory, illuminated with a dim red light, called the “screaming room” because of the women’s reaction when their film didn’t turn out. I remembered how I had cried when MacTavish once fired me for spoiling a roll of film. I could laugh about it now, just barely.

My newspaper experience was helpful, because I already knew how to remove the film from the camera in total darkness and develop it in a tank of chemicals, rotating the tank by hand with a crank. I knew how to print photographs, too, placing the negative in the enlarger, exposing the paper to light and bathing it in hydrochloric acid before rinsing it with water. Here I didn’t hang the wet prints to dry, but fished them out of the tank with rubber tongs and flattened them against a huge revolving heated drum.

The new skill for me, and one that I enjoyed the most, was piecing together aerial maps. All the photographs were printed four inches square, and overlapped in a diagonal pattern to form an aerial view of the landscape below, as if a deck of cards had fallen over sideways. The edges were almost invisible, and the scale so accurate that the entire thing could be superimposed over a map with all the roads and railways matching.

I was so absorbed during the day that I didn’t think about anything but my work. At night, I was tired enough to fall asleep before the homesickness really sunk its teeth into me.