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.