It wasn’t until the poplar leaves outside my bedroom window began to turn yellow that the Germans were either driven back by the RAF, according to the press releases, or decided to take a breather, according to MacTavish. Whatever the reason, the Luftwaffe went home at last, leaving twenty-three thousand British civilians dead.
I ran a front-page photograph of Winston Churchill, cigar clenched in his fat face, holding up two fingers in his famous “V-for-Victory” sign. “Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few,” was his tribute to the gallant air force.
“You’ll notice the Royal Canadian Air Force headquarters have been set up at Bournemouth,” was MacTavish’s reaction. “That’s just typical! The Limeys put our boys on the south coast, so they’ll be the first to get it when the Huns invade!”
Somewhere in England
October 1, 1940
Dear Rose,
I have a forty-eight and nowhere to go, so I’m lying on my bunk writing letters. I arrived two weeks ago at a new station. Sorry I can’t tell you where it is, or you’d probably get a letter with a nice square hole cut out of it by the censors.
It’s pretty comfy, as stations go that is, and the food isn’t bad. They make us eat carrots until we feel like bunnies. They’re supposed to be good for our eyes. Once every two weeks we even get a real egg.
Boy, does it ever rain over here. I’ve never seen so much water in my life. At least we don’t have to haul it from the well; all we have to do is stick a pail out the front door! We Canadians joke about the moss growing between our toes. Not very funny, but anything for a laugh.
My first crew has been assigned and they’re a swell bunch. Our second pilot is a Dane who escaped just before the Huns arrived. He’d be a pilot himself if it weren’t for his accent.
I’m flying a Vickers Wellington, we call it a Wimpy after the Popeye character. It’s a twin-engine bomber, a real workhorse. Since I’m the pilot, I got to name her. I picked Prairie Rose, hope you don’t mind. My crew thinks it isn’t ferocious enough, but I don’t care.
Jerry has been giving it to us hot and heavy ever since I got over here, but I’m happy to report we haven’t been lying down ourselves. Enough said.
We don’t have a lot of free time, but they bring in some good picture shows. Last weekend we saw His Girl Friday, with Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell. It’s a comedy about a newspaper, so it reminded me of you. Has it come to Touchwood?
Dad sends me the Times every week, but I’d sure like to hear from you. Mail call is a big occasion. If you can send me a spare picture of yourself, that would be grand. Then I can show the other fellows how pretty the girls are in my hometown.
As always, Charlie
5
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