by Wendy Orr
The Australian government, however, was not interested in Jane and Ian deciding that they could live quite happily with Ruth in a granny flat off the house, not interested in hearing that Ruth could support herself without burdening social services. And though Jane had tried to describe the impossibility of her mother moving to the Arctic where Mike charted potential-rich maps of underground oil, or to Rick’s one-bedroom city apartment, the numbers were what counted, and the numbers said that Ruth, with twice as many offspring in Canada as Australia, had no need to come.
One of the more pointless things she’d thought about as she’d waited online for Qantas to arrange this present, complicated route with the further complications of proof-of-death faxes for a bereaved fare, and again as she’d tried unsuccessfully to call Mary back to confirm the arrival time. Ruth would have died, she reminds herself now, wherever she’d lived. But immigration officers are easier to hate than a long-neglected God, or death.
She doesn’t even know how her mother died—in her sleep, Mary said. But even at eighty, even in their sleep, people die of something. Jane knows the terms, we all do, in these days of statistics in newspapers, telephone appeals and ‘ER’—cardiovascular accident, cardiac arrest, cerebral thrombosis—but she thinks, heart or head? and hopes it was the former. Ruth wouldn’t have liked not being able to think, especially during something as dramatic as death.
By mid 1942, despite the loss of Amy Johnson into the cold grey waters of the Thames estuary, the ATA has seventy women pilots—and Ruth, at last, is one of them. She has passed her medical, signed the secrecy statement, studied map reading, meteorology, the technical detail of aircraft engines and the position of barrage balloons protecting towns or factories from enemy pilots but equally lethal to friendly. She has a navy blue uniform of tunic and slacks—the latter with strict and often ignored instructions to be worn on duty only—as well as skirt with black silk stockings, and a warm flying suit with boots for cold altitudes.
She tells herself that she’s no longer the dreamy girl who could find ecstasy in the smell of a leather flying helmet, secretly sniffing before pulling it on and admiring the goggled looking-glass pilot, but the day she gains her wings that dreamer finds fulfilment.
After her initial training and observation, she’s posted to a small all-female base near Southampton, where she fits in easily though never makes close friends. She takes a room at the local yacht club, which seems less confining than digs with a family and less irksome than learning to cook and housekeep with one of her fellow pilots. She has never been so happy. Between the base and the various servicemen at the yacht club, there is plenty of companionship, and the flying is all she could ask. Although most flights are short local deliveries, no more than half an hour in the air, over the next three years she will deliver up to five aircraft a day, flying thirteen days out of fifteen, fifty weeks a year, whenever the weather permits and often when it’s doubtful.
Starting on the simplest single-engined craft, she works her way through the trickier or heavier ones, eventually flying over sixty different types of planes, some of them, to the astonishment of watching RAF pilots, with no more introduction than the instruction book taped to her knee. Her favourite, however, will always be the Spitfire. Snug in the cockpit with the Merlin’s power at her fingertips and the hum of it in her ears, a rudder so sensitive that the plane seems to sense her commands as it lifts and soars through the skies, she can hardly believe that she should have so much fun and get paid for doing so.
By the time the war ends she will be qualified to fly everything except the big four-engined bombers (her shameful secret regret, matching her secret exhilaration at the beginning, is that she will never join this select band of women). Female pilots, although still too hysterical for combat duty, have by now become stable enough to ferry all types of aircraft from base to base. Only the huge flying boats of Coastal Command are exempt, in case honour is compromised by overnight stops amongst mixed crews—ironic, Ruth thinks later, as if fate had determined not to let her meet Bill until the time was right. But since everything is so exactly right when that time comes, she has no real complaints.
Bill is twenty-one when the war starts. His younger brother Albert joins the merchant marine; he’s always leaned more towards the sea than the farm, going out with his fishing uncles, the ruddy-faced, white-haired MacTavishes, from the time he could stand up straight in an oilskin.
Bill has never had Bert’s feel for cold water, and his father’s stories of the trenches of Givenchy—a battle entwined with their family history; a tragedy without which, ironically, he might never have been born—have left him determined to keep whatever space he can between himself and mud. He decides on the air force.
He has few illusions about life in the services, but flying, he imagines, would be the closest a man could ever come to freedom. About whether or not he should go at all there is no real decision; he knows little of the background politics but recognises evil when he sees it. Canada seems a long way from the newsreels of devastated Poland, but she is nonetheless at war and duty, or fear of not being seen to adhere to it, is a powerful motivator. Barely admitted is the desire to test himself in this ultimate challenge of self-identity: the gruesome question of whether he will be capable of either heroism or self-preservation. Although he suspects that in the end one or the other of those qualities will bring him to it, he has no desire to face killing another human being—even at school he was never much of a fighter—which is another factor in the air force’s favour.
Is it in protest at losing two sons to Europe that George Dubois falls off a haystack one bright October day and, fracturing a thigh, keeps the oldest at home for another seven months? If so, it’s more effective than he could have planned: by May, when he’s fit again and Belgium, Luxembourg, the Netherlands and France have all fallen to the Nazis, the Canadian air force’s new training program is badly overcrowded. At the Applevale recruiting station, after enlistment, medical and interview, Bill’s name is simply placed on a waiting list. ‘A month or two,’ they tell him but in the end it’s four and he’s begun to wonder whether the war will pass him by completely when September rolls around again. His call-up finally comes on the day that Ruth’s Nanny dies, although of course Bill is aware only of the ending of this part of his own life. Like most young men, he has no conception that the ending could be final.
The Annapolis Valley in the fall is serene and beautiful; in the small community of Evelyn’s Pond the whitewashed houses, grey through winter and spring, stand bright and clean against leaves of scarlet and gold. It is difficult enough to believe that the rest of the world exists, impossible to understand that it’s being torn apart. Bill has worked quietly and efficiently through the seasons; has spread the manure from last winter’s dung heap and cleaned the barn out fresh for the next; cut, raked and carted hay, oiled harnesses, sharpened ploughs, nailed down stray shingles on roofs of house and barn, and chopped cords of wood for the furnace. Now he sends the last of the apple harvest off for cider and knows that the farm is as ready as it can be for his father to manage on his own.
He takes the train from Halifax in a grey November rain, arriving in Toronto on Remembrance Day. He is overwhelmed by the size and vibrancy of the city. The stench of his barracks, however, is familiar:
Air Craftsman 2nd Class W Dubois
RCAF Manning Pool, No 1
Toronto
Ontario
18 November 1940
Dear Mother, Dad, Grandpère and Louise
This is a pretty fancy address but if you’re picturing me in a fancy place to match you’d be wrong. Would you believe it’s really the exhibition grounds—and my bedroom is in the bullpen! If you write to Bert before I do, tell him that after sleeping with five hundred other fellows and the smell of about the same number of bulls, I’ll never complain about sharing a room with him again. At least I’ve got a top bunk—the guy below me asked yesterday how much I weighed. I think he’s worri
ed that I’ll crash right through one night and crush him! Anyway, I can tell you now exactly what I do weigh: one hundred and sixty-nine pounds. The medical officer found out a lot more than that but it would make everyone blush if I told you the rest of it. We also got some shots that might have been left over from when the bulls were in here; I didn’t get sick from them but a couple of guys passed out cold.
I had the idea we were going to learn to fly, but instead they keep us busy with marching, standing at attention, saluting the flag, saluting anyone who looks like an officer, more marching, lots of PT, polishing buttons and boots, making our bunks, and then in case we’ve forgotten since the last time, a bit more marching. It doesn’t look as if we’ll see an aeroplane till we get to the Initial Training School in a few weeks time, and that’s when they’ll decide which of us can try to be pilots, or navigators or air gunners or whatever, or if they think you’re not fit to go into the air at all and get stuck in ground crew.
The streetcars come right into the exhibition ground, so I went into town with some of the other guys on Saturday. You can use the one ticket all day and I felt quite the city fellow by the end of it. You wouldn’t believe the city at night! Yonge Street is just full of lights and noise; even the fellows from Halifax thought it was something.
I trust that you are all managing fine without me. I miss you all but so far I am having a very pleasant time.
In fact he’s having the time of his life. Despite the regulations, the marching, the enforced communal life, Bill is a young man away from home for the first time. Away from the farm that has been not only his past but the whole of his future, he is overwhelmed by an extraordinary sense of freedom. He’s never before realised the weight of the land he loves, the burden of knowing that his father, a townsman at heart, has always felt himself to be husbanding it only until his son is ready take over. Now, as Bill moves on from the Manning Pool to initial training, pitting himself against the ignominy of airsickness or the treachery of the Link flight simulator—a terrifying bubble designed to destroy the aspirations of pilot hopefuls—there is no one depending on him but himself. Perhaps that’s why he performs so well. ‘You’ll be doing pilot training, for sure!’ his friend Bob insists, desperately practising standing on one foot with his eyes closed for next day’s medical.
However, the powers that be decree that Bill, who has joined the air force to be a fighter pilot—a dashing and daring flying machine—will become a navigator, destined to fly heavy bombers. It’s still aircrew; he’s too relieved to be disappointed. Anything is better than joining the small band of white-faced young men blinking back tears as they are posted back for ground-crew training.
‘You should have flubbed the math like I told you!’ says Bob, who will die soon after on his first solo flight. ‘You know the real math brains always end up navigators.’
Bill doesn’t believe this, but it wouldn’t have made any difference if he had. He can never quite comprehend that the men studying in the bathrooms long after lights out, coming to him desperate for explanation of a complicated calculation, truly don’t understand what seems simple and logical to him. Quite a few of them have been to university. They’re smarter than me, he thinks, just not looking at these problems the right way. They’ll do fine when it comes to exams. And he continues to tutor without any real awareness of his own ability. He’s not too honest to make a deliberate mistake, simply too modest.
His navigators’ training is in Manitoba; he writes home of the immensity of the treeless prairies, still deep in snow in March and frostbite cold for students taking astro shots through the open hatch of an unheated Anson. It is more difficult to describe his fascination with the craft itself, not simply the study of winds and weather or the identification of the stars in their constellations, understandable extensions of his inherent farmer’s lore, but the intense satisfaction of successfully locating an exact ground position from the intricate calculations of sextant and astrotables. He does not even attempt to share the despair of the early flight when he confused port and starboard and would have never found his way home if the long-suffering staff pilot, conveyor of novice navigators, hadn’t skimmed low past a grain elevator with the town’s name clear and large on the side. But by August, when the rest of his class are being packed into convoys of converted liners and on their way across the Atlantic, Bill is back in Nova Scotia on further special navigational training. He is also, to his own astonishment and his family’s pride, Pilot Officer Dubois. An officer.
It’s a convenient time to be posted near home; the hay’s been stooked but he helps get the last of it into the loft; brings in bushels of apples, butchers two pigs, is feted by aunts and uncles, fed by his mother and teaches Louise to smoke. But the base at Debert is also too close to gloss over the risks and casualties of flight training; when three crashes kill eleven aircrew in two days, the party line network has Bill dead before he has time to phone home.
Those crashes are the one blight on this period. For the rest of his life Bill will be able to picture his native province from the air; the topography of the North and South Mountains bounding the Valley; the darkness of spruce forests and the lakes of Cape Breton. Cruising too high to make out the wartime bustle of Halifax itself, they watch the convoys build up in Bedford Basin: troopships, merchant marine, destroyers and aircraft carriers; so many that it takes another hour’s flying out over the ocean to understand the loneliness of those ships once they leave the harbour.
Finally, on Christmas Eve, they become another crew of ‘kids flying the Atlantic’, as the head of Ferry Command terms them: young men whose first operational duty is to deliver a heavy aeroplane from the Canadian factory to the British Royal Air Force, which is using them up at a prodigious rate. Aircraft have improved since Lindbergh’s acclaimed flight, but the North Atlantic is no less unsafe. It is still twenty-five years and another era from the day when Bill’s daughter will board a routine flight from Halifax to London, with no thoughts of icing windshields, oxygen masks or the dark water below.
They pick up their brand-new Hudson from the factory in Montreal, so virginally untouched that the navigator’s table is still covered with a protective paper which Bill folds carefully, wondering whether he ought to replace it at the other end. It’s late afternoon when they land in Newfoundland.
‘We’re finally out of Canada, boys,’ says Hank McBain, wireless operator and crew comedian, ‘but it don’t look much different so far.’
Next evening, under an icy, low-lying cloud, they load a few cartons of cigarettes ‘to trade with the natives,’ quips Hank, fill thermoses and collect sandwiches from the mess. Bill’s stomach knots as he sets up his table, checks his sextant and charts. After thirteen months of training, he is finally about to go to work.
The pilot’s feeling the same way; Bill notices that his voice is a tone higher than usual. ‘We’ve flown distance before,’ he tells them. ‘We’ll just do our jobs and there’s not much that can go wrong.’
It’s the oxygen that does. Leaving the cold loneliness of Newfoundland, they climb high over the cloud to head out across the lonelier, colder wastes of the North Atlantic. High enough that they are already feeling dreamy when they put on their oxygen masks. The masks, with a valve to regulate the flow, are fed by a long tube from the mother supply controlled by the pilot. He doesn’t mention that he’s set the supply at minimum and Bill, who’s switched his valve to the same setting, doesn’t realise that he’s receiving virtually no oxygen at all.
In the windowless nose he feels very alone. Alone and sleepy. There is no sense of time; time stretches infinitely; he has been here in this enclosed fug of fuel and fumes forever and can’t imagine that the journey will end: he’ll be here till the end of his life, till the end of the universe, frozen in this throbbing shell of noise and steel. The times he must calculate—the ETA over ten hours from take-off, the adjustments as winds shift, as the course changes—are abstract figures with as little relationship to reality
as meridians have to the earth’s surface. He pours a cup of coffee from his thermos, struggling now to remember exactly what the calculations are. The phrase ‘triangle of velocities’ appears and he repeats it several times, which gives it a pleasing authority though no further clues as to relevance or procedure. Eventually he decides it must be time for a star shot. Staggering down the length of the aircraft, his umbilical oxygen hose trailing, nothing is right: further than he thought and harder to walk, the hatch stiff to remove, the stars won’t stay still and worst of all, the sextant doesn’t work—the glass is opaque and quite unreadable. He stops himself just short of throwing it through the open hatch in disgust.
‘Can you give me the point of no return, Bill?’ Ray calls as he stumbles back to his desk.
‘Point of no return,’ Bill repeats, adding, ‘I feel woozy. Woozier and woozier.’ He staggers again, which Hank finds amusing; but Ray, who is not suffering from oxygen deprivation, adjusts the main valve until the oxygen starts to flow through their masks and on to their brains.
Bill still feels alone. His world is the table in front of him—charts, graphs, circular slide rule—and sextant, not faulty at all, just frosted over from his own breath. He cleans its glass gently as his headache clears, supremely grateful that he didn’t jettison it, and makes his way back to the hatch to take his star shots. The stars, as always, reassure him—they are constant and known—but it is not until he begins the complex series of calculations that will fulfil the pilot’s request that he truly understands what it means to be a navigator. The point of no return, worked out on a hot July afternoon in a stuffy classroom, had seemed an abstract equation, its object simply to take him one step further to passing the course. Now the finality of the words and the responsibility of their meaning settle heavily on his shoulders.