Till We Meet Again (55 page)

She gave Swede a big mug of the coffee she made constantly, so that there was always a full pot ready. Students asked for it shakily before they went up and as soon as they landed, always euphoric after an hour of the learning process. Among the students, the instructors and Gavin, Freddy estimated that she gave away more coffee than she’d sold pastries at Van de Kamp. She should charge for it. That might make the school a profitable paying proposition instead of a borderline operation.

Freddy settled in another of the inexpensive but comfortable armchairs she had bought to make the office more welcoming, and looked fondly at the unusually silent man who sat busily sipping her fragrant brew. He worked steadily at the mug until it was empty, and then put it on her desk with as much delicate care as if it were fine porcelain.

“Listen, Freddy, there’s something I have to talk to you
about.” He took out a handkerchief and mopped his forehead with an unconscious sigh. “It’s about Mac.”

“Can’t it keep, Swede?” Freddy said coaxingly, trying to hide her feeling of impatience. She wasn’t in the mood to concoct another installment of Mac’s devoted filial life in Maine.

Swede Castelli seemed not to have heard Freddy’s question. “It’s about Mac,” he repeated heavily. “I’ve been … in touch with him, Freddy.”

“You couldn’t have!”
Her words leaped out of her mouth without an instant of thought.

“Mac’s telephoned me at home every week … since he took off. He … he had to find out how you were … had to make sure that you were making out O.K.”

“You knew all along and you didn’t tell me!”
She jumped up and stood before him, accusation and betrayal glaring from her eyes.

“Mac made me promise not to say anything. I swore I wouldn’t. I couldn’t let him down, Freddy. We’re old buddies—you understand what that means. He depended on me to keep my promise and I did, Freddy. Don’t think it’s been easy. I hated pretending I didn’t know the truth—Jesus, Freddy, I felt so bad for you having to make up all those stories, but I had to keep coming over. When Mac called me, he would have been frantic if I hadn’t been able to tell him that you were all right. Oh, Freddy …”

“What’s wrong?”
Freddy demanded, in alarm, without knowing why she used those words. She stood over Swede threateningly.

“Wait a minute, Freddy, let me tell you in my own way.… Mac … Freddy, Mac’s … in Canada.”

“WHERE IN CANADA?” she shouted. She’d go to him. She could be with him tomorrow. If she left right away and pushed the Rider, she could be with him in hours.

“Near Ottawa, at a Canadian Air Force training base,” Swede answered. Freddy whirled and started for the door. Swede got up and put a restraining arm around her. “No, Freddy, no, listen to me. There’s more.”

“More?” she repeated, panic shooting through her at a new, fearful note in his voice.

“Mac’s dead, Freddy,” Swede said painfully, tears springing into his eyes. “There was a crash … he spun in, Freddy … it was over in seconds, I got a letter from his commanding
officer this morning. Mac didn’t have any next of kin so he’d given them my name, just in case. The letter said that it happened while he was instructing a kid who froze at the controls. At least it’s what they think caused it. That, or something went wrong with the plane. They still don’t know for sure. The general said they may never know. The … funeral … was yesterday. A military funeral … both … both of them.”

“Funeral,” Freddy repeated. “Funeral? Mac!
Mac?
My Mac? You’re lying to me, aren’t you, aren’t you? Please say you’re lying to me, Swede. Please, please say it.” Her pleading voice broke as her shock turned into comprehension. Swede Castelli clumsily put both his arms around her, as if he could protect her from his words.

“Christ, I wish I was, Freddy,” she heard him say. “The guy was the only brother I ever had.”

“Oh, Swede,” she cried out, almost inaudible through her savage sobs, “how can I live if Mac is dead? How, Swede, how? Why would I want to?”

“Oh, Freddy, I’m so sorry. It was … beautiful to see the two of you together.”

“You didn’t have to leave me, Mac, you didn’t have to go.”

“He was certain he did, Freddy. He always told me that he knew he’d done the only right thing,” Castelli said. “He loved you so damn much, it tore him apart.”

Both of them looked up as they heard the voice of one of Freddy’s instructors outside the office, his question answered by a student. A plane must have landed while they were talking. Hastily, Freddy locked the door of her office.

“Shouldn’t you maybe go back to be with your family, Freddy?” Swede said anxiously, as her weeping grew more severe. “Remember I met your mother? It’d be good for you to be with her.”

“Swede … how could I leave our house?” Through her primitive, annihilating heartbreak Freddy tried her best to respond to his efforts to comfort her. “Don’t you know about our house … such a sweet little house … how could I leave it? It’s all I have left of him.”

“I understand,” he said. “But when you’re ready … promise you’ll think about it?”

“When I’m ready? I’ll never be ready, Swede, never, never for the rest of my life,”

“Please, Freddy, you’ve got to let me do something to help you.”

“Would you … come to the house tomorrow night and tell me everything Mac said to you? Everything that happened to him in Canada? Will you come and tell me again … how much he loved me?”

That night, after it was dark, Freddy returned to the hangar where the great old airplanes were kept. One by one she rolled the fragile, magnificent, beloved ships outside onto an open, grassy space on the other side of the runway. Each one of them could still be flown, each one could carry a man—or a woman—far, far into the blue horizon.

When they were all grouped closely together, she half-pushed, half-piled the lightest of them onto the heavier ones. Then Freddy brought out a can of gasoline and poured it carefully over and around the ships. She circled the planes slowly, caressing their wings and their struts and their fuselages for the last time, giving each propeller a final spin, saying their legendary names out loud, names Mac had loved to speak. There was not a ship over which he had not spent hundreds of hours of labor to bring back its original glory.

At last, reluctantly but resolutely, she lit a match and touched it to the edge of the nearest plane. When the blaze was at its height, when the noble ghost squadron had almost taken off to join him, she said only three words before she turned away.

“Good flyin’, Mac.”

16

“D
O you give your chilblains names, Jane, or do you number them?” Freddy asked her roommate, as they inched reluctantly out of chilly blankets into a far colder room early in the morning of the sixth of January, 1941. She pinched a hole in the curtains, peeked out on a black, frozen, British predawn, and shut them hastily.

“Oh, names, pet, names … boys’ names, only the ones who proposed of course.” The Honorable Jane Longbridge yawned, managing to sound cheerful as she staggered to the washbasin. “Numbers would be too depressing. Does one really want to know how many one has?”

“But you’ve never complained,” Freddy said, sleepily indignant. Chilblains, those painful raised inflammations, red, hot to the touch, itching and throbbing, which were caused by cold weather, took the form of something between a callus and a wart. They grew and flourished on her toes and fingers in winter, in spite of several pairs of wool socks she put on under her flying boots, or the lined gloves she wore whenever she went outside.

“I used to at school. Complained madly, but it never did any good. Matron only cared when they got ulcerated. That was nasty, but it got me a few weeks’ excuse from games. Made it almost worth it, Hated games.” Brown-haired Jane hastily splashed her face, brushed her teeth vigorously, and looked at herself approvingly in the mirror, briefly admiring, as she unabashedly did every morning, her straight hair, straight teeth and straight nose, all of which, combined with her naughtily unastonished, big brown eyes, and her wicked, easily provoked smile, made her one of the prettiest girls, as she often complacently but correctly remarked, from John o’Groat’s to Land’s End.

“It’s sickeningly Dickensian,” Freddy protested, as she took her turn at the basin.

“Chilblains?”

“Sending kids to schools where they get them. What’s the point in being a baron’s daughter? Didn’t you tell your mother?”

“Didn’t bother. Waste of time. Mother’s keen on games. Her chilblains were probably points of pride.” Jane set her teeth and shed her heavy pajamas, one half at a time, and hastily struggled into a set of precious prewar woolen winter underwear. Freddy slept in her own woolies, as well as in the voluminous teddy-bear cloth lining of her Sidcot boiler suit, the only way she knew to attain a body temperature on the verge of comfort in the virtually unheated bedroom of the lodging she shared with Jane. It was one of the worst winters in history. For the last month, even the German air force had had to call off the Blitz. The massive night bombing that had begun after the Luftwaffe failed to knock out the RAF in the Battle of Britain the summer before, was temporarily halted by the impenetrable weather over Britain.

Freddy had been in England for almost a year and a half, since late June of 1939, when she had wound up her life in California. With Mac’s death, there no longer existed a reason for her to keep the flying school open. When she asked herself what she intended to do, only one answer seemed possible: find a way to join the cause for which he had died. The United States was neutral, and in any case there was no place for a woman pilot in any of its forces. However, there was the British Civil Air Guard, with its four thousand new recruits who wanted to learn to fly.

Mac had left Freddy everything he owned, in a will that Swede Castelli had in his possession. She sold their house and all the school training planes, including her lovely white Rider. Before she went off to Britain to volunteer, she said farewell to Eve and Paul, making peace, at last, with her father. Freddy had immediately been accepted as an instructor in the pilot-training program.

Three months later, on September first, 1939, Hitler invaded Poland, and two days later, England and France, pushed over the line they had waited years too late to draw, declared war on Germany.

On January first, 1940, a small group of highly experienced women pilots who were, like Freddy, instructors in the Civil Air Guard, had been carefully chosen to sign contracts with the Air Transport Auxiliary. The ATA was formerly an all-male civilian organization reponsible for ferrying planes throughout Britain for the RAF, flying them from the
factories in which they were built, to the airfields at which they were so desperately needed.

Now, a year later, the number of women pilots in the ATA was growing, relieving more and more men for aerial combat. The women had proved that they could fly in the same highly rigorous and hostile conditions as the men: working thirteen days in a row before they were given two days off; picking up and delivering planes in weather so risky that no fighters ventured aloft; piloting without radio or any navigational aids except a compass; dodging, twisting and turning above a countryside covered by tens of thousands of barrage balloons, whose steel cables were traps for any plane, friendly as well as enemy. Over the island that was Britain, the utterly unpredictable weather could change without warning to conditions in which a pilot found himself lost within seconds; the landscape was dotted by RAF fields, protected by ack-ack guns that shot first and asked questions later, for the country was in a war where the enemy was so close that an ATA pilot about to land was never surprised to see Messerschmitts diving over the landing strip for which he was heading.

In winter the sun rose at nine o’clock and set around five, since England maintained the optimistically named “British Double Summertime,” or daylight savings time, all year round during the war. It was still dark outside by the time Freddy and Jane arrived at their base in Hatfield, in the battered MG in which Jane had once terrorized the countryside. Today was an anniversary, marking a year after the first ferry trips by women pilots, and Pauline Gower, their commanding officer, had arranged a celebration party for that night.

Yesterday had been frightful—icy, snowy, foggy, rainy and cloudy, “the whole bloody lot,” Jane had said good humoredly, squinting at the sky—and at Hatfield all flying had been canceled shortly after noon. Both Freddy and Jane had spent the afternoon back at their rented digs, brewing tea, napping and reveling in their rare unexpected leisure. Nevertheless, from other bases a few pilots had made the decision to take off, among them Amy Johnson—now divorced from Jim Mollison—who had joined the ATA soon after Freddy. The world-famous pilot, Freddy’s heroine for so many years, had left Blackpool on the Lancashire coast, ferrying an Oxford twin-engined training plane, the same plane Freddy and Jane flew most often. Her destination was not far, Kidlington, an air force base near the Somerset coast.

Freddy and Jane hurried from the MG into the comparative warmth of the Operations Room, where they picked up the chits that told them what planes they were supposed to fly that day, if weather conditions allowed. Clutching their chits, they made for the Mess, a wooden hut which was the source of endless coffee, tea, and chat, with a dart board, a billiard table and copies of the daily newspapers. A few pilots even brought chessboards and backgammon boards to the Mess, and there was talk of a bridge school to be established in the Flight Captain’s room, a school Jane and Freddy had pledged each other not to join. Jane’s game of choice was darts; Freddy’s was pitching cards into her cap, which she insisted required more coordination and skill than any of the others. Actually, when she was on standby, she was too keyed up to concentrate on a game of any complication.

“Oh, oh, there’s trouble,” Jane said the minute they walked into the Mess. Pilots were grouped together, coffee abandoned, as they talked intensely, in low voices, expressions of shock on their faces.