The Girl in the Blue Beret - By Bobbie Ann Mason Page 0,14

went through all the moves—easing back the yoke, feeling the wings lifting. You were the plane, the bird. You were soaring, rising, guiding, turning. Breathless. A plane wanted to fly; takeoffs were its natural bent. You trusted yourself to the machine. You were the machine. You maneuvered so smoothly that the passengers would think they were sitting in their living rooms. Now, as a passenger, Marshall could hear every note of the ascent. He could feel the engines spool. He could guess the cruising altitude when they reached it. Thirty-six thousand feet, he thought. The heading was about forty-seven degrees east.

The passengers began to squirm after the plane leveled out and the seat-belt sign went off. A woman across from him asked for a blanket.

“Would you like something to drink, sir?” A flight attendant with bulky arms and blowzy hair trundled her cart just past his row and braked it.

“A ginger ale, thanks.”

She scooped the ice with a plastic cup, her fingers touching the ice. The other stew had wrinkles. The airline business was going to hell, he thought. He had to admit their job was hard. Only the stews, on their feet, up and down the aisle, would feel the strain of the 747’s peculiar three-degree nose tilt.

The flight was smooth enough. Airliners had to be flown without flair. In the B-17 sometimes you were bouncing like a child on a rocking horse. The yoke would be vibrating like a jackhammer, and you held on, on a wild ride, better than anything a carnival ever offered.

The man next to him tried to talk about the Mets, but Marshall immersed himself in the packet of V-mail he had written to Loretta from Molesworth Airfield in England.

10.

THE LETTERS WERE PHOTOSTATS OF MICROFILMED V-MAIL—a compact stack of five-by-seven pages of miniaturized handwriting. His eyes lit on random passages as he flipped through the stiff little pages, all written between November 1943 and the end of January 1944.

Dearest Loretta,

Last night I stumbled through the blackout to a small town nearby. Was almost killed by derby-hatted Englishmen tearing along in the dark on bicycles with no lights! At a pub I had a glass of English beer—which cost me two bob, six pence, along with some kind of meat pie.

*

Hello, sweetheart,

Today is typically an English day—in other words, it’s raining lightly, and it’s damp and cold. Our barracks are made of brick and stone, as are nearly all structures in the Isles, due to the scarcity of wood. There are four of us to a room, and we have double-decked beds. There are two lockers and two small “chester drawers,” as my mother used to say. We eat in a mess hall similar to the one in the States. However, we use our mess kits and canteen cups to hold the food and coffee, and fall in a wash-up line at the end of each meal.

At the Officers’ Club here we may buy English ale between 6 and 10 in the evening and see a free picture show. Yesterday I went over but was unable to get a seat.

*

Today was wet and cloudy, and there is no moon whatever tonight. On our way to the mess hall in the blackout we manage not to bump into each other by rattling our mess kits.

*

Our room has a coal stove with a terrific capacity for fuel, and it keeps a guy busy throwing coal into it. I think the hardest thing I’ll ever have to do in the line of duty is getting out of bed in the shivering morning to build a fire in the little monstrosity! Luckily I have my long-handled G.I. drawers. Yesterday, I very ingeniously bored a hole in His Majesty’s floor and installed a piece of pipe on our wash-stand, so that now, instead of having to go outside both to get and dispose of our water, we merely go out to get it. Also built a wooden contraption which I’m using as a clothes-line and wardrobe, but which I’m going to use to hang myself from if I don’t get a letter from you soon!

Love you to death, baby!

He could have been writing from Boy Scout camp, he thought. Such schoolbook phrasings! Of course he couldn’t tell her much under the censorship rules. And he didn’t want to tell some things. The dull smack of enemy shells hitting the plane. The noise up there in the sky when the guns opened up. The giant yellow and orange and red flowers