The Girl in the Blue Beret

6.



MARSHALL, WAITING FOR JUNE, LIVED ON TV DINNERS—A slab of meat loaf, mashed potatoes with a stagnant pool of dirt-brown gravy, peas, carrot cubelets, and a cubbyhole of apricot cobbler. Airline food, one of life’s staples. He recalled the scarcity of food in France during the war, the way a family shared its meager rations. He remembered a large carrot, baked in ashes and sliced into five pieces, each piece enlivened with several dusky flakes of an herb.

Sometimes in the evening when he watched an old forties movie, he drank a beer, but his pilot’s discipline still restrained him. Twelve hours from bottle to throttle. He didn’t like to cloud his mind. His brain bag was gathering dust, and his uniform was drooping in the closet. He imagined it hanging there a hundred years in the future. Numbly, he stared at the global map on his wall, Paris gleaming like the North Star.

He still wore his wrist chronometer, set to Greenwich mean time. He was reviewing his French books.

He slept on the studio bed in his den, where he had escaped so many hours over the years—reading books, writing on a portable typewriter, studying French. The kids’ bedrooms, down the corridor in line with the den, were like abandoned stores, still full of merchandise. Like someone studying for exams, Marshall spent his days and nights with the war—books, tapes, and the movies and documentaries on TV. One night he stayed up until two to watch Twelve O’Clock High again, and he couldn’t sleep after the movie ended. It was set at an air base in England like Marshall’s. When he closed his eyes, he was flying over the English countryside, low over the patchwork of fields and the white scar along the Channel. Winter-brown fields and hedgerows and clusters of trees enclosed the base, peacefully, as stoic as the English people. When the airmen traveled into Kettering, the quiet village seemed safe and snug until they saw the ration lines and the blank shelves of a grocery.

During a layover in London a few years before, Marshall had returned to the airfield at Molesworth. He took a train to Kettering, then a bus to Thrapston. The train was blue, more modern than the dusty green wartime coach that he recalled. He found the base deserted, with weeds growing through the tarmac, and he recognized the scene—Dean Jagger in Twelve O’Clock High returning to his old base and hearing the B-17s roar to life in his memory. So much in the world was predictable, a celluloid cliché, Marshall thought. Like Jagger, he could feel the throbbing of the B-17s, their bodies sexed up and loaded with their bombs. The crews had decorated the noses of their planes with alluring women, cartoon characters, snappy quips. Dirty Lily was scantily garbed in black, with raven hair and red puckered lips. She was their figurehead, their cheerleader, their whore and mama all in one. All the guys were ready to fly, bomb the Jerries, be heroes.

The old base was bare and neglected, surrounded by barbed wire, with warning signs. As he stood gazing through the fence, he could make out a distant cluster of trees next to several rows of Nissen huts that had formed the hospital. They appeared derelict. Beyond them, through the trees, he could see one of the stately homes of England, Lilford Hall, a seventeenth-century manor. He remembered how from the air its stonework, with ornate chimneys and split-level roofing, gleamed white, and the sheep in the surrounding fields seemed like connect-the-dots.


THE BASEMENT WAS STUFFED. Marshall burrowed deep into the closets, sniffing out ancient relics, and pulled out some boxes of letters. A postcard tumbled out. It was a kriegie card—Kriegsgefangenenpost, a POW postcard.

Dear Marshall, Well, it is not easy to find something to write about. Just wanted to tell you I haven’t forgotten you. I am getting along alright. No news that I can tell. Hope to see you soon. Tell all the folks hello for me. Always, Tony



The card was dated March 2, 1944, only a month after they went down, but it had not been postmarked until March 24, 1945. Tony Campanello was the navigator. He and Al Grainger, the bombardier, and Bobby Redburn, the ball-turret gunner, had been captured by the Germans and were MIA for a year longer than Marshall was.

Loretta had saved all his letters in a box tied with a green velvet ribbon. Marshall thumbed through the early letters from the Texas air base where he trained, now and then losing himself in a description of the barracks or some practical joke the guys had pulled. In a separate packet he found the V-mail letters he had been looking for, letters he had written her from England, and he set those aside, intending to read them at the right time.

He found some addresses in Loretta’s address book, and he began to write letters to the surviving crew about his trip to the crash site and about the boy’s father who died helping one of their gunners. He asked about their own escapes after the crash. Don Stewart, the tail gunner, had died in a Cessna in 1959. Marshall didn’t know how to reach Campanello, so he asked Grainger. “Since you bunked together in that German resort hotel, I figure you might still be in touch with each other,” he wrote, then wondered if he was too flippant. Marshall looked again at the kriegie card from Campanello. He didn’t get stateside till June 1945, and he remained in a hospital for many weeks. As far as Marshall could recall, none of the three POWs had ever talked much about life in the stalag.