The Girl in the Blue Beret Read Online Free PDF Page B

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.

7.
    M ARSHALL THOUGHT THE FAMILY WHO HID HIM IN PARIS WAS named Vallon, but in the Resistance, people often took false names. Robert was often there, bringing news and supplies. He bicycled out to Versailles one weekend and brought back a freshly killed goose hidden in a carpetbag. The farmer who sold him the fowl had declared it would be safer for him to carry a slaughtered bird, its honker silenced.
    The apartment was alive with feathers, which Mme Vallon carefully saved for pillows. Marshall helped with the plucking. Since the rich smell of roasted goose would attract neighbors, maybe even suspicious German soldiers, Marshall had to be prepared to jump out the back window and to enter the neighboring apartment in case of a heavy knock on the door. The Vallons and their guests enjoyed their goose and their conversation, with a gaiety both genuine and frantic. Amidst the laughter and good will, they insisted that Marshall eat extra,