The Way the Crow Flies

  “WAKE UP, MADELEINE. We’re here.”

  Royal Canadian Air Force Station Centralia. Six hundred and thirty-eight acres of government issue dropped into the middle of one continuous agricultural quilt. A good place to train pilots, farmland being ideal for emergency landings. Jack trained here during the war. “Welcome to the MON,” his flight instructor had said: the Middle Of Nowhere.

  He slows the car on the Huron County road. To their right, the station. To their left, the houses of the PMQs. “Let’s take a tour, shall we?” he says and turns right.

  Just outside the main gates, a World War Two Spitfire speeds on a steel pedestal, legendary little fighter, its propeller welded to a stop, clear canopy bolted over the single seat. Per ardua ad astra, says the plaque, motto of the RCAF: Through adversity to the stars.

  “Dad, can you show us where it happened?” asks Madeleine.

  “We’ll get there, little buddy.”

  Jack would have flown a bomber had it not been for the crash. A big heavy Lancaster with four Merlin engines, the opposite of the nimble Spitfire. “That little airplane is one of the reasons why we’re alive and free today,” says Jack.

  Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few. When Churchill said that, he was talking about the pilots who flew in the Battle of Britain. The Spitfire helped save Britain from Nazi invasion in 1940. When England stood alone, ninety-nine Canadian pilots stood with them, fending off the might of Goering’s Luftwaffe while ordinary Britons watched from the ground.

  The bolted and mounted Spitfire is another difference between Canada and Germany. Here the emblems of battle are proudly displayed, refurbished tanks and cannons, cenotaphs in town squares commemorating “our glorious dead” from the Boer War through to Korea. But in Germany there were no Messerschmitts shined up and on show. There were bullet-pocked buildings and heaps of debris, abundant ruins amid the “economic miracle”—the Wirtschaftswunder. It’s a long word, like many German words, but Madeleine remembers it because it sounds like a magic spell. Her father explained what it meant and told them how the women of Germany rebuilt their cities brick by brick with their bare hands after each bombing raid, as undaunted as Londoners during the Blitz. Madeleine pictures them as though in a black-and-white newsreel, die Trümmerfrauen—“the Women of the Ruins.” In head-scarves, bent over foothills of rubble.

  Jack pulls up to the guardhouse, chats and chuckles with the guard, who says, “Welcome to Centralia, sir,” and salutes with casual courtesy—the type of salute that distinguishes air force from army. Jack touches two fingers to his forehead in response and pulls away. The Rambler drives slowly up Canada Avenue.

  If her father had gotten to fly a bomber, he would have made more rubble in Germany. Unless they shot him down first. Hamburg, Dresden, Cologne…. Dad always shakes his head sadly at the mention of Dresden. When you hear the name Dresden, you picture beautiful china and wedding-cake buildings. They are gone now, bombs away. “Total war was Hitler’s idea,” says her father. Imagine going into someone’s house and breaking all the plates. That’ll teach you. All the women in the world couldn’t put them back together again.

  Madeleine watches the buildings go by, silent white siding with green trim, all neatly landscaped, labelled and laid out. The Protestant chapel, the Catholic chapel, the fire hall, the library. Shopping carts parked outside the PX, all quiet on this Sunday afternoon. Turning onto Saskatchewan Street now….

  They are driving very slowly. Like a military slow march, the muffled bootfalls a sign of respect or mourning. The McCarthys are carefully, reverently beginning to say hello to Centralia. Moving among a herd of unknown sleepy creatures, their future—don’t make any sudden moves, don’t anyone take a picture yet.

  Up Nova Scotia Avenue, past administrative buildings where the dads work, past H-shaped barracks where the non-dads live. Heat shivering up from the parade square, chessboard black against the white buildings. The movie theatre—Pillow Talk is playing—the curling arena, the hockey arena—a flurry of activity behind the rec centre where kids are cannonballing into an outdoor pool. Madeleine watches it all inch by under the loving August sun. This is where whatever will be, will be.

  As abrupt as a flock of gulls, a squad of young men jogs past, white sneakers in double-time, billowing singlets and blue shorts, sweat-stained cadets all sinews and Adam’s apples. Some are African, others Asian, the rest Heinz 57 Caucasian. Mimi watches them pass, then raises her eyebrows ever so briefly at Jack, who mutters, “Avert your eyes, woman.” She smiles. Jack underlines his mental note—he will definitely start running, once they’ve settled in.

  He watches the young men jog away under the brutal accumulated heat of afternoon. He’s been there. Here. Wore the coveted “white flash”—a triangle of cloth inserted in the front of the wedge cap to signify aircrew in training. One of the “Brylcreem boys,” irresistible to the fair sex. He did his ground training, sweated over an instrument panel in a classroom, surrounded by a cyclorama of painted landscape and horizon, trying not to “crash” the Link trainer—an ingenious little flight simulator still in use—drawing the hood over its cockpit, flying blind, trust your instruments. They drilled it into you, take off into the wind, even on the throttle, hands, feet and head…. Speaking aloud the cockpit check, powering up for the first heart-pounding solo—God watches over your first solo, after that you’re on your own. And later, at the officers’ mess, legs still trembling, raising the glasses high, Here’s to being above it all.

  Jack trained here, but he would have gone operational in the skies over Germany—Mühlheim, Essen, Dortmund. Mission after mission to the “land of no future,” as they called the Ruhr Valley, industrial heartland of the Third Reich, where an Allied bomber crew’s life expectancy was even shorter than usual. But the war is history. Many of these cadets are training as NATO pilots. They will be assigned to squadrons around the world. They may never see combat, but they will take turns on Zulu standby, ready to scramble and be airborne within minutes of the alarm, armed with nuclear bombs and missiles, knowing that, if the balloon goes up, it could all be over one way or another in a matter of hours. Not just for a flight crew, or for hundreds, even thousands of civilians on the ground. But for all of us. It’s a very different world now. Jack turns the wheel and the Rambler rolls into the shadow between two huge hangars.

  Moments later they emerge onto a quiet expanse where concrete strips fan out to form a vast triangle within a triangle. The airfield. Perfectly still and baking.

  Jack stops the car. Cuts the engine. Out on the runway, a shimmer of heat. “There’s the old scene of the crime,” he says. His tone is affectionate—a time-worn joke about a long-dead loved one. “Son of a gun,” he says. Shakes his head. Mimi watches him. He turns to her and winks. Can’t complain. He leans across and kisses her.

  In the back seat the children look away, out at the airfield. Then Jack and Mimi are looking out too. It’s as though the four of them were at a drive-in. Silent picture in broad daylight. The liquid air in this heat, a blurred screen.

  Madeleine blinks. This is where Dad trained as a pilot. This is where he crashed. Surveying the smooth runways, she experiences one of those mental jolts that mark the passage between being little, and being a kid. Until now, she has pictured Centralia in the middle of the war—gritty landing strips swarming with cheerful men in fleece-lined leather bomber jackets, cracking jokes, sharing smokes, fearless and uncomplaining. Bombs exploding around the airfield, Dad dodging and dashing to his airplane. Although she knew very well that Centralia was in Canada, one aspect of being little was her ability to place it nonetheless at the centre of European hostilities.

  When you are little, you can believe two things at once. Madeleine often had to remind herself that her father had not been killed in the crash—how could he have been, when he is right here telling me the story of it? Yet somehow she had come to think of it not only as The Story of the Crash, but also as The Story of
When Dad Was Killed in the War. Now she realizes the absurdity of the images she harboured, and is chilled at how the latter title used to float through her mind with no sense of fear, no sense even of contradiction. All part of the semi-hallucinatory world she inhabited when she was little. Five minutes ago. She looks out at the airfield and feels as though she were waking from a dream. There are no bullet-riddled airplanes, no craters in the concrete, there are certainly no Lancaster bombers or even the bulky Anson trainers that her father flew. There are no weapons at all. The old Spitfire anchored back at the gates is the closest thing to a combat aircraft on the base. For there, ranged on the tarmac, are Centralia’s main operational aircraft: Chipmunks.

  Cheerful little yellow training machines. Cadets get their first taste of the wild blue in the cockpit of a de Havilland Chipmunk, then work their way up to sleek Sabres, Voodoos and CF-104 fighters, or hefty Hercules transports and Yukons. But not in Centralia. This is a Primary Flying School. And a Central Officers’ School. With a Language School, an Engineering School and a Supply School, the whole place is one big school.

  Centralia plays its role in the web of NATO defence but it is far from the Berlin Wall. Far from the Bay of Pigs, the Suez Canal, Cape Canaveral and the Russian Cosmodrome, far from it all. The Middle Of Nowhere. This is where Jack was awarded his medal: the Air Force Cross. For valour, courage and devotion to duty whilst flying, though not in active operations against the enemy.

  The government built Centralia in 1942, part of Prime Minister Mackenzie King’s vision of a vast network of aircrew training bases that prompted President Roosevelt to call Canada “the aerodrome of democracy.”

  Canada was one-third of the great North Atlantic Triangle, poised between Britain and the United States. This triangle worked in cunning ways. Under the Lend-Lease plan, many of the airplanes were built in the U.S.—“the arsenal of democracy”—but until the Americans entered the war the planes could not be flown into Canada without violating the United States Neutrality Act. So pilots would fly the new aircraft to Montana or North Dakota and land just shy of the border. Only feet away, a team of horses waited on the Canadian side. The airplane was hitched up and hauled into Canada, then flown to RCAF stations to supply the British Commonwealth Air Training Plan.

  Recruits from all over the Commonwealth—Britain and every corner of its former empire—and many American flyboys, before they had their own war, came to Canada. Far from the front lines and out of range of German bombers, over a hundred thousand aircrew were trained—pilots, wireless operators, air gunners and navigators. They got their wings and fed the skies overseas, where they died in droves—most of them on night bombing missions, seven to a crew, in broad moonlight.

  At that time Centralia was a Service Flying Training School, last stop before operational training in England, followed by the real thing. Jack was ready to go to England when he pinwheeled in his twin-engine Anson and exploded in the field south of the landing strip. Just short of the ditch. You can see the fringe of longer grass out beyond the taxiway. They pinned a gong on him for valour because he had done the right thing. It felt like reflex at the time but, as it turned out, Jack had made a courageous decision in the air, though not in active operations against the enemy.

  Last April, when he got his posting notice, Jack laughed. Centralia. Son of a gun. Considered asking for an extension of his European tour of duty, but when he told Mimi, she said, “I want to go home, Jack.” In all the years of their marriage they had spent only four in their own country. She said, “I want our next baby to be born in Canada.” He smiled, needing no more persuasion than her desire for a third child. She loved Europe, but it was time. Time for the kids to know their country. Time, he knew, although she didn’t say, to put some distance between them and the Cold War. When the Wall had gone up last summer, she had said, “We’re too far from home.”

  This is the first time he has been back to Centralia. After the crash, he wore a bandage over his eyes for six weeks. His right eye is fine; he lost some peripheral in the left; he wears prescription sunglasses for driving and otherwise none at all except for reading. If he had been operational at that point, had he been injured by flak over Europe, they would have sent him back up once he recovered. No reason you can’t drop your bomb load with an eye and a half. But he was CT’ed. Ceased Training. Like an obsolete aircraft, he was Struck Off Strength. He kept his wings but lost his aircrew category. His war was over. He was bitter at the time. He was young.

  Mimi takes his hand.

  Now he is back in Centralia. And Centralia is still a flying school, except these days the cadets come from NATO countries. And there are families. There are station wagons, barbecues and sprinklers. There is peace.

  Most of his friends were killed.

  He squeezes then releases his wife’s hand, and starts the car. He rounds slowly back between the hangars. Time to show Mimi the social hub of RCAF Centralia. It’s bound to be nice, they always are. High-polish wood and leather, sterling silver, white linen and gardenias. The officers’ mess. Worth squeezing yourself into a monkey suit, if you are an officer, and, more important, worth spending hours slipping into your best satin décolleté if you are an officer’s wife. But formal events are far from the rule. Weekly dances require nothing more than a sports jacket and tie for the men, party dresses for the wives; bingos, raffles, barbecues and corn roasts are even more casual.

  Mimi considers her husband’s profile. She likes to tease him that he looks too young for her, although he is a year older. Something innocent about his blue eyes—it could be his lashes, golden brown and too long for a man. She wants to rest her head on his shoulder while he drives, the way she used to when they were courting. Feel his cheek light against her lips, his smooth shave, knowing he can feel her breath, wondering how long it will take him to pull over…. Jack looks unconcerned but she knows it means something to him, being back here. He teases her about being “dramatic” but she knows this is where he had his heart broken. Not by a woman, by an airplane.

  She knows better than to talk about it, or to show him she knows by any sign other than being happy here. By plunging in and organizing their life, unpacking her formals along with the pots and pans, joining the Officers’ Wives Club, sending his uniform to the cleaners…. Something she would never tell him: she is glad not to be married to a pilot. Salt of the earth, life of the party, some of their best friends, but … the worry for the wives when the men are flying. And the waiting after work when the men are together, drinking. High-strung esprit de corps, for all her husband’s belief in how relaxed the air force is compared to the army. Mimi knows, but does not say, that men who are relaxed with other men are sometimes anything but, once they get home. She is grateful to be a wife, not a cheerleader. She has the best of both worlds: a man in uniform whose first love is his family.

  She looks away, not wanting him to feel watched. He is whistling through his teeth. He’s going to be fine. I have such a good man. There is nothing more erotic than this knowledge, no Hollywood scene could rival this station wagon in the sunshine with this man and his children and the secret that only she knows: his face, hovering just above her own, deserted by his defences. At the mercy of his own strength, needing her to take it from him, keep it safe. Then give it back to him. She slips her hand onto his thigh.

  Jack turns left on Alberta Street and follows the one curve on the base. A slow circular drive leads to a stone building couched in hedges and flower beds. Low-slung Frank Lloyd Wright, its granite facade a glamorous contrast to the architectural whiteout everywhere else.

  “There you go, Missus,” he says.

  Flagstone steps lead to a pair of oak doors. Tilted wood-framed picture windows afford a glimpse of cocktail tables and chairs between burgundy-and-blue curtains—the air force tartan. The dance floor gleams. It is possible to fall in love with your wife all over again in the time it takes to escort her up to the open doors where the sounds of a swing orchestra greet you, a
long with the clink of glasses, the aroma of the buffet, the laughter of men and women. Enchanted evenings.

  “Bon,” says Mimi. And they drive on.

  Mike says, “Where’s your building, Dad?”

  “Oh we just passed it, buddy, it’s back there on the right.”

  Receding through the rear window of the station wagon, a two-storey white building with a green shingled roof and concrete steps. Benign as a snowfort. That is where Jack will be running the Central Officers’ School. That is where he will fly his desk.

  Mimi takes a hanky from her husband’s pocket and wipes the lipstick from his mouth, left over from their kiss at the airfield. Then she kisses him again and whispers in his ear, “Je t’aime, baby.”

  Life is beautiful. He lets the steering wheel unravel beneath his palm as he completes the leisurely turn back onto Canada Avenue. He is a lucky man. He wants what he has.

  He knows that, had he gone operational in ’43, he might well have been killed. The crash spared him. He has been given the gift that many of his friends sacrificed. He has children. It ends there, there is nothing better, not fast cars or caviar, not Playboy bunnies or money. Your children. And the woman who has your children. He says softly to Mimi as she squeezes his thigh, “Behave yourself, Missus.” She glances down at his lap—“You behave, Mister”—and smiles. Pleased with herself.

  As the Rambler passes the gates, the guard touches his cap and Jack lifts two fingers from the wheel.

  They near the Spitfire again, and Madeleine feels the butterflies wake up in her stomach. We are finally going to our new house. Which one will it be? In Centralia there are 362 to choose from. In a variety of colours.

  Opposite the Spitfire stands a wooden pole. It’s not a telephone pole, Madeleine can see that. Way up at the top is a large bird’s nest. And protruding from the mass of straw is a thrust of metal. Like a rusty mouth.

  “It’s an air-raid siren,” says Mike.