I have carried the photo in my wallet for years. It shows four young women in WAAF (Women’s Auxiliary Air Force) uniforms posing outside a Nissen hut on an RAF bomber station in England during World War II. My mother is one of those young women. She is 22 years old.
For as long as I could remember, the photo was amongst a jumble of photos in a large Eaton’s cardboard box under my parents’ bed. From the time I was about 10, and through my teen years, I loved to pull the box out from under the bed, scoop up a handful of photos and sort through them to find the ones of my mother during “the war”. If she happened to be around, I would ask her about the other people in the photos and, if she was in the mood – this I had to read, carefully – she would tell me their names, where the photo was taken and whether they were still alive. And, she would tell me stories about life on the bomber station.
Sometimes, if my mother was busy downstairs with my three younger siblings, I would go into my parents’ room, pull out the box from under the bed and sit on the floor, by myself, sifting through the photos. I would try to remember the names that went with the faces and the stories that went with the photos, repeating the details to myself like a litany.
The four young women in the photo are Claire, Chappie, Peggy and “Mac” (my mother). All of them had been trained in the WAAF as drivers and motor mechanics. My mother drove trucks and jeeps and staff cars but, mostly, she drove air crews out to the runways to the Lancaster bombers that flew nighttime bombing raids over Germany. And, in the morning, she would drive back out to the runways to pick up the air crews who were lucky to make it back.
During one of my sabbatical years in England, I took the train out to a small East Anglia town and, after walking a long way out of the town, I eventually found the field where the bomber station had been located. Some of the original Nissen huts were still standing and, when I walked out into the harvested fields, I found chunks of the old airfield runways, corn growing up through the cracks. As I stood in the middle of that field, I thought about the people in those old photos in the box under my parents’ bed and about my mother’s stories.
I have carried that photo of the four young women in my wallet since my mother died. I am not altogether sure why and I am not sure it really matters. As a child, it seemed utterly mysterious to me that my mother could have had this whole other life before she was my mother. And, I have always longed to know more.
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