Rose Under Fire (Code Name Verity, #2)(15)
Operations told us to look out for flying bombs launched from planes – from German bombers. We’ve had the flash cards out to familiarise ourselves with the silhouette of a Heinkel He-111, just in case. They will probably aim for Paris and Brussels, not London, but they are not licked yet.
September 11, 1944
Camp Los Angeles, Reims, FRANCE!
I am in France!
I am staying overnight with the American nurses in the Red Cross unit at one of the redeployment camps near Reims, full of GIs on their way to battle. Uncle Roger moves on to his own forces near Antwerp tomorrow. They call this place Camp LA, which is short for Camp Los Angeles – all the camps around here are named after some American metropolis, to make the boys feel at home, I guess. No one is fooled. It is an instant city, just add water! (Of which there is plenty, most of it underfoot.) Reims was liberated on 30th August and Camp LA has not been here for much more than a week, but it is huge. There is a grocery store and a cinema as well as the hospital and mess halls, all in tents.
The store is stocked with American loot that seems miraculous to me – Quaker oats and Ivory soap and Hershey bars. Nothing makes me feel at home like Hershey’s chocolate! Back at Justice Field you get the chocolate factory lined up on your starboard wing tip when you’re coming in to land, and when the wind’s from the north-west, the whole valley smells like roasting cocoa beans.
It doesn’t smell like cocoa here. Most of the open space in Camp LA is an ocean of mud, except the freshly surfaced runway. It’s been a beautiful clear day for once, and I had no encounters with other aircraft on our way here, although it was sobering to see the utter destruction of Caen as we crossed the coast, and the clouds of smoke rising over Le Havre in the north.
When Uncle Roger gets things moving, he moves fast. I think that’s partly to make sure no one ever has time to say no to him. Here’s what happened this morning: I got an S chit when I went in to Operations at Hamble, which means ‘Secret’ – I’m not supposed to tell anyone who I’m ferrying or where I collected them. I won’t write down any of that. Also – this isn’t secret – I was supposed to make sure I had my US passport with me as well as my ATA authorisation card and pilot’s licence, and Operations told me to go home and change to full dress uniform with skirt (not slacks) – which usually means you will be taxiing someone important. Only in this case it just meant they didn’t know who, and I ought to be presentable in case I ran into General Patton after I arrived!
Operations didn’t tell me I was going overnight, so I haven’t got anything like toothbrush or pyjamas with me. But it is only for one night and the other girls are having to wash their faces in their helmets, and had to sleep in their ambulances on the way here from Normandy before the tents got set up, so I guess I can spend another night in my clothes. Roger bought me a toothbrush in the grocery store along with a month’s supply of chocolate and gum. I am going to be everybody’s best friend when I get back to Southampton.
I flew an Oxford to get here, carrying Roger and a handful of other passengers. I felt like the whole sky belonged to me. The Seine was with us all the way through France, great big loops of shining silver out the port side, and I’d already had to shout at my passengers to take turns looking because they were throwing me out of balance by crowding on one side of the plane, and then there it was ahead of me – PARIS, FRANCE.
It was a huge gorgeous sprawl of wooded parks and broad avenues, and although we flew over some bomb damage in the suburbs, the closer we got to the middle the more and more beautiful it was, and from the air it didn’t look the least bit damaged. Everybody was glued to the tiny windows and as we got closer they stopped trying to crowd at the same side because the city was all around us. I went down to about 700 feet and it was like flying over a model railway village, with the gleaming white domes of Sacré Coeur presiding over it all and Notre Dame Cathedral like a wedding cake right in the middle. Of course it is the first time I’ve ever seen Paris, and what a way to see it for the first time, flying low over streets full of flags and red-white-and-blue bunting!
By the time we were over Notre Dame I was singing to myself again. The cabin was so noisy I thought no one would be able to hear me. But Uncle Roger and someone else were crouched right behind me looking over my shoulders because there is a better view from the cockpit than in the back, and they heard me. And then everybody joined in.
‘Allons enfants de la Patrie,
Le jour de gloire est arrivé!’
I don’t know why I know all the words to the French national anthem. I am just like that. I never forget the words to anything! We learned it in eighth grade when we were just starting to take French.
If Roger and the others hadn’t all joined in I’d have probably ended up in tears – overcome with emotion. As it was, everybody was too noisy and excited for me to start feeling sentimental. We were shouting as I detoured east along the Seine towards the Eiffel Tower, most of my passengers just going ‘Da Da Da DAH!’ since I was the only one who knew all the words.
As we got closer to the Eiffel Tower, one of the wags in the back yelled, ‘Go under it!’
I did not fly under the Eiffel Tower!
But I bet if I’d been flying a fighter plane, something small and zippy, I’d have been tempted. Maybe tomorrow? No, I won’t be that stupid. But the thought that it’s even a possibility makes me warm and happy.