The Girl in the Blue Beret by Bobbie Ann Mason Read Free Book Online Page A

houses. It was a very cold ride, and did it feel good to be warm again!
    *
Honey, I’ve been a seamstress tonight, patching rips in the blackout curtains. Say! Let’s not have black drapes in our dream house, baby. Let’s show we have nothing to hide .
    *
Tonight coming back from the mess hall I learned that war is dangerous! I was absent-mindedly walking on what is the “wrong” side of the road here, and was knocked ears over appetite by a blacked-out bus—it was only a glancing blow and merely injured my “dignity,” but it surely messed up my only clean pants!
Hootie is standing in the door, letting all our nice cold air out, and letting that nasty old warm air in from outside. I’m thinking of spreading a little water on our floor and using it for a skating rink in the morning .
    Marshall recalled with some fondness those dark, breakneck, nighttime forays and the foolhardy bike races to the mess hall in the early-morning blackness. After a while he had developed a sixth sense about walking in the dark. He tried to act like a keen animal. He learned to relax his pupils to take in more light. He grew sensitive to the nuances of darkness, how the eye could be trained to interpret shapes in the dark. In deep darkness, he learned to move with his arms out ahead. In good moonlight, the landscape was enchanted. And if there were drifts of mist about, sometimes passing across the moon like advertisements trailing behind a small plane, he might feel he had entered another world. The flimsy, scattered mists were pleasant, but the thick fogs smothered and enclosed the base with tooth-chilling cold. The fogs glowed with light borrowed from the moon, a light so dim the eyes could not penetrate it.
Darling, I’ve said it before, honey, but—once more—please don’t worry a lot about my work here. I was optimistic enough, I think, about this business before I came in closer contact with it, but the outlook at closer quarters is even more reassuring. Plain statistics are very comforting, and when you add to them my undeniably outstanding ability as a Hot Pilot (?!) the future looks absolutely rosy! The only thing I’m afraid of is that the thing will get to be such a snap that the Big Operators will boost the score from 25 innings to a hundred!
Of course, I plan to personally throttle Adolf Hitler if I get a chance. Aside from the heavy humor, I AM very much impressed by the record and achievements of this outfit, and I know damned well that I’m fortunate to be with it. They’re a great bunch of lads .
    Twenty-five missions was the goal. And his score turned out to be only ten. Plain statistics were shit, he thought as he flipped through the pages. Sixty Forts hadn’t returned from a raid to Schweinfurt one bleak October day, a few weeks before Marshall arrived at Molesworth.
Bob Hadley came in from a mission the other day and had a fever and a bad cold. He reported to the Dispensary and was sent up to the General Hospital. The rest of us here in our pneumonia hole are in pretty good shape—with this eternally damp weather. It seems nearly impossible not to have a constant case of the sniffles .
    It was hard to write her after he came in from a long, tense flight, weak-headed from breathing straight O 2 for hours, his body taut from leaning in to the throbbing yoke of the plane. The fatigue could not be cured by a two-day respite. Hadley had been hospitalized with a touch of anoxia, oxygen deprivation. Alone, Marshall bicycled through the English countryside, the domestic patchwork of fields only here and there revealing the wartime crisis with the barracks and control tower of an air base. He remembered discovering the remains of an old Roman road, then finding it on his map. He had written about it to Loretta in one of the V-mail letters, and he saw now where that detail had been censored out in heavy black ink. The blackout was pervasive, like the fog. Sometimes he was a worse censor than the official censors.
    He