This drabble is part of @mercurygray ’s Blind Dates OC Fest this year, where she invited people to ‘write a short story that introduces a new character to an existing fandom and establishes them as a leading person worth paying attention to.’ Let me introduce my OC, Harriet Parker, who is inspired by the beautiful picture above that has the following caption: ‘Miss Parker, a member of the Auxiliary Territorial Service, on duty as an enemy aircraft spotter near London, 1943.’
One of the benefits of the spotter glasses they were issued, was that one could easily pretend to ignore the men on base if they were in one’s peripheral vision. ‘Keep focused on the sky, girls, or those men catching the sparks in your eyes may be dead before teatime’. Captain Gibson, formerly a professor of poetry somewhere clever, was prone to dramatics on occasion but she supposed he had a point.
Keep your eyes on the skies, Harriet Parker, the Luftwaffe don’t care that you keep looking for the tall Yank who waved and smiled your way the other day.
The glasses with blinkers that initially the women of the ATS had initially baulked at wearing had become as integral to their kit as their binoculars. A few days of a cloudless sky, and looking directly towards the sun (because that's how the enemy hid their approaches on a clear day) had left them all in bed with various migraines and spot blindness. After that, every spotter had honed her wire frames to fit well without indenting or falling off.
She had been doing just that, adjusting the arms and cleaning the lenses ready for the start of her shift when the rhythmic trot of boots on concrete came past the command post. She hadn’t meant to look up at them, except Janet who was manning the post with her asked her to check the range on the scope, and she had looked up from her fiddling as they jogged past.
Of course, her looking up at the passing platoon for a fraction of a second was enough to warrant a chorus of whistles and shouts now the men realised they had an audience. Their lieutenant, a short curly haired fellow shouted for them to quieten down as they went past, but even he had a smile on his face. She heard Janet next to her sigh and mutter to herself about ‘don't encourage them by noticing them’.
Yet it was rather hard not to notice the Americans at Upottery. Firstly, it was the largest group of men her age she had seen assembled since the arrivals back from Dunkirk back in ‘40. Secondly they were loud. Forever yelling, shouting or cracking jokes. Occasionally they just fought with each other for the hell of it, and they weren’t even drunk. Thirdly, they were all under lockdown together at the airfield. There were a dozen ATS ladies on base, and even with the glasses, brodie helmets and their tents being segregated by barbed wire, they stood out like a sore thumb.
‘Hey, HEY doll! What’s your name?’
‘-you look swell without them goggles on!’
‘Where you from, honey?’
The shouts were enough to make Harriet quickly look back down to her glasses in her lap and place them on her face. She was used to the shouts by now after several days, but the novelty hadn’t worn off for the Yanks. Something about them not being used to women stationed in men’s roles on the homefront. They, the ATS women were also as Janet had grimly said in the tent the previous night, ‘convenient’. With no pubs, beaches or villages in beautiful Devon to invade, they took what chances they could. Being fenced in under lockdown could only mean one thing, something big was about to happen. Any fool knew that the sheer numbers of these men gathering along the southern coast of England meant that something ‘big’ was at work, but being under lock and key with sentries patrolling the perimeter meant that it was imminent.
Such thoughts had left her with a lump in her throat. How many of these men were to die before their feet hit the ground? How many would return to England? How many would make it home over the seas? If she looked at them, could she tell which ones would make it? Or is war just a game of undiscriminating luck? It had all begun with brothers of friends she had danced with at parties, or someone she knew from church. She would receive a letter from a friend, a cousin or her mother telling her ‘dear Alice’s boy, Michael, who was a lieutenant with the Worcestershires has been killed in Burma’. The worst was meeting an old friend for afternoon tea, and asking after their beau, only for the friend’s composure to drop for a moment, enough for one to know the answer is ‘departed from here’. It had become the kind thing to not ask, but instead offer your own news delivered with the British stiff upper lip. Over the years, many of the young men standing alongside her in photos or in memories all faded away leaving a few remaining, who still weren't home.
She wondered if the men knew she was thinking this, if they were thinking about their own imminent mortality and deciding to embrace what potential few days of peace they had left in England. She couldn’t begrudge them that, taking the chance to call at a couple of women manning a spotter telescope with no other pretty girls around to entertain at a pub on a Friday evening. Still, she wouldn’t encourage it. No good would come from being chatted up by some handsome (yes, she did have eyes that off-duty would look at her surroundings) young men about to jump to their fates across the seas. She knew she was a convenient distraction. Best to look past the white shirts and fatigue trousers towards the horizon.
It was the second to last man on the nearside of the group that had turned to look at her that caught her attention. He hadn’t yelled, or called out, he was just smiling. He looked happy. It had been so long since she was truly happy, it was warming to see it on the face of another person. It was a quick, slight movement of his arm that turned into a slight wave at her, and his head had locked with hers and had kept his attention, even as he jogged past he craned to look at her. A well meaning shove from a fellow soldier behind him and a quip ‘Forward, Smoke, or I swear you’re gonna trip over those big ass feet again’ broke the moment, and he was off and away.
In retrospect, Harriet felt foolish. There was no moment, was there? He could have been looking at Janet. She had been wearing her glasses for heaven's sakes, so she could have been looking anywhere. Perhaps it was her lipstick, her own little streak of personality in her uniform that she had retained over the years. She didn't even know what this man looked like, except that he was a tad taller than the rest of the group around him. He had a nickname ‘Smoke’, but was it even a nickname? Was that just some name Americans made for each other? (One of the girls in their tent had said one tried to introduce himself as ‘Gonorrhoea’!) But he had smiled at her, and for the first time in years, she felt herself smile back. That was worth something, wasn’t it? Or was she getting khaki fever suddenly in her 4th year of the war?
Today, all the men were laying out their gear on the runways, a sea of olive drab littered with C47s. It was impossible to tell who was who, particularly with half the tarmac covered in camo cream and wearing their helmets. She sighed, leaned back in her seat at the battery and brought her binoculars up to her eyes. The best she could do now for this soldier was to do what she did best: keep watch, call in the range and bearing on any enemy aircraft she sighted, and give him a fighting chance before he landed on his feet. If it was meant to be, luck would bring him back her way again.
More about the ATS enemy aircraft spotters here. A lovely oral history from a former ATS spotter and gunner is available here.
I decided to place this in Upottery as I drove past it yesterday, and its a very tense part of the first episode for all involved.
The reference to Michael, KIA in Burma is actually a nod to Mr Juno's great uncle (not a Michael) who was killed in Burma in January 1945.
