Becoming Clementine: A Novel

by Jennifer Niven

  I hope you will write to me if you can at Harrington Airfield, Station 179, attention Velva Jean Hart, WASP, to let me know where he is. If you can’t tell me, I hope you’ll at least write me and let me know he’s okay.

  Thank you very much.

  Yours truly,

  Velva Jean Hart

  THREE

  As we touched down at Station 179, a black-bellied B-24 took off, its nose pointed south. Helen and I sat strapped into the fuselage of our B-24, which was a retired D model, hollow and rattling like a bag of old bones. We sat with Lieutenant Alden and the four other pilots from Prestwick, who hadn’t said a word to us since we boarded the plane.

  After the engine growled to a stop, the men didn’t even wait, but shoved on out ahead. Helen looked at me and said, “Welcome to England.”

  There was a hum about Station 179 that made me think of the way Fair Mountain hummed after a rainstorm. This was the home of the U.S. 801st Bombardment Group, which was also called the Carpetbaggers. Men in uniform covered the ground like ants. I didn’t see a single girl anywhere.

  As we lined up on the runway, collecting our things, sorting our gear, Lieutenant Alden and the others walked past as if they didn’t want to be seen with us. Most of the other men, the ones already on base, stopped and stared, and an officer came bounding toward us. The air was dank and misty, and I could feel my hair begin to curl. Except for the control tower, the buildings were low and long, looking like grain silos lying on their sides, half-buried in the ground. The officer was ruddy faced, with a chin that faded into his neck. He said, “This way to the operations block.”

  He pointed out buildings as we went—the sick quarters; the mess hall; the PX, or postal exchange; the Service Club; Tent City, an enormous area just off of Harrington-Kelmarsh Road covered with row after row of tents, some five hundred in all; and headquarters, or HQ, which was as ugly a place as the others. A railway line ran along the western edge of the airfield, but the officer said you couldn’t see Station 179 from the trains because Harrington was a secret, self-contained town, which was why it was camouflaged.

  It was what they called a Class A airfield, which meant it was a base for heavy bombers. Instead of grass runways, concrete runways joined and crossed, and the main one was almost a mile long. Planes waited on the edges—an A-26, a C-47, a smaller plane I didn’t recognize, and twenty or so B-24 Liberators, a few painted camouflage green, the others painted black.

  Helen and I were taken straight to the base commander, Lieutenant Colonel Heflin, a serious-looking man with brown hair swept up in the pointy tuft of a Kewpie doll. His second-in-command, Major Fish, had thick black hair and thick black eyebrows and a down-turned mouth that made him look like a brook trout.

  Lieutenant Colonel Heflin welcomed us and told us he was glad to have us, and the whole time he seemed to be off somewhere in his head. I thought a man like this must have more to do in one day than the President. He said, “We’re glad you’re here. As you know, we have a shortage of pilots. As soon as we run FBI checks, we’ll clear you for takeoff.”

  I looked at Helen and she looked at me. I thought: What in the world is an FBI check? And why would they do one on me? I knew the FBI was the Federal Bureau of Investigation because before he wanted to be a movie cowboy or a gold panner or Red Terror, Russian spy, Johnny Clay had decided he would go to Washington, D.C., and become a lawman. I wondered if this FBI check was something the lieutenant colonel was making up just to keep us from flying or if it was a real thing that every pilot had to go through.

  Lieutenant Colonel Heflin said, “We’ll notify you as soon as you’re cleared.” And he stood, which meant he was done. Major Fish opened the door for us, and Helen went on out. I stood, still facing the lieutenant colonel, who said, “You’re dismissed, pilot.”

  I said, “Thank you, sir. But I have a question.” Helen hovered in the doorway, trying to decide whether to come back in.

  Major Fish sat down in one of the hard-backed chairs and folded his hands across his stomach. He looked back and forth between the lieutenant colonel and me.

  “Yes?”

  “My brother Technical Sergeant Johnny Clay Hart, of the 101st Airborne, is missing. No one’s heard from him since winter of last year, and the last letter he wrote me was dated October 18, 1943. He was supposed to jump on Normandy, but he didn’t. He hasn’t been with his unit for a long time. I was hoping you might help me find out where he is.”

  Major Fish stared right at Lieutenant Colonel Heflin, his mouth twitching.

  The lieutenant colonel said, “I’m sorry, but I can’t help you.” He sat down and began rummaging through the papers on his desk.

  I said, “The commanding officer at Bluie, the base in Greenland—a man named Colonel Burns—he looked at the telegraph reports and did some checking, but he couldn’t turn up anything. I was hoping maybe you could—”

  Lieutenant Colonel Heflin barked, “I’m sorry, Miss Hart.” My eyes started stinging, and for one horrible moment I thought I might cry.

  Instead I pulled myself up to my full height, which was almost five feet seven inches tall, and I said, “Thank you, sir.” And then I walked out of the office, trying not to see the smile on Major Fish’s face or the way Lieutenant Colonel Heflin shook his head and rolled his eyes. I heard their voices as I shut the door—rumble, rumble, rumble, then laughing.

  Outside, the sky was dull and thick with clouds. Helen said, “That went well.”

  I said, “I had to ask.”

  A Jeep rolled past carrying two women and two men. The women were attractive and young. They were laughing and smoking cigarettes and looked as if they were out for a Sunday drive. One of them caught my eye and I felt a chill. I’d never seen anyone look so cool and confident. I stood still as a statue, like I was carved out of stone or rooted into the earth like a tree—Helen’s voice in the distance, her hand tugging at my sleeve—watching them until they drove out of sight.

  At four thirty in the afternoon, a large American car with curtained windows arrived at Station 179. Helen and I stood outside our Nissen hut—one of the sideways silos—where we were bunking with some Red Cross girls who were stationed there. We watched as three men in paratrooper uniforms got out of the back of the car.

  The men were met by officers who led them to one of the other huts. The three men were young, so young, and they carried duffel bags with their names on them. As they walked past, one of them looked our way and I caught his eye, just for a second.

  Helen said, “Look at them.” And I knew what she meant—these were just boys from farms and mountains and little cities and big cities, which they might never see again. I thought, Any one of them could be Johnny Clay, and thinking it made my heart drop low in my chest.

  We didn’t see the men the rest of the day. We looked for them at mess, but there wasn’t a single sign of them. After we finished eating, Helen and I started back toward our barracks, and suddenly we spotted the men coming out of the same hut they’d gone into earlier. This time they were dressed in helmets and large padded gray-green jumpsuits that made them look like giants. The same officers were walking with them, and they put the men into the same car with the curtained windows and drove them off toward the airfield.

  I said, “Let’s go!” And I grabbed Helen’s hand and we started running. The airfield was probably half a mile from the mess hall. We ran as fast as we could, getting there in time to see the three men climb into one of the black B-24 Liberators, its engines already churning. Behind it, lined up on the runway and the airfield, were three more B-24s, ready to go. We stood, trying to catch our breath, wind whipping our hair around—I could feel a storm brewing in the distance—and watched as the doors closed behind them and the officers, still on the ground, stepped away. The Liberator rolled down the runway and took off, followed by another and another and another, into the night sky, the moon shining bright as fox fire.

  Sometime before dawn it started raining and it didn’t stop
for three days. Early in the morning, a car with curtained windows drove onto the base carrying three men, followed an hour later by three cars carrying ten men, only all the planes were grounded, so no flights went out that night or the night after. The newspapers said it was the worst storm in forty years. The reports from Normandy were gloomy—eight-foot waves slamming the beaches, grounding eight hundred Allied vessels and stopping five hundred others from getting where they needed to go. The Army Air Forces couldn’t fly in to drop reinforcements, and the navy couldn’t get through to make deliveries, which meant the six hundred thousand troops that were waiting were short of supplies and help and ammunition.

  On the fourth day, the rain started to let up, and by the afternoon of the fifth day, June 24, the sky was gloomy but dry. We were called into the sick bay and given physicals by one of the Red Cross nurses. And then she gave us shots: tetanus, typhoid fever, malaria, and dengue fever. We would get the rest—smallpox, cholera, typhus, yellow fever—in a couple of days. She said, “These may make you feel a little bad later.”

  We were too sick to do anything the rest of the day but lie in our beds and sleep. I was dizzy and hot and mad at myself for coming here and dragging Helen with me when I didn’t know what they were planning to do with us. I’d never even heard of dengue fever, but it sounded horrible. Like something one of the Lowes would have up on Fair Mountain. Like something you would get from a possum.

  From her cot, Helen said, “Well, I’m bored to death. I might just die of boredom. Let’s study our French before I lose my mind.”

  Helen had learned to speak French during her year of college and, before that, at Miss Porter’s School for Girls, which was a fancy boarding school where her mother had gone, and her mother before that. She took me through different words and phrases, just as she’d been doing since Camp Davis, all things she said I should know when and if we ever got to France. Afterward, we went over our maps of France, trying to learn the names and coordinates of every town.

  I said, “That team of four people in the Jeep. The two men and two women. They weren’t dressed like soldiers, but they were important. I think they were spies.”

  Helen said, “Oh, Hartsie.”

  I said, “What?”

  She said, “All this spy talk.”

  I said, “What else could it be?”

  She was quiet. One of the good things about Helen was that she didn’t always insist on being right. If you talked to her long enough about something, sometimes she came around. She said, “Well, my mother did know a girl at Miss Porter’s who said her mother was a spy in the First World War. Mother said she was never sure whether or not this girl was telling the truth, but she figured she didn’t have any reason to lie.”

  I thought about how Johnny Clay and I used to play Spies on a Mission, which was our favorite game when we were growing up. I was Constance Kurridge and he was Red Terror, and we would creep through the woods as silent as haints. We were the best spies for fifty miles.

  Hours later, I woke up to the dark, my cot shaking underneath me. I said in Helen’s direction, “What is it?”

  She said, “The drop. There’s a drop tonight.” All flights over enemy territory were made during the moon periods when the weather was good. This was so pilots in the middle of the blackout could find their way by using rivers, lakes, railroad tracks, and towns as checkpoints. Helen’s voice was blurry. She said something else, but I couldn’t understand it because she was fading away into the darkness.

  I said, “I wonder where they’re going?” I closed my eyes again. My head was spinning right into the pillow, right into the floor. I said, “I wonder if they’ll come back?” And then I fell asleep.

  The next morning, one of the Red Cross girls was on her way out the door of the Nissen hut when she turned around and poked her head back in. She said, “There’s something out here for you all.”

  Helen propped herself up on one elbow and said, “Gosh, I hope it’s roses.” And we both laughed because that would be the last thing ever left on our doorstep at Harrington.

  I followed the nurse outside, my legs wobbly as an old man’s, and saw a stack of newspapers sitting in the dirt. It was starting to rain again. I said, “How do you know they’re for Helen and me?”

  She said, “Because some of the articles are circled.” She bent over to study the papers and then she picked them up. She straightened and frowned at me, and it was a sorry kind of frown. She was a nice girl. Mary Phillips, from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Before the war, she’d been a telephone operator. She said, “I just want you to know that the girls and I think what you and Helen are doing—what all of you girls are doing—is pretty damn swell.” I looked down at the newspapers, my eyes going right to the circled story. I flipped through each article in the stack and saw story after story marked with a black pen.

  “What is it, Hartsie? Why are you sitting here in the rain?” Helen leaned against the doorframe, rubbing her eyes. “God, what an awful day.”

  I kept flipping through the papers, and she sat down beside me, brushing the dirt off the step, pulling her knees in tight, and started reading over my shoulder.

  All the articles were about the WASP, some from recent newspapers, some from months ago. The latest one, dated June 23, had a headline that read: “WASP Bill Defeated.” It said that on June 21, the United States Congress met to discuss the WASP militarization bill. Male civilian pilots had been campaigning for months to fight the bill, and they were helped by reporters like Drew Pearson, who wrote regular columns for the Washington Post demanding that the WASP deactivate, and Time magazine, which had published an article called “Unnecessary and Undesirable” that said the program was too expensive and that men could have been trained more quickly. These articles were also in the stack.

  The hearing in Washington had lasted less than one hour, and when it was over, 188 to 169 voted against the militarization bill. The House recommended “immediate discontinuance of the WASP training program.” Jacqueline Cochran was told that all current students—the ones already at Avenger Field—could finish their training. But five days later, a brand-new class of WASP recruits had to turn around and leave Texas as soon as they arrived, paying their own way home.

  Velva Jean Hart, WASP

  Harrington Airfield

  Station 179

  Northamptonshire, England

  June 23, 1944

  Dear Velva Jean Hart,

  I am sorry, but we have no record that Technical Sergeant Johnny Clay Hart was ever at Upottery.

  I wish you all the best in locating your brother.

  Sincerely,

  Ann-Marie Paget

  Secretary to General Maxwell Davenport Taylor,

  Commander 101st Airborne Division

  FOUR

  On Monday, July 3, in the early hours of the morning and on into the day, the B-24 Liberators returned to base, one by one. Around noon, a bomber limped into Harrington with over a thousand bullet holes shot through it. Officers, pilots, crew, and nurses came hurrying out of the control tower, the tents, the lodges, the Nissen huts, HQ, and the sick bay, rushing over the concrete of the airfield to look at the B-24. A gaping hole had been torn into one side of the bomber, and the glass of the windshield was splintered into a million little lines and rivers running this way and that, up and down and across. The engine was smoking, and one of the wings was cut in half like someone had chopped it with an axe. Before they could talk to anyone, the crew was driven away by a group of officers.

  Lieutenant Alden and another pilot stood on the flight line, dressed in their flight suits. Helen and I walked up, standing just behind them.

  Without looking at us, Lieutenant Alden said, “You need to remember something and really think it over. Back home, you may have been a WASP, ferrying planes and what have you, flying them from base to base.” The way he said it made it sound like all we’d done was sit around and go to tea parties. “But this is a war zone. No one was shooting at you.” I
thought of the gunners firing at our airplanes during target towing practice. “No one was trying to kill you.” I thought about the sabotage on our planes—sugar in the fuel tank, sand in the carburetor, rudder cables cut in two, my friend Sally, trapped in her A-24, burning to death because someone had tampered with the canopy safety latch. “But here, you’re a weapon of war.”

  That afternoon, we were called into Lieutenant Colonel Heflin’s office, where we sat in the straight-backed chairs across from him, learning that our FBI checks had come back fine and we were now cleared for duty.

  The lieutenant colonel said, “You will be flying to France, dropping off supplies or teams of men, and then returning back to base. I know you both check out on the B-24, but I’m having Lieutenant Colonel Dickerson go over the bombers you’ll be flying since they’ve been modified for our purposes. When flying, you’ll wear your WASP uniforms. If your plane is shot down, you’re to keep your uniforms on because they entitle you to POW protection under the Geneva convention, even if you aren’t technically military.”

  He leaned forward over his desk, clasping his hands together and resting on his elbows like he was about to pray. He said, “It’s not too late. We’re asking a lot of you. We ask a lot of any man who goes up right now.” He didn’t say it, but we knew what it was he wasn’t saying: We’re asking even more of you because you’re women.

  I waited for Helen to tell him we were sorry, that we just couldn’t do it, that we were taking our B-17 and flying back to Camp Davis, North Carolina. I waited for me to say something, to turn this around so that it had never happened, so that it never would. Helen uncrossed her legs and recrossed them and stared unblinking at Lieutenant Colonel Heflin. Neither of us said a word.