Ann-Marie MacDonald: Way the Crow Flies

He watches the young men jog away under the brutal accumulated heat of afternoon. He’s been there. Here. Wore the coveted “white flash”—a triangle of cloth inserted in the front of the wedge cap to signify aircrew in training. One of the “Brylcreem boys,” irresistible to the fair sex. He did his ground training, sweated over an instrument panel in a classroom, surrounded by a cyclorama of painted landscape and horizon, trying not to “crash” the Link trainer — an ingenious little flight simulator still in use — drawing the hood over its cockpit, flying blind, trust your instruments . They drilled it into you, take off into the wind, even on the throttle, hands, feet and head… . Speaking aloud the cockpit check, powering up for the first heart-pounding solo — God watches over your first solo, after that you’re on your own. And later, at the officers’ mess, legs still trembling, raising the glasses high, Here’s to being above it all .

Jack trained here, but he would have gone operational in the skies over Germany — Mühlheim, Essen, Dortmund. Mission after mission to the “land of no future,” as they called the Ruhr Valley, industrial heartland of the Third Reich, where an Allied bomber crew’s life expectancy was even shorter than usual. But the war is history. Many of these cadets are training as NATO pilots. They will be assigned to squadrons around the world. They may never see combat, but they will take turns on Zulu standby, ready to scramble and be airborne within minutes of the alarm, armed with nuclear bombs and missiles, knowing that, if the balloon goes up, it could all be over one way or another in a matter of hours. Not just for a flight crew, or for hundreds, even thousands of civilians on the ground. But for all of us. It’s a very different world now. Jack turns the wheel and the Rambler rolls into the shadow between two huge hangars.

Moments later they emerge onto a quiet expanse where concrete strips fan out to form a vast triangle within a triangle. The airfield. Perfectly still and baking.

Jack stops the car. Cuts the engine. Out on the runway, a shimmer of heat. “There’s the old scene of the crime,” he says. His tone is affectionate — a time-worn joke about a long-dead loved one. “Son of a gun,” he says. Shakes his head. Mimi watches him. He turns to her and winks. Can’t complain. He leans across and kisses her.

In the back seat the children look away, out at the airfield. Then Jack and Mimi are looking out too. It’s as though the four of them were at a drive-in. Silent picture in broad daylight. The liquid air in this heat, a blurred screen.

Madeleine blinks. This is where Dad trained as a pilot. This is where he crashed. Surveying the smooth runways, she experiences one of those mental jolts that mark the passage between being little, and being a kid. Until now, she has pictured Centralia in the middle of the war — gritty landing strips swarming with cheerful men in fleece-lined leather bomber jackets, cracking jokes, sharing smokes, fearless and uncomplaining. Bombs exploding around the airfield, Dad dodging and dashing to his airplane. Although she knew very well that Centralia was in Canada, one aspect of being little was her ability to place it nonetheless at the centre of European hostilities.

When you are little, you can believe two things at once. Madeleine often had to remind herself that her father had not been killed in the crash— how could he have been, when he is right here telling me the story of it? Yet somehow she had come to think of it not only as The Story of the Crash, but also as The Story of When Dad Was Killed in the War. Now she realizes the absurdity of the images she harboured, and is chilled at how the latter title used to float through her mind with no sense of fear, no sense even of contradiction. All part of the semi-hallucinatory world she inhabited when she was little. Five minutes ago. She looks out at the airfield and feels as though she were waking from a dream. There are no bullet-riddled airplanes, no craters in the concrete, there are certainly no Lancaster bombers or even the bulky Anson trainers that her father flew. There are no weapons at all. The old Spitfire anchored back at the gates is the closest thing to a combat aircraft on the base. For there, ranged on the tarmac, are Centralia’s main operational aircraft: Chipmunks.

Cheerful little yellow training machines. Cadets get their first taste of the wild blue in the cockpit of a de Havilland Chipmunk, then work their way up to sleek Sabres, Voodoos and CF-104 fighters, or hefty Hercules transports and Yukons. But not in Centralia. This is a Primary Flying School. And a Central Officers’ School. With a Language School, an Engineering School and a Supply School, the whole place is one big school.

Centralia plays its role in the web of NATO defence but it is far from the Berlin Wall. Far from the Bay of Pigs, the Suez Canal, Cape Canaveral and the Russian Cosmodrome, far from it all. The Middle Of Nowhere. This is where Jack was awarded his medal: the Air Force Cross. For valour, courage and devotion to duty whilst flying, though not in active operations against the enemy .

The government built Centralia in 1942, part of Prime Minister Mackenzie King’s vision of a vast network of aircrew training bases that prompted President Roosevelt to call Canada “the aerodrome of democracy.”

Canada was one-third of the great North Atlantic Triangle, poised between Britain and the United States. This triangle worked in cunning ways. Under the Lend-Lease plan, many of the airplanes were built in the U.S. — “the arsenal of democracy”—but until the Americans entered the war the planes could not be flown into Canada without violating the United States Neutrality Act. So pilots would fly the new aircraft to Montana or North Dakota and land just shy of the border. Only feet away, a team of horses waited on the Canadian side. The airplane was hitched up and hauled into Canada, then flown to RCAF stations to supply the British Commonwealth Air Training Plan.

Recruits from all over the Commonwealth — Britain and every corner of its former empire — and many American flyboys, before they had their own war, came to Canada. Far from the front lines and out of range of German bombers, over a hundred thousand aircrew were trained — pilots, wireless operators, air gunners and navigators. They got their wings and fed the skies overseas, where they died in droves — most of them on night bombing missions, seven to a crew, in broad moonlight.

At that time Centralia was a Service Flying Training School, last stop before operational training in England, followed by the real thing. Jack was ready to go to England when he pinwheeled in his twin-engine Anson and exploded in the field south of the landing strip. Just short of the ditch. You can see the fringe of longer grass out beyond the taxiway. They pinned a gong on him for valour because he had done the right thing. It felt like reflex at the time but, as it turned out, Jack had made a courageous decision in the air, though not in active operations against the enemy .

Last April, when he got his posting notice, Jack laughed. Centralia. Son of a gun. Considered asking for an extension of his European tour of duty, but when he told Mimi, she said, “I want to go home, Jack.” In all the years of their marriage they had spent only four in their own country. She said, “I want our next baby to be born in Canada.” He smiled, needing no more persuasion than her desire for a third child. She loved Europe, but it was time. Time for the kids to know their country. Time, he knew, although she didn’t say, to put some distance between them and the Cold War. When the Wall had gone up last summer, she had said, “We’re too far from home.”