Your friend Rose has evaporated with them. I don’t know what else to tell you, Maddie.
What a miserable letter! And your last one to me was so full of encouragement and flying stories. I am afraid you will cry when you read this one. I wish I hadn’t mentioned the frozen children. But you know I would never be anything less than wholly honest with you.
Here is better news to end with – surprising, but positive at least. The Boy Nick has got married. I think it was partly a way for him to cope with losing Rose, but partly, it is true, he has found another lovely girl. His new bride is also American, a Red Cross worker who does counselling and social work for the troops. She is not made of the same strong stuff your Rose was, but to tell the truth the Boy Nick isn’t either. Maybe it’s as well they didn’t tie the knot last summer.
I am desperate for it to be over now, and to see you again and to be with you always.
Thine ain true
Jamie
This pretty book is all that’s left of Rose and her poetry. She’s written my name in the front – ‘A present from Maddie Brodatt’. The army nurses she was staying with at Camp Los Angeles found it in her camp bed. I should have sent it to her mother and father, I suppose, but I haven’t got the heart. I remember when I gave it to her, to write Celia’s accident report in.
Oh, Rose, Rose. Bloody, bloody hell.
I’ve lost you – lost another friend – ‘as if those warm wings and beating heart had never existed’. This war has taken my best friend and my bridesmaid from me in the space of a year. IT ISN’T FAIR.
Oh, Rose – when the US Air Force transport pilot from Camp Los Angeles dropped your notebook off at Operations in Hamble last September, for a long time I still hoped you’d turn up and I could give it back to you. I know it’s possible to crash-land in occupied Europe and make it out alive. I know.
So I find it impossible to ‘close the book’ – to accept that you’re not coming back. And just in case I’m right, I am going to leave your notebook and my letters for you to collect at the American Embassy in Paris. I think you’re as likely to end up there as anywhere, if you’re still alive. Your Uncle Roger is in on my plot and has already filled a safe-deposit box there with a little money for you and a letter from your family. He’s told the Embassy to put you up at the Ritz Paris until other arrangements are made for you. What it’s like to have relatives in high places! Not that it makes much difference to you now.
Writing to you like this makes me feel that you are still alive. It’s an illusion I’ve noticed before – words on a page are like oxygen to a petrol engine, firing up ghosts. It only lasts while the words are in your head. After you put down the paper or the pen, the pistons fall lifeless again.
If this message ever reaches you – I know you have family in England and plenty of loving friends and family back home in America – but my mother-in-law, Esmé Beaufort-Stuart, says that you have got a home from home with her as well and please to contact her without hesitation. It is a better address to leave than mine – at the moment I am still being sent all over everywhere with work, and I don’t know where I’ll be by the time this ever catches up with you. Esmé’s address, you probably know, is Craig Castle, Castle Craig, Aberdeenshire. That is pretty much also her telephone number, which I don’t actually know – I just ask the operator for Craig Castle when I ring them.
Esmé has always been generous about giving a home to waifs and strays and other exiles. There is a band of tinkers who stop on their riverbank every year for a month – Julie and Jamie were so familiar with them as children that they picked up their strange dialect! And then there are the evacuee lads from Glasgow, whom you’ve met – Esmé has actually adopted two of them now, though the others have gone home. She has also got a dozen wounded airmen convalescing there. For Esmé, I think, the war effort will continue for a while after the war has officially ended.
And, of course, there is me. I am one of her waifs and strays too. She would do anything for me, I think, so on my behalf and by her own invitation, you must consider Craig Castle one of your homes from home. Bring your friends.
That’s given me hope – a vision of you and a lot of other Rose-like people drinking coffee and singing songs from Girl Guide camp, while Esmé plays the piano, in the morning sunlight of the Little Drawing Room at Craig Castle.
Your fellow pilot and loving friend,
Maddie
PS Fliss and I had to go through your things like we did with Celia’s, and I kept your fuse – I wanted to keep something of yours. I don’t suppose you’ll ever want it back, but it seemed a bit horrible to return it to your Aunt Edie.
Oh, Rose – What happened to you?
Part 2
Ravensbrück
Rose Moyer Justice
Handwriting Sample, April 17, 1945
Paris, France
When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.
They told me to stop after I listed the ‘unalienable Rights’. By then I had written enough for them to tell it really was my handwriting, and I was crying so hard I could barely see the page. Life. Liberty. Happiness. Unalienable rights.
I can write again. Oh God! I can write again. All those months of not being able to write! Of not being allowed to write. More than six months of hiding pencil stubs in the hem of my dress, hiding chips of charcoal in my cheek, hiding torn shreds of newsprint in my shoes. Knowing I’d be shot if I were caught with any of it. And SO MUCH that I wanted to write. It seems like I have been a prisoner for so long.
I can write!
It feels dangerous – like stealing a plane. But it is my unalienable Right. And this is my own notebook, which they gave back to me in the American Embassy this morning, along with an enormous pile of cash from Uncle Roger and a temporary passport. The passport is made out in the name of Rose Moyer Justice; date of birth, 22 October 1925; place of issue, Paris; date of issue, 17 April 1945, today. I mean yesterday. And a photograph that Aunt Edie had sent them, a wallet-sized copy of my portrait in ATA uniform from last spring.