A funny thing happened along the way, though. Unlike my mum, who never once doubted the sincerity of my desire to be a pilot and fly, who never once questioned my habit of returning home from the library with a hefty stack of war books, I began to notice that other people—nice people, well-meaning people—found something about my interests a tad… off. I’m sure it was a perfectly innocent question in their mind, usually revealed with a subtle eyebrow raise and a puzzling curiosity behind the eyes as they looked me up and down. But it’s a look I’ve seen enough times by now to recognize. A question I still encounter as a grown woman and a published author.
“She’s such a nice girl—why is she so interested in war?”
I get a similar look for my airplane obsession, and since the two are rather inextricably intertwined for me now, I feel I can’t address one without the other. I love talking about Spitfires and Mustangs and Hurricanes. Put me at a table with a crowd of older men, and we’ll have plenty to discuss fondly. We’ve read the same books, watched the same films, know the same facts. And you should see their expressions when they quiz me on Second World War airplane trivia and I know the answers! I’m hardly an expert (an armchair historian who has mild ADD and a difficult time remembering specifics), but I’ve spent the better part of my life reading memoirs and manuals, chasing a taste of what it might have actually been like to soar with wings in the golden age of flight. I know enough to scoot quietly under the radar.
I’ll admit, though, when I was younger and put on the spot about my interests, I wasn’t quite sure how to explain myself. I wanted to be a pilot. I enjoyed war stories. I was a hopeless romantic who dreamed of true love. These disparate parts felt entirely natural, but still made me feel like some kind of novelty, or worse, an anomaly. Looking back now, I think I know the answer I couldn’t quite articulate as a teen. I wasn’t fascinated with war itself. Not the ugly parts, at least. But I was fascinated by the lives of other young people, not much older than I, who’d “danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings” and also found themselves a breath away from death, learning to both fly and kill at impossible heights. Flying itself is no easy feat. I was given the controls of an airplane once, right as we were hurtling up off a runway, and let me tell you—all of that reading did literally zippo to prepare me for the actual moment of going airborne! Every muscle froze, my heart pounding, hands sweaty on the controls, and the only reason I’m alive today is because the pilot beside me did most of the hard work. (Okay, he did all of it.) My dreamy vision of “natural instinct” disappeared as soon as our wheels left the tarmac. Still, I definitely gained a more visceral appreciation for the courage it took the young pilots in my history books to fly into deadly skies with mere hours of training. There were no fancy computers in those WW2 airplanes. Pilot skill alone kept the whole thing aloft—hands and feet and eyes working in tandem—along with a few weapons to be aimed accurately. Then add in someone else in another airplane, chasing right behind with their own guns, and it’s getting pretty extraordinary.
I’ll confess, I’m not sure I’d have made it more than a few hours. Which might be why all of my childhood daydreams on the swing-set had me parachuting out of my aircraft …
In any case, I think it was this twin fascination that captured my younger self so completely: the allure of the thrilling sky and the tragedy of early death. When you’re a teenager, still confined to the established boundaries prescribed for you by adults, there is little that moves you more than the reckless desire to be free, at last, and the heart-tingling terror of not actually getting to reach that moment in life. Many of the young pilots I read about didn’t get their chance at adventure and love. They chose to sacrifice it for a greater good, and that was deeply convicting to me. Often, people seem to miss, at first glance, what our interests truly say about us. Most of us don’t love things just for the face-value reasons. We’re diving deeper, reaching for what’s pulsing beneath the surface, some question or curiosity that is unique to us alone. We can’t explain it, but if we chase it, our life begins to feel more whole and complete, all the disparate pieces come together at last.