The Girl in the Blue Beret
Read The Girl in the Blue Beret Online
Authors: Bobbie Ann Mason
Tags: #Fiction, #Literary, #Historical, #War & Military
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BOBBIE ANN MASON
FICTION
NANCY CULPEPPER
AN ATOMIC ROMANCE
ZIGZAGGING DOWN A WILD TRAIL
MIDNIGHT MAGIC
FEATHER CROWNS
LOVE LIFE
SPENCE + LILA
IN COUNTRY
SHILOH AND OTHER STORIES
NONFICTION
ELVIS PRESLEY
CLEAR SPRINGS
THE GIRL SLEUTH
NABOKOV’S GARDEN
Copyright © 2011 by Bobbie Ann Mason
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Random House, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
RANDOM HOUSE and colophon are
registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Mason, Bobbie Ann.
The girl in the blue beret: a novel / by Bobbie Ann Mason.
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-0-679-60494-5
1. World War, 1939–1945—Aerial operations—Fiction. 2. World
War, 1939–1945—Underground movements—Europe—Fiction.
I. Title.
PS3563.A7877G57 2011
813’.54—dc22 2010036861
Jacket design: Anna Bauer
Jacket photograph: Adoc-photos/Art Resource, NY
v3.1_r1
AUTHOR’S NOTE
My late father-in-law, co-pilot of an Allied bomber shot down by a German fighter plane over Belgium during the Second World War, owed his eventual escape from Occupied Europe to the help he received from members of the French Resistance, including a teenager he would remember as “the girl in the blue beret.” Inspired by my father-in-law’s wartime experience,
The Girl in the Blue Beret
is nonetheless a work of fiction: names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of my imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental and unintentional.
DEDICATED TO
MICHÈLE AGNIEL
AND TO THE MEMORY OF
BARNEY RAWLINGS
(1920–2004)
BLISS WAS IT IN THAT DAWN TO BE ALIVE,
BUT TO BE YOUNG WAS VERY HEAVEN!
—WILLIAM WORDSWORTH, “The Prelude”
Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Chapter 57
Chapter 58
Chapter 59
Chapter 60
ESCAPE
AND
EVASION
D
URING WORLD WAR
II, THOUSANDS OF ALLIED AVIATORS CRASHED OR
parachuted into Occupied Europe. A number of escape-and-evasion networks helped to hide them and send them safely back to their bases in England. Thousands of Europeans risked their lives by hiding the airmen in their homes, providing false identity papers, and smuggling them by sea to England or across the Pyrenees to Spain. Between 1942 and 1944, more than three thousand British and American downed flyers successfully evaded capture with the help of an unknown number of ordinary citizens, who risked being shot or sent to a concentration camp.
FLIGHT CREW
THE DIRTY LILY
Molesworth Airfield, Station 107, England
303RD BOMB GROUP, B-17G
SQUADRON 124
MISSION TO
F
RANKFURT
, G
ERMANY
January 31, 1944
| Captain | LAWRENCE WEBB |
| Co-pilot | MARSHALL STONE |
| Bombardier | AL GRAINGER |
| Navigator | TONY CAMPANELLO |
| Top-Turret Gunner , | JAMES FORD |
| Flight Engineer | |
| Radio Operator | BOB HADLEY |
| Ball-Turret Gunner | BOBBY REDBURN |
| Left Waist Gunner | HOOTIE WILLIAMS |
| Right Waist Gunner | CHICK COCHRAN |
| Tail Gunner | DON STEWART |
1.
A
S THE LONG FIELD CAME INTO VIEW, MARSHALL STONE FELT HIS
breathing quicken, a rush of doves flying from his chest. The landscape was surprisingly familiar, its contours and borders fresh in his memory, even though he had been here only fleetingly thirty-six years ago. Lucien Lombard, who had brought him here today, knew the field intimately, for it had been in his family for generations.
“It was over there beside that tree,
monsieur
,” Lucien said, pointing toward the center of the field, where an awkward sycamore hovered over a patch of unruly vegetation.
“There was no tree then,” Marshall said.
“That is true.”
They walked through the furrowed field toward the tree, Lucien’s sturdy brown boots mushing the mud, Marshall following in borrowed Wellingtons. He was silent, his memory of the crash landing superimposed on the scene in front of him, as if there were a small movie projector in his mind. The Flying Fortress, the B-17, the heavy bomber the crew called the
Dirty Lily
, had been returning from a mission to Frankfurt.
“The airplane came down just there,” said Lucien as they neared the tree.
Lucien was elderly—probably in his eighties, Marshall thought—but he had a strong, erect physique, and he walked with a quick, determined step. His hair was thin, nearly white, his face smooth and firm.
“Normally a farmer would not permit a tree to thrive in his field,” he said. “But this tree marks the site.”
Unexpectedly, Marshall Stone began to cry. Embarrassed, he turned his face aside. He was a captain of transatlantic jumbo jets, a man who did not show weakness. He was alarmed by his emotion.
Lucien Lombard nodded. “I know,
monsieur
,” he said.
In Marshall’s mind, the crumpled B-17 lay before him in the center of the field. He recalled that the plane had been lined up with the neatly plowed furrows.
