Heritage by Miguel Bonnefoy

Author:Miguel Bonnefoy [Bonnefoy, Miguel]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Other Press
Published: 2022-05-24T00:00:00+00:00

* * *

—

This was the second war for a Lonsonier. By the time they arrived in London, the Luftwaffe had been bombarding the English ports for a year. Planes were attacking maritime convoys from Weymouth, the radar station at Ventnor had been put out of service and the mouth of the Thames was filling up with fuselage carcasses like an aviary littered with broken wings. Messes were set up in docks and on the outskirts of towns, with hundreds of aircrew coming and going. Saving fuel wherever they could, scorching the grass to dry it out, they had given up counting their losses. Far from home and family, Margot and Ilario soon saw that joining the Free French Forces would not be an easy matter. They spoke broken English and their Chilean qualifications were not recognized here; like all the other Latin Americans who took part in the Second World War, they had to lower their expectations.

Margot went through the phone book, calling everyone she could think of in the aviation world. Two weeks later, she was offered a position in “general services” – essentially cleaning and maintenance. Deprived, along with her fellow countrymen, of the chance of battlefield honors, Margot spent her days emptying the latrines, changing recruits’ sheets, peeling carrots and digging the eyes out of potatoes. She got used to the jargon, the bombers’ attitudes and colonels’ whims. She managed to get a transfer to a munitions factory where she worked eleven hours a day without leave, checking the Spitfire guns. Then she was set to work washing tubes and scrubbing parts with lye, at a point in the war when Latin American recruits were joining the RAF’s ranks in such numbers that the authorities decided to create a South American squadron.

As soon as her English was good enough to follow lessons, Margot was determined to complete the necessary 140 flight hours as a drogue operator to allow her to fly. She showed she could calculate positions and distances, navigate using dead reckoning and assess flight paths. She was soon called upon by the auxiliary transport ministry to play a role that would give her none of the glory, but all of the danger, in a conflict that already promised to stay long in everyone’s memory. She was allowed to fly, but only moving planes from place to place. It was around this time that she and Ilario sewed Chilean flags to the shoulders of their uniforms.

She spent the next two years moving planes between airfields so that pilots could fly them into battle. When she took her first flight in British airspace, it seemed to her that the sky was less pure than it was in Chile, the stars less joyful, the horizon less open, the towns encircled by black clouds like a shepherd surrounded by his flock. Having previously only flown the innocuous, jangling aircraft at flying schools, she now found herself piloting solid, powerful machines of war, built to destroy, whose fuselage was often pocked with gunshots.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.