Jack’s reply to them all had been, “We’ll see.”
The boy thought to himself, “What a silly answer,” but that seemed to be all the silent sailor man would say. He looked little enough like a sailor now, and not nearly as grand and imposing as when he had met the boy and his father in New York as they stepped off the train on their arrival from the West nearly a month ago. At that time he had appeared in his uniform of blue with gold braid and gold wings. As they had driven out from the station across the crowded city with its strange noises and bewildering lights, there had been time to do little more than notice the slim straightness of him.
His Dad had said to Jack, after the first greetings were over, “Well, here’s the young fellow I wrote you about. I couldn’t leave him out West, and besides he will be a great help around the hangar.”
And Jack had replied, as he shook hands, “One more Kiwi for our camp.”
“Right,” said Dad, “but I have had to make him a promise that he won’t be a Kiwi for long.”
Kiwi was a good enough name in its way, and it did seem to stick to him wherever Dad went. All his boy friends knew him as Snub but, of course, the boys knew so little about flying and few of them knew where the name of Kiwi came from.
Dad had told him that during the war—and Dad had been there, so he should know—all of the officers who did not fly had come to be known as Kiwis, named after a bird from Australia or New Zealand “which had wings but did not fly.”
So Kiwi he was. There seemed a promise in the name that one of these days he would learn to fly, for, after all, a Kiwi did have wings. It was something to start with, and on all the flights he had gone on with Dad he had kept his eyes open and now felt that he understood all that had to be done to control the plane.
Often when they had landed after a flight, old war-time friends of Dad’s would come over with a loud “Well, Skipper, how’s the boy doing? Going to send him off solo[[1]] soon?”