Daughter of the sky

by Jr. Paul L. Briand

For her, war had been simply a matter of parades and brass bands and men in uniform. She had been unaware that Canada had been at war for four years. Like so many other Americans, especially women, she really didn’t know what war was like. The crippled soldiers made her feel guilty and ashamed. She decided she must do something to help.

That night she had a long talk with her mother. “I want to stay in Toronto,” she told her, “and help in the hospitals. It’s useless for me to go back to school.”

Mrs. Earhart tried to dissuade her daughter. “But you’re graduating this year, Melia,” the mother said. “You should graduate from school before you do anything.”

“I don’t care,” she answered. “I want to help. A diploma doesn’t mean anything; but what you do does. I’m old enough to know what I want to do, and I want to do something useful in this world.”

The mother had met this stubbornness before, when as a child Amelia had wanted such things as a flat-bellied sled, a football, a baseball bat. Mrs. Earhart relented: her daughter was of an age to make her own decisions, even if they did seem somewhat impulsive. She would have to learn for herself, now, and discover the consequences of her own acts.

Amelia started training under the Canadian Red Cross and soon qualified as a nurse’s aide. Her first assignment was to Spadina Military Hospital, a converted college building. With characteristic energy in meeting a new challenge, she scrubbed floors, made beds, and carried trays of food. She worked from seven in the morning until seven at night, with two hours off in the afternoon.

“Sister,” the patients would call to the slender girl in the white coif and the white starched uniform, “please rub my back.” Sister Earhart would rub backs—some of them lovely ones, she frankly admitted. “Sister, please bring some ice cream today instead of rice pudding.” Sister Amelia, remembering the rice puddings that came back untouched, bearing little crosses with the epitaph R.I.P., matched pennies with the help in the kitchen. With her winnings she bought ice cream for her patients.

Although Amelia found much satisfaction in her work as a nurse’s aide, there was another activity that attracted her as no other had. At first she had looked simply out of curiosity, but now she would go out to the edge of the city to Armor Heights whenever she had time off. She had become fascinated by the training planes and the way they took off and landed. She had seen and talked with some of the young beginning pilots at the hospital; they had crashed their planes through some mishap or other, and some of them had barely escaped death. Yet they were of unqualified good humor: they laughed and joked with one another about their accidents, and spoke gruesomely yet smilingly about an ambulance as a “meat wagon.” They were blasé and devil-may-care, and such an attitude toward life and death, so kindred to her own, intrigued her.

She wanted to know more about these young men and their business of flying. Despite their surface merriment, she wondered what it was that made them fly, even in the face of death. Certainly they realized the danger involved; if so, she reasoned to herself, there must be something beyond the danger that somehow lured the pilots into the air. She would have to find out for herself what it was.

Soon she ventured closer to the airport and the operations shack where she could watch the young men. They were Canadian, Scotch, Irish, American. She talked with some of those she had seen at the hospital either as patients or as visitors. She loved to watch their descriptions of various maneuvers; “hangar flying,” they called it. They simulated with their hands the best way to execute a loop, or a barrel roll, or a lazy-eight. Their enthusiasm fired her with an irrepressible urge to go up.