Friendship Theme Analysis

“I won’t be flying again, will I? […]”

Dympna stood smoking calmly in the evening sunlight and watched Maddie for a while. Then she said, “There’s going to be air work for girls in this war. You wait. They’re going to need all the pilots they can get fighting for the Royal Air Force. That’ll be the young men, some of them with less training than you’ve got now, Maddie. And that’ll leave the old men, and the women, to deliver new aircraft and carry their messages and taxi their pilots. That’ll be us.”

He wanted to know, then, why I was choosing to write about myself in the third person. Do you know, I had not even noticed I was doing it until he asked.

The simple answer is because I am telling the story from Maddie’s point of view, and it would be awkward to introduce another viewpoint character at this point. It is much easier writing about me in the third person than it would be if I tried to tell the story from my own point of view. I can avoid all my old thoughts and feelings. It’s a superficial way to write about myself. I don’t have to take myself seriously—or, well, only as seriously as Maddie takes me.

It’s like being in love, discovering your best friend.

She heard a lot of cursing from the front before the pilot pulled himself together and reset his course. Then she heard his sheepish “Thanks, mate.”

Thanks, mate. Maddie hugged herself with pride and pleasure. I’m one of them, she thought. I’m on my way to France. I might as well be operational.

I think her actual last words were “I am glad to die for my country.” I can’t say I honestly believe such sanctimonious twaddle. Kiss me, Hardy. The truth is, I like “Kiss me, Hardy” better. Those are fine last words. Nelson meant that when he said it. Edith Cavell was fooling herself. Nelson was being honest.

So am I.

Julie has vanished.

It’s true she made her first meeting—Tues. 12 Oct., the day after we got here, but then she simply disappeared as if she’d never been in France. Today’s the 21st. She’s been missing over a week.

I understand now why her mother plays Mrs. Darling and leaves the windows open in her children’s bedrooms when they’re away. As long as you can pretend they might come back, there’s hope. I don’t think there can be anything worse in the world than not knowing what’s happened to your child—not ever knowing.

“I know what they’ll say. Silly girl, no brains, too soft, can’t trust a woman to do a man’s work. They only let us fly operational aircraft when they get desperate. And they’re always harder on us when we botch something.” All true, and what I said next was true too, but a bit petty—“You even get to keep your BOOTS and mine are BURNT.”

We were flying low over the long sands at Holy Island, and it was beautiful, but the plane kept trying to climb and I was fighting and fighting to keep it down. Just like the Lysander. Scared and worried and tired all at once, angry at the sky for being so beautiful when we were in danger of crashing. Then Julie, sitting alongside me, said, “Let me help.”

In the dream the Puss Moth had side-by-side dual controls like a Tipsy, and Julie took hold of her own control column and gently pushed the nose forward, and suddenly we were flying the plane together.

All the pressure was gone. Nothing to be afraid of, nothing to battle against, just the two of us flying together, flying the plane together, side by side in the gold sky.

Because that’s what it’s like, schoolmates being guillotined as spies. I didn’t understand before—really didn’t understand. Being a kid and worrying that a bomb might kill you is terrible. But being a kid and worrying that the police might cut your head off is something else entirely. I haven’t words for it. Every fresh broken horror is something I just didn’t understand until I came here.

Julie was next.

Suddenly she laughed wildly and gave a shaking yell, her voice high and desperate.

“KISS ME, HARDY! Kiss me, QUICK!”

Turned her face away from me to make it easier.

And I shot her.

I saw her body flinch—the blows knocked her head aside as though she’d been thumped in the face. Then she was gone.

Gone. One moment flying in the green sunlight, then the sky suddenly gray and dark. Out like a candle. Here, then gone.

Her gardens are full of roses—sprawling, old tangled bushes, quite a few of them autumn-flowering damasks with their last flowers still nodding and drooping in the rain. […] The flowers are sodden and dying in the December rain, but the sturdy bushes are still alive, and will be beautiful someday in the spring, if the German army doesn’t mow them down like the ones in the Ormaie town square.

What’s strange about the whole thing is that although it’s riddled with nonsense, altogether it’s true—Julie’s told our story, mine and hers, our friendship, so truthfully. It is us. We even had the same dream at the same time. How could we have had the same dream at the same time? How something so wonderful and mysterious be true? But it is.

And this, even more wonderful and mysterious, is also true: when I read it, when I read what Julie’s written, she is instantly alive again, whole and undamaged. With her words in my mind while I’m reading, she is as real as I am. Gloriously daft, drop-dead charming, full of bookish nonsense and foul language, brave and generous. She’s right here. Afraid and exhausted, alone, but fighting. Flying in silver moonlight in a plane that can’t be landed, stuck in the climb—alive, alive, ALIVE.

“You never gave any to Julie.”

“Never gave any to Julie!” Engel gave an astonished bark of laughter. “I damn well gave her half my salary in cigarettes, greedy little Scottish savage! She nearly bankrupted me. Smoked her way through all five years of your pilot’s career!”

“She never said! She never even hinted! Not once!”

“What do you think would have happened to her,” Engel said coolly, “if she had written this down? What would have happened to me?”

“They let us bury everyone at last,” she told me. “Most are up there by the bridge. But I was so angry about those poor girls, those two lovely young girls left lying there in the dirt for four days with the rats and the crows at them! It’s not right. It is not natural. So when we buried the others I had the men bring the girls here—”

Julie is buried in her great-aunt’s rose garden, wrapped in her grandmother’s first Communion veil, and covered in a mound of damask roses.