大象传媒

I was adopted pretty much at birth in 1962 (Edinburgh) and brought up with my mother, Norah Jeanette Canavan (nee Alsop) and Bill Canavan in Findhorn, Moray.
My father was a Met officer or weatherman stationed at RAF Kinloss and I never really considered why we lived there. I knew my mother was from Surrey and Essex, Dad from Fife, but they had met in Bahrain. I guessed it was just one station among many..
However, my mother died in 1977, and my father in 1985, and only after that did I discover why we lived in the far north of Scotland.
I decided one day to go through some of my mothers posessions, which she tended to store and found a small pack of folded letters and something slightly bulkier, wrapped in a length of blue ribbon. These were letters to my mother dated 1940, some time before she and my father met. Unfolding them one at a time I read about a love affair between a young nurse at St Barts Hospital named Norah, and a Sergeant Pilot in the NZAF called Bruce Wisely, who was stationed at RAF Kinloss in Moray, and was flying raids over Italy and Germany. The letters were full of recollections about local places they had visited during his leave- places I knew so well from growing up but never knew how far before my mother knew them. They also had cartoons depicting himself as the 'Saint' - one in particular showing German troops running away from him at his downed plane, shouting 'Hilfe! it's the Saint!'
The last letter told how operations were coming up and there would be a communications silence for a while. A newspaper clipping told how the Bomber command had launched raids over Milan and Turin. 3 planes didn't return. This sentence was ringed in her characteristic turquoise ink, and labelled BRUCE.
His blue grey winged NZAF shoulder flashes were the last item in the little bundle. Nothing else.
It showed me how events that may be inconsequential in peacetime, can have a powerful poignancy in war, and the emotional tie my mother had with the area, even after long service in the middle east during the rest of the war, may well have drawn her back to raise us as her family there.
I still have no idea if my father knew.

Donald Canavan

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