大象传媒

Although America never suffered direct attack, the war was present in every aspect of life. My mother, who lived outside of Philadelphia, close to where she had been born, always kept a set of kitchen canisters made of aluminium (as was usual in wartime) for flour, sugar, coffee, tea, and dripping. These had been wedding presents from a group of her college friends.
Mother married her first husband, Bow Kennedy, when she had just graduated from college, and he was a dashing young American AAF pilot. The kitchen canisters were among their most prized wedding presents, not because of their appearance or even for their sentimental value--but because her friends had pooled their ration coupons and each canister was full.
She had another curious item, a sort of art-deco cast aluminium dish, which she kept by her bedside, as an ashtray. When I asked her where she had got it, she said it was half of an aircraft piston chamber. Bow flew a number of missions over France and Germany; I believe he was a fighter pilot, probably based in Essex, and escorted bombers on occasion. His son, my half-brother, still has the panel from his plane which he brought back with him after it crashed in enemy territory--he himself was brought back by the timely arrival of some American troops.
Bow survived the war, and returned to his base in Alabama, while Mother remained with their two children at her mother's home in Pennsylvania, getting it ready for him to come home to. The day before he was due to be demobbed, she was cleaning the bathroom when the doorbell rang. It was a telegram, and in those days a telegram meant only one thing. Bow had been killed in a training flight. She went back to cleaning the bathroom--what else could she do? Some years later she met and married my own father, and was happy, but she never forgot Bow, and made sure his children never did.

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