Sask. farm girl’s wartime experience
JENNI MORTIN Take a girl from a Saskatchewan farm and put her down in RAF Medmenham in England during the Second World War, interpreting aerial photographs taken over Germany and occupied France to help the bombers flying those dangerous skies.
Base your story on the real lives and experiences of young Canadian women who did just that, most effectively and in the greatest secrecy, and you have this strong new book by former Saskatoon reporter Elinor Florence.
The heroine of Bird’s Eye View, Rose Jollife, is also a reporter when the book opens, on the local paper in Touchwood, Saskatchewan. Her editor thinks Canada should stay out of the war, but idealistic Rose is dead keen to get into it and do her bit. She manoeuvres her way to England and joins the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force of the RAF.
As a Leading Aircraftwoman posted to photo reconnaissance, she ends up in RAF Medmenham, housed in a two-storey mansion in the beautiful English countryside. Her job is to develop, print and file the photographs taken by unarmed reconnaissance planes but her farm kid’s eye catches something in one photo of northern France in early spring that she has to take to her superiors.
This is a beautiful Saskatchewan moment in the book, for what Rose notices is that the rows in one recently seeded field are not straight! Her explanation of that from the farmer point of view leads to a second examination of the photo by the interpreters and the discovery that a German fuel depot had been set up there. It also leads to her chance to become an interpreter.
Florence’s description of this work is very clear and understandable, and she also makes clear the downside of the job: the incredible eye strain, the need for concentration, the stress when officers are waiting outside the room for answers and bombers may take off once those answers are obtained.
Even photo interpreters had private lives, of course, and Rose’s life takes a romantic twist when she falls in love with her married superior officer and they begin a series of secret rendezvous in a dingy London flat that she privately calls Bliss. Her talent for interpretation possibly does not apply to men, although she is close to her brother and a pilot friend from home.
The letters she writes to and receives from her parents on the farm near Touchwood keep her, and the book, grounded in Saskatchewan while she plays her part in the earth-shaking events going on in Europe. Although the denouement depends a little too much on an incredible coincidence, Bird’s Eye View is a fine and fascinating book.