The Future Homemakers of America. Laurie Graham

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      We were just finishing up dinner, Crystal wriggling in her chair, wanting to get down and play, Vern waving his fork around, last piece of fried potato getting cold while he told me about some new Pratt & Whitney turbojet that could take you to over 1,000mph, when the phone rang. It was Betty.

      ‘Now, listen,’ she said. ‘Here’s the latest. They’re taking the king to London on Monday, along the railroad, travelling real slow, so folks can pay their respects. And here’s the best bit: it’ll be going right by here, no more’n a few miles away, and Ed says I can go, just as long as I’m home in time for the girls. So, could you drive down, tell Gayle and Audrey, and I’ll call up Lois? I thought I’d throw a coffee tomorrow, so we can plan what we’re gonna wear?’

      I said, ‘Betty, that’s easy. Unless there’s a sudden change in the climate I’ll be wearin Vern’s duck field-jacket and his five-buckle snow boots. Heck, I might just see if we still got an Alaska-issue comforter. Get myself sewed up inside it.’

      ‘Peggy Dewey!’ she said. ‘Shame on you! The queen’s gonna be looking right out of that train, and Princess Margaret. We have to do this thing right. I think just a touch of mourning. A little black hat, maybe, or a pair of gloves. Jeepers, we’re gonna be seen by royalty.’

      Vern thought I was crazy. He was all wrapped round me, after lights out, trying to keep me warm and get what he figured he was owed seeing he was gonna be three nights away, standing the duty.

      ‘What you wanna do that for?’ he said. ‘Standin’ out there, ketchin yer death. Be a bunch a breeds there, too. You seen some of them locals? Bunch a freaks. Now, you gonna get outta that passion-killer so we can mess around a little?’

      Messing around was Vern’s main interest in life, after his baby, with her static thrust of 3,750lb. And Crystal, of course. He loved throwing her up in the air till she screamed. Arm-wrestling with her, pretending to let her win.

      ‘Did you know kings and queens bunk down in separate quarters?’ I got to thinking about that again, after we’d messed around.

      ‘Jeez, Peg,’ he said, ‘I was just dozing off.’ He made himself cosy again, hogging all the covers. ‘Who cares?’ he said. ‘Bunch a throwbacks, sitting round in robes.’

      First time I saw Vern he was dancing with a girl, couldn’t have been more than four feet ten. She was looking him in the belly-button and he was giving me the eye over her head. He did look cute in his Blues. Still, I should have known better. My sister Connie married the army and that was a five-minute wonder.

      Soon as Vern knew I had fallen with Crystal he done the decent thing and my folks were happy to see the back of me, twenty-two and still no sign of any Hollywood screen-test. We were married in August, in the chapel on the base, his folks come down from Costigan, first and last time they ever left Maine, and we had an arch of sabres and shrimp hors-d’oeuvre and the whole nine yards. November he got orders to Ladd Field, Alaska.

      Crystal come along in a big hurry, waters busted in the mall at Topperwein and my mom grinding her teeth every time I got a pain, telling me how this was only the start of my troubles. Nine pounds eleven ounces, she weighed, and she was the living image of her daddy, only he didn’t get to see her till she was nearly four months old.

      We landed at Elmendorf and while I was waiting for the transport up to Ladd, looking for a place to warm the baby’s bottle, a girl come up to me, little newborn scrap in her arms and another one at foot, and she says to me, ‘Why, Peggy Shea! It is you. I’m not usually wrong about a face, but you’re carrying a few extra pounds these days.’

      Last time I remembered seeing Betty Glick was when Future Homemakers catered a Mother-Daughter Spaghetti Supper for the Class of ’42, and she was in charge, in her sweetheart apron, giving her orders, little piggy eyes and a real homely face.

      She already knew Ladd. They’d been on the base nearly a year and she’d just been back to Texas for the birth of little Sherry. So we were a marriage made in heaven, me not knowing what in the world I was going to and Betty never happier than when she was showing somebody the ropes.

      Four years of marriage and motherhood had left its stamp on her. She’d lost her puppy fat and got herself a permanent too. She seemed real grown up, compared to the way I felt, but then, I think Betty was born grown up. And she was so proud of her Ed. I never thought he was all that. Everything about him was kinda hard and square, even his head. Lois reckoned he was made outta sheet metal.

      ‘I swear,’ she used to say, ‘Ed Gillis was not born of woman. I think they just punched in a few rivets and rolled him off the line at Boeing.’

      Me and Vern were okay, when he was around – which wasn’t much. They were putting in long hours, training on the Superfortress, and then when he did get a 96 he liked to go off fishing. Now I think back on it, we didn’t hardly know each other.

      ‘Love ya,’ he used to say, when he was drifting off to sleep. ‘Whoever y’are.’

      So I started hanging out with Betty Gillis, née Glick, picking things outta the Sears catalogue and clipping recipes for tuna bake and generally raising hell. Summer nights up there, when it never gets dark, if Vern and Ed were standing the duty, I’d go round to her quarters, tuck Crystal in with Deana and Sherry, and we’d sit out front, drink iced tea and wonder what became of all those other big shots from Topperwein High.

      Audrey I met later on, when we rotated through Kirtland. She rang my doorbell, told me there was a coffee klatsch at the Officers’ Wives’ Club and signed me up for the Blood Drive. Wouldn’t take no for an answer on either score.

      You could go to some of those wives’ clubs not knowing another soul and come away in the same condition, none of the in-crowd being inclined to get off their backsides and welcome a newcomer. But I’ll say this for Audrey: she had an open and friendly way about her. She’d stride across any room in her white bucks and make herself known to lonesome strangers.

      She was married to Lance Rudman and they made a handsome pair. They were the kind of people knew where they’d come from and where they were going. Lois called them the Class Presidents.

      Lo came on the scene while we were stationed at Kirtland too. She was married to Herb Moon. He was kinda dopey-looking, seemed slow on the uptake, except when he climbed into the cockpit of a B-50. Up there, so I heard, he was one cool customer.

      ‘Life’s a bitch,’ she said, when she found out we’d done a tour in Alaska. ‘Herb woulda loved that. All that rugged scenery and weather and stuff. ’Stead of all those cans of Dinty Moore I been feeding him, he coulda bagged himself a whole caribou. But no. He just had to go an’ draw Hickam Field, Hawaii. Heaven on earth, girls. You ain’t had a rope of Hilo violets hung round your neck, you ain’t lived. Papaya juice. Pineapples. Mangoes. I tell you something. Herb may not be no dreamboat, but that man took me to paradise, no mistake.’