“Not yet, Bob,” Aunt Lou scolded.
“No, no. It’s all right,” Dash said. “I have to report back in January,and the Wrens will tell me. I don’t know if I’ll ever get to do mechanic work again, but I’m sure there will be something.”
“I saw something that I think might interest you. It was in the paper.” Uncle Bob turned to her father. “Do you have last Saturday’s edition?”
Nodding, he left the room then returned withThe Oshawa Daily Times.Uncle Bob muttered to himself as he flipped through the pages.
“Aha! Here we go.”
He folded the paper so one article was easy to see, then he handed it to Dash.
“Elsie MacGill, Queen of the Hurricanes” was the headline.
Dash frowned at the article. “Who’s Elsie MacGill?”
“Oh! I’ve heard of her!” her mother exclaimed. “She’s Canadian, from Vancouver. She was a Woman of the Year in 1940. Brilliant woman. Designed her own airplane, I think. Why? What’s this all about?”
Dash began to read, and every sentence gave her a little boost of adrenaline. “This says she helped design the Hawker Hurricane, that slick new fighter plane I saw in a shorty before a movie the other night.”
“Good for her,” her mother said.
Uncle Bob pointed at the article. “Keep reading.”
Dash knew the moment she had reached the part he wanted her to see. “She’s… she’s at a factory up at Fort William called the Canadian Car and Foundry Company. She’sin chargeof building hundreds of Hawker Hurricanes.” She blinked at her mother. “She’s theboss. And… and it says most of the factory workers are women.”
“That’d be something. Work for a woman?”
“Work for a womanandbuild planes?” Dash closed her eyes, dreamy. “Just imagine.”
“Why just imagine?” Uncle Bob asked. “Write to her tonight.”
Somehow the dishes got washed, though Dash barely remembered doing them. Her mind was on Elsie MacGill, the fascinating woman in the paper. She read the article twice more, increasingly awed with every read. Miss MacGill had been the first woman admitted to the engineering program at the University of Toronto, then she’d taken a job in Michiganas a mechanical engineer with an automobile company. When she got interested in aircraft, she’d returned to school and become the first woman aeronautical engineer in the world. From there, she’d been hired as the chief aeronautical engineer at the Canadian Car and Foundry Company in Fort William, where she designed aircraft and eventually ran the Hurricane project. Dash could not imagine how a woman could have gotten so far in a man’s world, but she wanted to know more.
When the others went into the living room to play bridge, Dash headed upstairs to the little table she also used as a vanity. She pulled out paper and a fountain pen then hesitated, an uneasy swirl of doubt building in her chest. What if she wasn’t up to this? She felt so uncertain—sounDash-like—these days. If only Dot was here to talk her through it.
“You’re not thinking logically, Dash,” she would say. “What are you afraid of?”
Dash knew exactly what she was afraid of. Before last week, she hadn’t known what it was, but then she’d faced Mr. Eisen’s rage, and now she did. She’d failed. She’d never failed at anything in her life, and she never wanted it to happen again. What if she wrote to Miss MacGill, and she didn’t want her? Dash had always been good at what she did, but what if she wasn’t ready for the next level?
“Idid it,” the Dot in her head reminded her.
What an amazing girl her sister was. Despite every fibre of her shy little being fighting against the challenge, Dot the Dormouse had graduated from HMCS Conestoga and had been transferred to a specialized camp all about radios and coding and stuff she loved. She’d done all that by herself. Without Dash’s help.
Working for Miss MacGill wasn’t just what Dash wanted, she thought, curling her hands into fists. It was what she needed. And if Dot could beat her own paralyzing fear, why then, so could Dash. She picked up her pen, searching her memory for everything her high school English teacher had told them about writing formal letters, then she placed the tip of her pen onto the paper.
Dear Miss MacGill…
twenty-oneDOT— February 1943 —Moncton, New Brunswick
Dot stared longingly across the white expanse of Coverdale’s snow-covered field then returned her gaze to the hulking black shapes lurking by the fence. She shifted her boots in place, realizing her toes had hardened into frozen pebbles from standing in place for so long.
Was it her imagination, or had the creatures moved closer?
“Come on, Dot!” Alice was twenty feet ahead, her voice muffled behind a thick yellow scarf. The day-old snow reached the tops of her boots. “They’re just cows!”
Technically, yes. Just cows. The sensible thing would have been for Dot to march alongside Alice as they crossed the vast field to get to the Huff Duff hut, keeping her gaze averted from the big animals. That would be the smart thing. But people were smart in different ways. Dot figured she was being pretty smart in her own way right now, staying cagey around the herd. They seemed more curious about her every time she passed this way.
“Dot!”
