All the mail sent to and from Coverdale, as well as other secret offices—Dot assumed theirs wasn’t the only one—was sent to a common central address in Toronto: 25 King Street, Room 1145. Anyone could write to Dot there, but the letters were redirected after that, so no one knew where she really was.
Joyce pulled out a few envelopes. “Alice, your boyfriend wrote… Dot, here’s one from your sister, and something from command…”
Every time Dot received a letter from Dash, her stomach swirled with both joy and guilt. She still felt the vacuum left behind by her departure, though the pain of missing her had eased over her months of training and working with the Wrens. She lived for Dash’s letters and all the news shesent. All of her words were open and honest and brimming with satisfaction in her job. And they told the truth.
Unlike Dot, Dash didn’t have to lie to her sister.
For now, Dot set aside her sister’s letter and opened the other envelope, which bore a symbol of the WRCNS in the top left corner. Inside was a short directive that made her blood run cold.
Petty Officer Wren D. Wilson to attend Captain J. Powell’s office at 0900 tomorrow.
With her pulse hammering, she slipped the paper back into the envelope, not bothering to look at Dash’s note. The night before, Chief Wren Alder had said Dot did the right thing, coming to her with the decryption, but they both knew Dot had broken some major rules. The chief Wren then shared Dot’s information up the chain, and that would have been impossible to do without revealing the fact that Dot had broken protocol. She’d broken the oath of secrecy, and she’d been warned of the punishment for doing that. In the morning, she would receive her sentence.
twenty-fourDASH— Fort William, Ontario —
Dash was one of over four thousand people employed at CanCar, of which more than half were women. Some were married and went home at night, but the single gals were boarded in various homes around Fort William. Dash stayed in a little house near the centre of town. Her landlady, Mrs. Simmons, was an old prude. Kind of like Pigeon, but bigger and more obvious. She was always tutting around, shaking her head with disapproval.
“Girls working in a factory. You should be ashamed,” she griped that morning as Dash finished her breakfast. “It’s wrong. In my day—”
“In your day, there were still horses and buggies on the streets,” Dash replied, sipping carefully and observing her landlady over the brim of her cup of tea. “Why shouldn’t we be helping to win the war? Please explain this to me. What makes women so special?”
“It’s a man’s place to fight in a war. Women should be at home. That’s the way it’s always been, and there’s no reason to change it.”
“I think it’s time you recognized that the world’s a different place these days, Mrs. Simmons.”
“Don’t be cheeky, young lady.”
“We should all help in our own way. I mean, you are already.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“You’re letting me rent a room here, which means you’re helping me, and by doing that, you’re helping CanCar.” She bit down on a smile. “See? It’s not so bad.”
Her landlady’s gaze dropped to Dash’s navy-blue coveralls. “Ladies do not wear trousers. It’s indecent, is what it is.”
Dash couldn’t resist. “Did I tell you I have flown a plane before? By myself. While wearing trousers.” She closed her eyes, remembering Jenny, then she reached for her coat. “It was glorious. Have a nice day, Mrs. Simmons.”
Dash took a bus to work. The most interesting part of the ride was squinting at the dark profile of Mount McKay in the distance, but CanCar was the best place to work in the whole world, so she didn’t mind. There, she was surrounded by airplanes, she worked with engines, and she learned new skills, like riveting the planes’ sheet metal skins. Plus, she got paid better than she ever had before, though still not as much as the men in the factory. Icing on the cake was that she got to work with a lot of smart women, some of whom shared her obsession with planes. She had made friends at Conestoga and had loved being with Ginny and Mary in Toronto, but CanCar was the first place where Dash truly felt she belonged.
Monday to Friday, she joined her crew on the latest project, a Hurricane that was about three quarters done. What a thrill it was to watch an aircraft take shape. When she’d arrived that morning, she had pulled on her welding helmet and wrestled an acetylene torch to solder the frame. In the afternoon she was in a cooler position, attaching canvas to the wings, readying the plane for a dope coat tomorrow. The dope, she had learned, was what protected and sealed the fabric.
“These men, they think they know it all, eh?”
That was Margie, a spunky little mechanic from Quebec. She always had a bone to pick with somebody, and Dash got a kick out of her. Her name was actually Marie Marguerite, but the girls had all decided that was too many syllables. Margie didn’t seem to mind the change.
“What happened this time?” Dash asked.
“That McMurtry, he says he can do this better than us.”
Stacy glanced over. “Yeah, well, mendon’tknow it all, and we don’t need them.” Stacy reminded Dash a little bit of Ginny, with her nimble fingers and quick one-liners, except Ginny had straight blond hair, and Stacy’s was thick and brown. “Don’t tell them, though. They’ll just mope around like my uncle Harry. That man. If I ever saw him laugh, I’ve seen a cow fly, too.”
Dash peered up from under the wing, a couple of nails squeezed between her lips. Out of the corner of her mouth she said, “We’d better build up this hull if there are cows flying up there.”
“This is ’ow you do this, this is ’ow you do that,” Margie mimicked, still fuming.
Paulette, the fourth member of Dash’s crew, was from New Brunswick, but she’d been living in Ontario for years. “Everybody knows women are steadier at welding,” she put in.
“Then there’s the fact that we show up for work every day,” Dash said. “You ever met a man who shows up to work every day like we do?”
