The Girl in the Blue Beret - Bobbie Ann Mason [0]
BOBBIE ANN MASON
FICTION
NANCY CULPEPPER
AN ATOMIC ROMANCE
ZIGZAGGING DOWN A WILD TRAIL
MIDNIGHT MAGIC
FEATHER CROWNS
LOVE LIFE
SPENCE + LILA
IN COUNTRY
SHILOH AND OTHER STORIES
NONFICTION
ELVIS PRESLEY
CLEAR SPRINGS
THE GIRL SLEUTH
NABOKOV’S GARDEN
Copyright © 2011 by Bobbie Ann Mason
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Random House, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
RANDOM HOUSE and colophon are
registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Mason, Bobbie Ann.
The girl in the blue beret: a novel / by Bobbie Ann Mason.
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-0-679-60494-5
1. World War, 1939–1945—Aerial operations—Fiction. 2. World
War, 1939–1945—Underground movements—Europe—Fiction.
I. Title.
PS3563.A7877G57 2011
813’.54—dc22 2010036861
www.atrandom.com
Jacket design: Anna Bauer
Jacket photograph: Adoc-photos/Art Resource, NY
v3.1_r1
AUTHOR’S NOTE
My late father-in-law, co-pilot of an Allied bomber shot down by a German fighter plane over Belgium during the Second World War, owed his eventual escape from Occupied Europe to the help he received from members of the French Resistance, including a teenager he would remember as “the girl in the blue beret.” Inspired by my father-in-law’s wartime experience, The Girl in the Blue Beret is nonetheless a work of fiction: names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of my imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental and unintentional.
DEDICATED TO
MICHÈLE AGNIEL
AND TO THE MEMORY OF
BARNEY RAWLINGS
(1920–2004)
BLISS WAS IT IN THAT DAWN TO BE ALIVE,
BUT TO BE YOUNG WAS VERY HEAVEN!
—WILLIAM WORDSWORTH, “The Prelude”
Contents
Cover
Other Books by This Author
Title Page
Copyright
Author’s Note
Dedication
Epigraph
Escape and Evasion
Flight Crew: The Dirty Lily
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Chapter 57
Chapter 58
Chapter 59
Chapter 60
Acknowledgments
Discussion Questions
Selected Bibliography
About the Author
ESCAPE AND EVASION
DURING WORLD WAR II, THOUSANDS OF ALLIED AVIATORS CRASHED OR parachuted into Occupied Europe. A number of escape-and-evasion networks helped to hide them and send them safely back to their bases in England. Thousands of Europeans risked their lives by hiding the airmen in their homes, providing false identity papers, and smuggling them by sea to England or across the Pyrenees to Spain. Between 1942 and 1944, more than three thousand British and American downed flyers successfully evaded capture with the help of an unknown number of ordinary citizens, who risked being shot or sent to a concentration camp.
FLIGHT CREW THE DIRTY LILY
Molesworth Airfield, Station 107, England
303RD BOMB GROUP, B-17G
SQUADRON 124
MISSION TO FRANKFURT, GERMANY
January 31, 1944
Captain LAWRENCE WEBB
Co-pilot MARSHALL STONE
Bombardier AL GRAINGER
Navigator TONY CAMPANELLO
Top-Turret Gunner, JAMES FORD
Flight Engineer
Radio Operator BOB HADLEY
Ball-Turret Gunner BOBBY REDBURN
Left Waist Gunner HOOTIE WILLIAMS
Right Waist Gunner CHICK COCHRAN
Tail Gunner DON STEWART
1.
AS THE LONG FIELD CAME INTO VIEW, MARSHALL