Shorter Notice
Pilot's Wife's Tale. By Esther Terry Wright. (Bodley Head. 78. 6d. THE heart of this record is in these words, written about supper together in digs, when the pilot husband was let out of hospital for the evening: " We were not free people and we knew it well, but the illusion of freedom was there, sometimes for an hour or two at a time; because for the moment we belonged to no one but ourselves." The months recorded—July, 1940, to September, 1941— were, from the wife's point of view, a long campaign for such moments. When posted to a new station, her first thought was, " Will they allow him to sleep out? " In the hospitals where David recovered from the bums received in the Battle of Britain she fought and planned, usually with success, to make some sort of home even in a ward. ' There are observations of general interest, such as the differences between Army and Air Force wives ; there is some good description, as of the wife sitting up in bed while her husband sleeps dead-beat, keeping herself awake with cigarettes so as to rouse him for his dawn patrol. But the main impression of the record is of this precarious plot of huinan happiness at the centre of the storm of war, yet curiously detached from it. The deliberately, —sometimes excessively—simple language of the diary emphasises this sense of isolation from the complexity of total war. Some readers may find it too self-centred, too set on the trivialities of the day's doings ; but a life with death only half a step away, a marriage which has never known a home, cannot make it easy to take long and comprehensive views of war or life.
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