Lancaster Lessons (second half)

 

We are about to leave the Mosquito when the young man pauses. He turns toward the other side of my display table. He points at the music-speaker to the right, and leans forward to inspect another model plane atop it, displayed seemingly to float on the air. “And this one is an Avro Lancaster, yes?”

 “Yes. Even more significant to me. Had a model of one as a boy. Played thoughtlessly with it.”

 “Hm. Boys play. But now, like that Mosquito there, you knew someone else who’d flown one?”

 “No. But M’Lady Nancy Sinclair’s twin brother, Denys Street, flew one. His plane was also shot, and he also had parachuted out, but he too was captured and sent to Stalagluft Three, just like his counterpart, the Mosquito pilot, Denys Sinclair.”

 “Counterpart? They both were called Denys?”

 “Yes. And more than that. They met on the prisoner train when on their way to Stalagluft Three, became firm friends, and were in the same bunkhouse for the next four years in prison. Not only that, but Denys Street, Nancy’s twin brother, told his pal, Denys Sinclair, all about his beloved blue-eyed and beautifully intelligent sister, Nancy; so much so that after the war, when Denys Sinclair was finely free, he searched Nancy out, and the rest, as you’ve learned, is history.”

 “Well, not quite. What happened to Nancy’s brother, Denys Street?”

 “He was one of the fifty caught, and then shot, in the so-called Great Escape.”

 “Really? Wow. There was a movie about that. Right? With Paul Newman?”

 “That motorbike-maniac story was entirely fabricated for the sake of the movie. But Nancy’s pain at the untimely loss of her brother, that way, endures to this day. They were born in 1922, see, and that means he too would’ve been100 this year, had he lived. But neither the mighty-might of the British air force, back then, nor the luck of drawing the right straw was with Denys. And the tragic story of those fifty brave souls who tried to escape has resonated through time. Denys Sinclair did not draw a short straw. Denys Street did. And what followed is a very sad story.”

“All sad? But what about the Sinclair story? After the war, when Denys Sinclair got free, what happened to them? He, and your M’Lady? You said they moved to Australia?”

“I did? Oh? Good listening skills. Yup. They first had their five children. They tried to make a go of a vegetable farm in southern England, a place near Godalming, but the economic after-effect of the war was too strenuous on them, so they emigrated to Oz. Ended up near Perth. Denys taught flying lessons, and M’Lady Nancy taught French lessons. She also did pottery, paintings, furniture upholstering, pot-pourri flower arranging, and recorded-readings for the blind, among other things. She is a most gifted person. But eventually Denys died too. She’s lost a lot.” 

“And she’s still there, near Perth?”

Yup. But she’s here too,” and with that I reach up and touch my heart. “Always.”

 “A bit like these boy-toy planes of yours,” the young fellow smiles at me, “constantly alive with very real and quite profoundly significant memories. Always.”