Free Flight of the Tiger Moth by Mary Woodbury Page B

Trevor. They were starting training and had no idea that he was ahead of them in flying skills. He jumped off the swing and headed out of the sleepy village, instead of home to check on his dad. Sometimes his secret clamoured to get out like a drowning gopher out of a ­hole.
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    Jack wandered out the gravel road that led to the Hobbs’ farm with its wonderful swimming hole. Melvin and Arnie had dammed the creek, decades ago, before they went to the Great War. He couldn’t walk that far today. He just wanted to put some distance between himself and his life in ­Cairn.
    In the last few years so many people had passed through his life, like the trains rolling across the prairies or the ducks and geese that spent summers on the sloughs and ponds around Thunder Creek. Everyone was bound for somewhere else – off to the war in Europe or the Far East, or moving to Calgary, Edmonton, Regina or Saskatoon, where they would work in munitions factories or manufacturing ­plants.
    Now these two young guys had walked into his life and stirred things up. He wanted to join in and get involved but he worried about investing too much in people who were just going to up and leave in a couple of ­months.
    Jack shaded his eyes from the setting sun and scanned the sky. A flock of geese flying in formation headed west to the wetlands near Thunder Creek. He whistled a crazy song his mom had taught him to play: “Mares eat oats and does eat oats and little lambs eat ivy.”
    His mother hadn’t played funny songs since Sandy went missing. She’d had days when she hardly talked because she was so sad. Every couple of weeks she’d pack a box of tinned goods and treats to send to Flo. The last time she had put in a bag of liquorice allsorts, Flo’s favourites. “It’s the only sweet things she’s likely to get,” she’d ­said.
    She’d taped the box carefully, trying to guarantee its safe delivery to somewhere in England. “All we can do is hope she doesn’t get sent to a field hospital near the front lines. That’s really dangerous.”
    Jack figured if Flo had the chance to go to the front, she would. She couldn’t tell them straight out. The censors wouldn’t let her. Besides if she told, Mom would worry all the ­more.
    Mom once said that if Jack had been through the First World War, the Depression, the dirty thirties with the dust and drought, and now Hitler, he’d know why she was a ­worrywart.
    After Flo left for England, Ivy had confided in Jack, “You’re all I’ve got left, Jackie. Whatever you do, don’t get hurt.”
    He’d promised not to. But if someone needed help, what would he ­do?

Chapter ­13

    After winning the ­five-­hundred-­yard race at the field day on Monday, Jack was feeling pretty chipper. Wes had won the broad jump. On Tuesday, Jack and Wes wrote their last exams. Jack knew he’d aced Science and Math. He was a winner whether anyone knew it or ­not.
    In the afternoon Wes’s sister Cathy came to the high school to talk about careers. She sounded a little nervous and flustered, probably because her little brother Wes was sitting there, grinning like a gawky crane with red hair and ­freckles.
    Wes figured Cathy was really there because the principal wanted her to meet the other teachers and get a feel for the way the school worked, since she would be teaching Grades One to Four in ­September.
    Jack was so amazed at how pretty Cathy looked in her pastel blue skirt and white blouse, her blondish hair cut in a short bob, her blue eyes dancing, that he couldn’t hear much of what she was saying. He’d always thought of Cathy as Wes’s skinny older sister. When had she turned into a beautiful young woman, he wondered? Too bad she was nearly ­nineteen.
    Girls. Jack smiled. Maybe he was the one who had ­changed.
    After school, Wes, Jack and Cathy strolled down the street to the Chinese restaurant for milkshakes. “Is the principal always so formal?” Cathy asked. “He didn’t seem so