Author's note: Hello again :o) I mentioned in Bobby, Robert, Pauline & Co that I had a handful of HH-related vignettes (in fact, the aforementioned story started off as one); I'm posting them here. For the moment there's just three or four of them, and they're far from exceptional in terms of quality and/or originality, but I'm fond of the little snippets and character explorations and I thought I'd share.
A thousand apologies to Victor Young for mangling the title of his beautiful number. I'm just so bad at thinking up story titles that I have to resort to ripping out classics, even though starlight doesn't actually enter the picture (yet). (I have to say I'm partial to Ella Fitzgerald's version, by the way.)
Disclaimer: Despite the nearly-uncontrollable urge to yell "I own nothing – nothing!", I'll just throw my hands up and say I'm just a humble writer who likes to string words together and see how they look. Mostly they just look like words …
Stalag by Starlight
1. Hopes and Dreams
Everybody has immediate plans for after the war.
More than anything, Newkirk wants to go back to the Red Lion, have a couple of English beers, a shepherd's pie or a ploughman's, with pickled eggs and salt and vinegar crisps. He misses the dart games, the warm, smoky atmosphere that smells just how a pub ought to smell, the cheerfully rowdy Friday nights, and he tries not to think about who used to drink there whom he might not drink with anymore.
LeBeau dreams of the hottest, most scalding shower he can imagine, because he's so sick of feeling cold all the time; he never wants another cold shower in the biting cold of January again. In his mind, Stalag 13 equals cold, and he actually has to remind himself of the four summers he's spent in that place. A good meal comes a clear second on his list, if only because he knows from the letters he gets that food in France is getting hard to come by, and that they'll probably have to go hungry for a while even after the war ends.
Kinch misses Detroit. He's a city boy at heart, and ever since he got to England – and later to Germany – he's realised just how much the various sounds, smells and sights of his hometown mean to him. When he's alone at his radio and it gets so quiet in the tunnel that it feels he's the only one alive in the place, he methodically sorts through his memories of tall brick or stone buildings, glass and metal shining in the sun, the busy sidewalks, the heavy traffic, the trolley on Michigan, and sometimes it's enough to make him forget the twinge in his heart.
Carter never gave much thought to the future; he usually lives in the present. He doesn't really know what he will do after the war is over, but he hopes he'll be able to come back home and make snowmen with his little cousins again. His memories are a bit blurry now with everything that happened in what seems sometimes like so little time and sometimes like ages, but he remembers that nothing was more important than finding just the right carrot for the nose, and would old Mr Jones next door lent them his old hat, and that felt good. His little cousins are not so little now, but he hopes they remember it, too.
Hogan just wants to fly again. It's where he belongs, and he always has; he never feels that pure, intense thrill of absolute freedom with his feet on the ground. What he longs for the most is to fly his plane back to the States and see American soil under his wings again. Of course, he also knows that his superiors will probably promote him behind a desk when this is over, and that it's the right way for an officer's career to go; but he can't ignore the old mischievous voice whispering in his ear that promotions are nothing if they take the open sky from you.
Believe it or not, I had trouble finding what Hogan would want most. But once the idea got hold, it didn't let go :o)
I should put up the next vignette in a week or so. Till then, bye, and thank you for reading!