ORIOLE

Monday March 28, 2022

A few years ago I wrote about a crucial teenage experience I had in front of a hobby store window in a Sydney street, deciding to throw off my boyhood attachment to building model aircraft – not aircrafts as you’ll hear these days; it will be sheeps next – as a plaything of the child, and to seek instead the things of a man. A Passage moment. The writing was prompted by an ironic coda to that decision a half-century later, my impulsively buying off the shelf a diecast model bomber, because it was a perfect replica of a plane that had become meaningful to me. I’d written about a real event on a sister aircraft in a novel manuscript, now at last published as Requiem For A Riot – The Battle of Brisbane.

To my surprise, during one of the recent Covid lockdowns a doctor advised me to take up some old boyhood hobby; lots of people were doing it to help fill their increased down-time. I scoffed, said that would be kid stuff and surely not appropriate. Yet somewhere in my old cupboard clutter, its origin uncertain, lay an intact model kit for another aircraft type that also figured in my novel. Well, I thought I might give it a go again.

Amazing scenes. Took back to it at once. I had that lovely sense of motor skills returning, more or less. Not quite a Lewisean ‘surprised by joy’ but deeply relaxing. It makes a nice slot in a weekend. Painting in particular was a great pleasure, as if the years since the last Humbrol Enamel strokes hadn’t existed. I discovered there are a thousand good kits out there now, for the field has truly boomed again – the Boys are Back. Yet, as a kind of whimsical discipline, I decided to restrict my choice of plane to what could be seen in Australian skies in the early years of the Pacific War. This was the era of Requiem.

Nearing the finish of my jolly work on a Martin B-26 called Our Gal, a US plane that operated out of Iron Range in North Queensland in 1942, I was strolling one afternoon towards a hobby shop in Penrith of the Plains. Wondering what to attempt next. In wait for me was a new, reverse, shop-window epiphany.

In the novel, which had come out not long before, set in Brisbane, the key female character Kay Dalberg – the ‘she-ro’ – receives a compliment from a GI. ‘Captain said he’s goin’ to organise for a P-38 at Amberley to have Fightin’ Miss Kay painted on its nose. He is so impressed with you.’

Of course this is just a sweet-talk line, as artillery officers don’t decide what pilots call their planes or the sweethearts they might want to salute there, but Kay is still touched. The P-38 Lightning was a very famous USAAF fighter in the Pacific.

And here in the window in Penrith was a large scale (1/48) kit for one, showing Atlantic Theatre squadron markings but the right early sub-type, a P-38F, rare in model kits but the plane Australians would have seen. I’ll find a way to re-mark it for the Southwest Pacific Area! I said. I could even paint FIGHTIN’ MISS KAY on it.

I bought it, to have another slightly unbelievable discovery when I opened it. The makers had supplied alternative marking decals for the South Pacific, precisely for an individual plane based on Guadalcanal in the Solomons in 1943, flown by one Lieutenant Murray Shubin.

He had named his plane Oriole, in cursive yellow-orange on the olive drab.

Now though we have one species of this bird here in Australia, the oriole is more often associated with the Americas, the golden oriole especially, and I assumed it was a nostalgic home reference for the pilot. Curious, I went online and found still available, all this time later, a family memorial page for the late Lt. Colonel Murray Shubin, very affectionate, with a lot of information about him and his descendants. From Pittsburgh, Pa, he finished the war with at least twelve shoot-downs – six Zero fighters in just one encounter – and an array of high decorations, so he was a top ace. There were even pictures there of his P-38.

But Oriole was in fact the name of his fiancée. And as I read on, this really did stop me in my boots. She was Oriole Coombe, of Wooloowin in Brisbane. A war-bride-to-be. Of all the hobby shops in all the world, I had to walk into the one that had a P-38 with a Brisbane woman’s name written on its engine nacelle.

A striking and charming coincidence, at the least. It’s hard to imagine anyone else for whom the discovery could have resonated so much. That particular coming together of chances.

I was so taken by it that I researched further on the site and found what seemed to be current addresses for two of the Shubins’ sons, in Colorado and Utah. Uncertain what they might think, I decided to risk writing to them out of the pure serendipity of the event. The model company wasn’t American, so would they even know their father’s plane was being used as a template? I was also in the delicate situation of needing to ask sensitively about their mother’s likely death by now.

Both replied. They sat somewhere between bemused, amazed, and delighted that such a letter could come from the blue, and they certainly didn’t know about the model kit. One of them has a piece of the original engine cowling that has the cursive name on it. We’ve corresponded further, I have pictures of their families and it would mean a lot to meet them if ever one gets back to travelling to America. I learned that their father – who sadly died relatively young after the war – was in Brisbane in ’43 for malaria treatment when he sighted Miss Coombe in a pharmacy where she worked. He apparently wasn’t the ‘fast- talker Yank’ type at all, really quite shy, more reserved about approaching this stunning Aussie girl than he ever was about taking on Mitsubishi Zeros. And they were very happy.

But the splendid thing is: Oriole is still with us, in an aged care place in Colorado Springs, turning 97 this year. One son lives nearby and visits her often. Why do I find it touching that her family still call her Mum, and not Mom?

I am racing to finish my P-38 build and to take a big picture of it, photo-shopped to have blurred, in-motion propellors. And to send it to them as a gift, from nearly eighty years.

Kid stuff.