A CODA FOR ORIOLE
Thursday December 15, 2022You might, in a light-hearted mood, say that when coincidences reign they pour. In March I wrote a story about Oriole Coombe, the young Brisbane woman who, during the Pacific War, had a lethal fighter plane named after her by its pilot, her American Air Corps fiancé. There were remarkable coincidences in my own connection to it: first being led back to a teenage hobby of aircraft model-building and then finding a kit for that very same plane; getting in touch with Oriole’s family and then, most especially, learning she was still alive in the USA these nearly eighty years later.
As I outlined it, the chain in one sense begins with a moment in Requiem For A Riot where soldier Tow Jersma tells the female lead Kay Dalberg that she’s going to have her name painted on the nose of a P-38 fighter, the same kind of aircraft. She knows it’s just a line he’s throwing her but it happens to please her. In the plotting, that fictional exchange takes place in Brisbane on American Thanksgiving Day in 1942, which was Thursday November 26 that year, and is the last day of the novel’s story. Later that evening, the first night of the riot that went into history as The Battle of Brisbane, the book’s issues and threads are brought to some kind of resolution.
I finally finished work on my model of the plane, the P-38F of Captain Murray Shubin. Oriole and Murray’s sons Derek and Jim, with whom I’ve been corresponding, more than moved me when they told me they were to make a special visit together to Oriole, now 97, in her aged-care home in Fort Collins, Colorado, where Jim also lives. With their spouses Linda and Peggy, they planned to show her the pictures I’d taken of the model plane, and to read her the story I’d written about her. I added my warmest personal greeting in post-script to it. Afterwards they said it was a reunion with many tender memories and feelings.
Derek and Jim knew a little bit about my novel but nothing of its particular details of time, and I said nothing, yet the occasion they chose to make their visit to Oriole was Thanksgiving Day just passed, Thursday November 24 this year. Exactly eighty Thanksgivings after Tow’s fictional pleasantry to Kay, on a hot afternoon in Brisbane at the end of our Australian spring.
Two of the pictures are below. One has the plane flying over unexpectedly bookish territory. In the second it’s doing its best to look like a real P-38, buzzing the Jamison Valley. During the war Mick Dark, the son of our novelist Eleanor Dark, watched two of them do just that, zooming down Katoomba Street and out over Echo Point. The locals didn’t mind a bit.
