My mother told us how her parents didn't eat until their children had had their fill. And if there wasn't any food left on the table, they went hungry. Which prompted my oldest uncle to make sure his siblings took modest portions so his parents could eat. It wasn't until years later that my mom understood what he was doing.
Right after high school, my dad was drafted and sent overseas to fight in Africa and Italy. While he didn't see a lot of action, he never knew when he would be called upon to fight. He was not sad when they dropped the bombs on Japan, because he surely would have been called into that conflict.
As for me, I had to endure measured meal portions during my childhood, hand-me-downs and taking a bus or hoofing it to attend school. And, while my life so far has had its ups and downs, it's been pretty unremarkable by comparison.
Maybe that's why my imagination was captured by two women who have just had books published about them.
Both had roles as spies in the French Resistance.
The first was Virginia Hall, a well-to-do American, who was the most highly decorated female of World War II. She was a master of disguises and identities, changing her code name repeatedly. She eluded capture by the Nazis, once by crossing the Pyrenees in winter -- with a wooden leg she called "Cuthbert." When the war was over, she went back to America and worked for the CIA. I listened to the author, Sonia Purnell, speak about her book, A Woman of No Importance. Now I'm looking forward to reading it.
The second story is about Marie-Madeleine Fourcade, who is featured in the book Madame Fourcade's Secret War by Lynne Olson. She was a Frenchwoman who headed the Alliance Network during World War II. She once escaped the Germans by removing all her clothes and squeezing between the bars of her jail cell. Her code name was "hedgehog," not because the animal is stinkin' cute (well, it is), but because hedgehogs have the ability to roll themselves into a ball of spikes that precludes attack by larger animals. She, too, was a master of disguises. Madame Fourcade survived the war.
I won't talk about the fact that it sucks these two women, and many, many others, haven't been given serious props all these years for putting their lives in danger and for their contributions to the Allied war effort. No, I'm not going to do that.
The hell I'm not.
Anyhow...I've got my summer reading lined up. In between beach reads, I'll be learning more about these two amazing women and their critical roles in the French resistance, when freedom from fascism was at stake.
And hope that we never have to fight a war like that again.
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