Afterword
I decided I wanted to write about a so-called “Chop Girl” after coming across a brief mention of the term in a book about the bombing of Dresden. It seemed like a near-perfect expression of the kind of superstitions that people fall back on when their lives are under extreme stress in ways they have very little direct control of. That, and my own mother “typed for her country,” to use her phrase, in Lincolnshire during the war, although she was in the Army rather than the RAF. In fact, it was where she and my father met, and her best friend’s boyfriend, whom I came to know much later, was part of a bomber crew. It took a while, though, to turn all of this into a story, when Walt Williams finally presented himself to me as the Chop Girl’s exact opposite; the luckiest (but also, perhaps, unluckiest) man in the RAF.