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Text ID:Jacqueline, we're pushing further into Austria tomorrow. I thought there might be more beer. Off to kill some nazis / if they don't kill us. Whatever happens I want you to stay in Brooklyn. I need you to be there / If / When I get back / I'll see you soon?? / I want to go home / I miss you, Yours. James Buchanan Barnes.
From — War Letters From A Long Lost Soldier, Sergeant James Barnes(September, 1943)
War is a slippery slope.
What would you do? / becomes, what will you do? / becomes, my god, what have you done?
Jacqueline neither begins nor ends with as the war-hero. Before all that, before the fame and the horror and the loss, she is just another hungry kid from Ireland. It was a wet nurse who sealed her fate. So powerless a figure and yet her small act of defiance changed the path of the Scully family history forever. None could have foreseen the turn of events she would initiate by letting the baby cry. Such an innocent sound and so loud.
My birth must have been a vast disappointment, Jacqueline thinks from time to time. Perhaps only second to her life up until this point. The displeasure of her existence is shared by many but none more than herself. She still hears tales about it to this day. A vague story of her underwhelming entry into the world looms over her.
An icy rush of air, a freezing slipstream on the newly exposed skin. A baby was, with no warning, outside the inside and the familiar wet, tropical world has suddenly evaporated. Exposed to the elements. A prawn peeled, a nut shelled. No breath. All the world come down to this. One breath. Little lungs, no wind in the strangled pipe. Panic. The drowning girl, the falling bird.
Big dewdrop pearls of sweat on the mother's skin, a horse nearing the end of a hard race. She'd thought the birthing pains would stop once the baby was out but her belly was pierced by the same excruciating tightenings as in labour. This was some trickery of the female form, kept secret from young women. Sylvie Joan Scully imagined she would conduct proceedings like a parade-ground sergeant-major. The baby was early. She was expecting it to be late. The best-laid plans, and so on.
"Oh, ma'am," the midwife cried suddenly, "she's all blue, so she is."
Through her blurry vision, the mother had to squint to see anything through the stream of sunlight. It was very clever the way the baby stood in the halo of luminosity. Sylvie reached out her hands, the unspoken plea on her lips. "Agirl?"
