The Ace of Hearts
Several stories received through this website capture our imagination and hearts, including this one.
This story is based on the diaries of a young woman from a tiny town northwest of Toronto, Ontario, Canada, who was good at electrical and mechanical work. She started writing on August 25, 1914. Her passion of new inventions drove her to attend a Catholic college to acquire a degree and learn to fly airplanes, but she recognized she had to play a man and accomplished a lot based on an incorrect birth certificate. Without a thorough physical test, she joined the Royal Air Corps and was dispatched to France to battle the Germans. She was shot down by a red German triplane above Brussels Belgium after becoming an aviation ace and rescued by her life lover.
Her diaries chronicle her life on a rural farm, at a Catholic college, ground and flight school, her air battles to be shot down and hiding from German patrols after crashing, the trouble they caused the German army, and her relationships, including a nun, to help her define herself. She became an ace and found her soulmate in her sixth relationship.
We were most surprised that she was a woman who had surmounted many barriers, including masking her sex, to succeed in a male-dominated world.
We checked various archives for this woman's identification but failed. Her journals seem to be the only ones that survived, but she was careful to disguise her lesbianism during World War I. She is anonymous, and we respect it.
We cannot find any living relatives of the girl they adopted; therefore we don't know how the journals left the family. We know that her first son was killed in the Vietnam War in the Ia Drang River Valley and her second in a car accident before they had children. Three diaries were combined with an auction book lot and wrapped in brown paper. These should be shared, so we offer them here.
All names in this novel are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or dead people is coincidental. Some localities have changed names over time. The chronology follows history.
