F e a t u r e s
and weekends were spent skiing and lighting up bbqs. I think of that time as one of constant laughter, of smiles as wide as the highway and grins as broad as the prairies. From being a fairly new RAF wife, scared of coffee mornings and unable to arrange flowers, I became a working, water skiing, wine cooler drinking woman who believed anything was possible.
After three and a half years, Steve was posted back to Scampton. I had forgotten how to use English money and how to drive on roads
that seemed too narrow and too crowded. I felt hemmed in, too tanned and lost. Nothing seemed to have changed over here in those years except me. My sister’s first words to me, after not seeing me in over three years were, ‘So you’re back’. She has never asked me what it was like, how I felt, what adventures I had had. It was as though living in Texas was so far out of her vision that it didn’t exist.
It was the Scampton wives who helped me through that transition time, women who
had travelled, moved every three years and had to find work with an itinerant CV. I could always pop round for a wine with a neighbour who had experienced this gypsy life. Perhaps our worldview is altered because we have been outsiders in the New World and then become alienated from our own world. RAF wives have a bond because they have often lived in a strange land, evolved from stranger there to native, and then done it all over again back home.
www.raf-ff.org.uk
Autumn 2010
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