Nan Doyal

When my great-grandmother died, she left to me, a plastic pill bottle stuffed with an old tissue. Buried in the folds of the disintegrating white pulp was a brooch and a note saying it was her most treasured possession. It was made from a pair of sterling silver eagle wings that flanked the letters R-A-F. They were fastened to a laurel wreath beneath a red enameled and diamond crown. The pin was a replica of the pilot wings that had been awarded to my grandfather, her son, when he became a Flight Lieutenant in the Royal Air Force.

My grandfather flew Bristol Blenheims. When he was twenty-three, he was shot down and killed while bombing Nazi munitions factories and shipyards in occupied Holland. He was survived by his wife and an eight-month-old son, my father.

For years my great-grandmother’s brooch lay forgotten in its plastic cocoon, buried at the back of my jewelry box. I had no use for an old-fashioned pin that belonged to a woman I barely knew, given to her by a grandfather I had never met. But something made me hold on to it, if for nothing more than respect for a mother’s last link to her son.

The year my own grandmother died, something inspired me to retrieve the silver pin from its hiding place. As I turned the piece between my fingers, I thought not about the man who had gifted it, but of his mother and his wife, and what they had given.

Military service skipped two generations in my family after WW2, and during those years, some of us moved away from the country my grandfather fought for. But last November, three days before Veterans Day, my American son signed on to serve in the US Air Force as a combat search and rescue operator. I could not decide whether it was irony or fate that he joined a branch of the Special Forces created explicitly to rescue downed fighter and bomber pilots.

On the morning he left, I went into my jewelry box, and for the first time, I pinned that winged brooch to my chest.