Yankee flyer

Yankee Flier  in North Africa,  Yankee Flier in the South Pacific. Worn green covers, paper that will turn yellow if exposed to the sun for more than half an hour.  Filled with the impossible adventures of O’Malley, the Irish fighter pilot  and his Yankee compatriot; they dive bomb and strafe the enemy, get their aircraft riddled with bullet holes, and still survive.  I read those books under the covers by flashlight in 1943 and 1944, only eight or nine years old. It  was my introduction to World War Two. Uncle Howard was a block warden who went out at dusk with his shaded flashlight to make sure that the blackout curtains were pulled throughout the neighborhood, to prevent Japanese  planes from bombing our neighborhood , Those books are still on my shelf, a remembrance of my early reading, my obsession with going under the covers to read anything: pirate stories ,the antics of fictional fighter pilots, newspaper accounts of advances in Europe, imagining the tanks surging forward into the German lines. Such was my childhood in that world ,Should I give these books away, who will cherish those greenclad books, who will know that they are touchstones of another world.