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I’VE just received a review copy of a newly published book, Wings
Over Leyte, by Lavinia Bradley. It’s published by Melrose Books,
an independent publishing company in the UK. Independent publishing
is sometimes called “vanity publishing” in the United States. If
you have the manuscript for a book, you may commission a company
like Melrose Books to publish it for you. The better vanity
publishers have editors who vet the manuscript for quality and
marketability before agreeing to do the job.
Wings Over Leyte is a good read. Only 120-plus
pages including covers, it will provide a lot of footnotes to
historians working on the immediate post-World War 2 years, when
American military officers were still in the Philippines, mainland
China and Formosa (Taiwan). It has some mistakes in Filipino place
and object names, but these would amuse instead of irritate the
Filipino reader.
Lavinia Bradley’s book is a love story and an
adventure story. It is also a historical record—full of vignettes
about life in Manila (and Pasay City) and some of the Philippine
provinces, including Palawan—of an American colonel’s work and
dealings with Filipinos and other Asians as remembered by his
English wife.
She was a 22-year-old girl in 1946 when she told
her grandmother she was rejoining the love of her life in Manila .
“My grandmother had traveled the world, following my grandfather
into remote and exotic places, where he laids roads, and built
bridges and dams. Those were the days of the gentleman adventurer,
and she did it in style with a retinue of servants.”
No servants were around, but there were
brigadiers, female officers and her grandparents old friends, to
help Lavinia when she journeyed from London to Manila . They flew on
jerky military planes that took her to Castel Benito, Cairo, Basra,
Karachi, Delhi, Calcutta , Bangkok and finally Manila.
“The time was 1946, and the world had been
ravaged by war. There was no civilian transport between England and
the Far East. Even letters were unreliable and were sent through
Army Field Post Offices. The very idea of a young girl setting out
on her own was unthinkable, but I had already begun my journey four
years earlier when I met Roswell Bradley, and there could be no
turning back.”
She was 18 in 1942 when smitten by the wartime
US Air Force colonel, Roswell Bradley. She worked as a
secretary to top US Army brass posted in England. That was when
her “education in the US military, its politics and its men”
began. “We saw the most we could of each other through four years
of hard work, and snatches of heady joyous play, bombs and rockets,
and our wartime assignments.”
When peace came, Lavinia’s colonel needed new
jobs. His was to take him to Manila to work for the US Foreign
Liquidation Commission. It had the tasked of selling all the surplus
US military equipment where they stood. He was appointed “Chief of
the Aircraft Division for the Far East, with a special brief to
foster the creation of civilian airlines.
Lavinia was marrying an ex-colonel who “would
be moving millions of dollars worth of war materiel and creating
communications to a cut-off world.” Roswell sold Philippine
Airlines and Cathay Pacific their first planes.
This was how Lavinia Bradley came to meet very
important people in the Philippines. And in China (where the
Nationalists or Kuomintang had not yet been driven away from the
mainland by the Communists), Formosa (Taiwan) and Hong Kong.
Here is what she wrote about the late patriarch
of the Lopez clan:
“In contrast [to a dinner with a young
Frenchman who was going native and lived in a shack which however
had ‘the flavor of France at its best’], my next dinner party
was given by Don Eugenio Lopez, who had been Roswell’s first
customer, and created the Far Eastern Air Transport Line Inc. in
three days. As befitted a millionaire, he had a beautiful very
modern European-style home at the Elena Apartments in Manila. He was
a small, smiling Filipino, educated in the US yet retaining the
refined manners of his old world. He and his wife, wearing native
costume, graciously received their guests. He looked immaculate in a
white shark suit worn with a Barong Tagalog—an embroidered shirt
made from pińa cloth . . . This was also the basis of his wife’s
exquisite dress with the high starched puffed sleeves that framed
her face like butterfly wings. There were generals and their wives
of both US and Filipino Air Forces, along with civilian dignitaries,
mostly from the flying world, all of whom Roswell knew well . . .
”
It was a grand and memorable Filipino dinner.
rqb@manilatimes.net and rq_bas@yahoo.com
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