BEDRIDDEN GIRL

Auckland Star, Volume LXXV, Issue 21, 26 January 1944, Page 6

BEDRIDDEN GIRL

AIR UNIT'S MASCOT STORY OF GLORIA LYONS (R.N.Z.A.F. Official News Service.) NEW GEORGIA. Nineteen-year-old Gloria Lyons lies in Christchurch Public Hospital with tuberculosis of the spine. Patient but cheerful, she faces a stay there for two years. At a forward Pacific base of the R.N.Z.A.F. stands another "Gloria Lyons"—a sleek Warhawk fighter, and in the pilot's cockpit a small typewritten note is pasted: "To the pilot: Gloria Lyons is our 4 S.U. mascot. She is doing a long term in hospital, and we want both our Glorias to last a long time. 4 S.U., Dec., '43."

Four young New Zealand airmen of No. 4 servicing unit, attached to the New Zealand fighter wing, sat in their tent one evening reading the mail, which had come in that day. For one there • were seven or eight letters, another also received a good batch, but for the other two it was a lean day. So they got their heads together, and not long afterwards this advertisement appeared in a Christchurch newspaper: "Two lonely airmen wish to correspond with two smart young ladies, 18 to 21, view friendship. Interests dancing, music, sport. Photo if possible." Among the replies came one rather diffidently from Gloria Lyons on behalf of herself and a fellow patient. A few more letters broke the ice and now a regular correspondence flows. She tells the airman to whom she writes of what goes on at home in New Zealand, he describes to her what life is like in the tropics. It is amazing how things get round in these camps, but tne airman did not have to stand "chipping" from his mates. Instead, the storv caught their imagination; and when a Warhawk with the identification letter G was passing through the maintenance line the idea blossomed in some head of naming the fighter after the sporting bedridden girl and adopting her as the unit's mascot. So while Gloria Lyons of the Pacific front line takes the air with her colleagues to beat the Japanese out of the skies, her namesake follows their fortunes keenly and hopefully, and the thoughts of the boys of Number Four serving in the 'unit are with the welfare of both.