| When Our Plane Hit the Mountain
By Lauren Byrne
 “The first
great adventure of my life,” French Girl Guide Janine Alexandre
recorded on 12 August, 1946, in her little notebook as she sat in an old
war plane rattling its way over the decimated French countryside toward
Ireland. The 16-year-old hadn’t a clue just how great an adventure
it would turn out to be.
Sitting with Janine were 20 other girl guides, ranging in age from 13
to 21, all equally excited by their first trip abroad on a plane.
They had been invited by their Irish counterparts, who felt that some
hearty Irish hospitality might make up for the deprivations of the war
years. However, poor visibility and driving winds blew the plane off its
course for Dublin. For the eager young French girls, the crunch of metal,
searing pain, then deathly stillness, marked their introduction to Ireland.
In the Wicklow hills, where the plane crash-landed, the event is part
of folklore. Now writer Suzanne Barnes brings the events back to life
in When Our Plane Hit the Mountain (New Island). Her vivid reconstruction
of the crash and its aftermath on the dank, boggy mountainside is enough
to curl the edges of the pages. English-born Barnes, a resident of Ireland
since 1989, first discovered hints of the story while on a walk
in the Wicklow Mountains in 2002. Intrigued, Barnes began her own search
for the plane crash victims; now women in their 70s and older, scattered
throughout France, but for whom the memory of the crash and their time
in Ireland, as she discovered, was still very much alive.
The girls and their crew of five all survived. While two uninjured
girls and the pilot stumbled down the mountain in search of help, clambering
down a sheer cliff face at one point, the remaining girl guides, cold,
many seriously injured— one girl trapped in the tiny toilet—
kept their spirits up by singing a favorite song, “Whatever should
happen to me/I will keep smiling/And look on the bright side of life.”
For most their disastrous first encounter with air travel and Irish
weather did not sour them. A number of the women returned to Ireland in
1996 to mark the 50th anniversary of the crash. And earlier this year
several traveled to Dublin for the publication of Barnes’s book.
“I never met a more enthusiastic and vibrant collection of women
in my life,”Barnes says.
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