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19. "I AM NOT THAT PEGGY"
The discharged American airman, half drunk after celebrating his return lies on a comfortable bed and wonders where he is. He fails to recognize the daughter of another ex-service man though it is her family who have put him up for the night. "Don't you know me?" she says as she arranges his pillow, "I'm Peggy." But he still does not recognize her. The name Peggy merely suggests a girl who should be dragged closer to him and kissed, and, as he pulls her towards him, she loses her balance and falls sprawling on top of him.
But Peggy has had two years' training in a hospital and has also done a course of social hygiene and she is ready to meet any emergency. "Oh no," she says, disentangling herself and picking up his coat to brush, "I am not that Peggy". It was all rather disconcerting but she is merely stating a fact and she laughs good-naturedly.
Though the best years of our lives is an American film Peggy might belong to almost any nation. She is essentially Peggy Stephenson but she is also one of many modern girls whose outlook on life is only just being appreciated. Two years in a hospital and the course of social hygiene have left their mark but she is as fresh and fragrant as ever, perhaps more so. Her mother need not have worried about keeping her the same till her father returned from the war, nor confessed to him regretfully that their children seem to have grown away from her. "A few years of normal growth," Peggy explains, "that's all," and after a moment's shyness her father understands.
Peggy's normal growth is not always easy. Soon after her father's return she finds herself in love with the airman whom they befriended, and she finds that she is that Peggy after all. Her hospital work leaves her both prepared and unprepared for falling in love, especially as the airman happens to be married; beneath all her training in social hygiene she is little more than a young girl, uncertain and perplexed. Yet when the surrender comes one feels that there is something worth surrendering, not a mere feminine frailty to be had for the asking.
How different, and yet in some ways how like, is Wilma, the simple untrained girl of humbler parents, the down on whose arms might well be the down on the willows in the spring, uninstructed in love yet knowing all that is worth knowing. She loved her young sailor when he had hands of his own and she loves him just the same when he returns from the war with two steel hooks instead. It is true that when she first sees them her lips quiver but only for a moment and when later as a test he insists on showing her his whole equipment all shrinking has passed and her love, if possible, is on even firmer ground. It is rooted, one feels, in herself rather than in any conscious loyalty.
Nothing is over-emphasized, or hardly ever over-sentimentalized. the best
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