BEHIND THE LOCKED DOOR OF HER RENTED ROOM, Laura Dillon began experimenting on herself. She pressed a pill onto her tongue and swallowed. She examined herself in the mirror. At first, she saw nothing, no changes at all.
Indeed, for Laura, her dealings with Dr. Foss had only one immediate side effect: her deepest secret was no longer a secret. One day at the lab, she noticed that people were sniggering as she walked by. Some of them called out, "Miss Dillon wants to become a man!" One of the secretaries pulled Laura aside and told her what had happened: the psychiatrist she'd gone to see—Dr. Foss's colleague—had gossiped about her case at a dinner party. Laura's story had spread around town. Now everyone knew .
That was it for Laura. She packed and fled, ending up in Bristol—the nearby city. Immediately, she lost herself in the bustle of traffic, in the crush of people who would never know her. The spires of ships bobbed over the roofs of warehouses; factories drew armies of workers; and buses rumbled along the streets. In Bristol, she could vanish.
At a cavernous garage with a Help Wanted sign in its window, she presented herself to the boss, offering a driver's license for his inspection. The boss held it between a greasy thumb and forefinger as he squinted at the name and then at the strange-looking person before him. All right, Miss Dillon, he said, you're hired.
Of course she was. The young men of Bristol had vanished, summoned away by letters in the mail. Women flocked into the Bristol Aeroplane Factory to work on the line. Help Wanted signs beckoned from doorways and shop windows everywhere. A young woman with an Oxford education could have had her choice of jobs. Except that Laura was no longer a woman, exactly.
She'd become a person in between, liminal, nervous-making, freakish. The testosterone had started to deepen her voice and bulk her muscles. She did not know what would come next—whether the drug would leave her stuck in androgyny or whether it would make a man of her. In those early years, chemists and physicians still thought of testosterone as a tonic for old men, a rejuvenating elixir that would forestall aging, mental decline, and impotence. The pills had been designed for bald-headed codgers who wanted to get their spark back. It was not supposed to turn women into men.
At the beginning of the twentieth century, the ovaries and testicles were shrouded in mystery; they were secret islands in the body that scientists had only just begun to explore. No researcher had managed to isolate estrogen or testosterone, nor indeed did these substances have names. Scientists knew sex hormones existed only because of their effects: the horn of the bull, the milk of the cow, the peacock's fan, and the soprano's trembling high note. But no one had yet explained how the testicles and the ovaries managed to shape almost every other part of the animal, including its personality.
In the early twentieth century, a Viennese gynecologist named Josef Halban theorized that both the male and female sex organs released the same chemical into the bloodstream. After all, males and females produced identical substances in their thyroid glands; a ram, for instance, could receive a thyroid-gland transplant from an ewe and it would remain a ram. So, Halban believed, if a boy were to be castrated and have an ovary implanted into his body, he would still grow into a normal man. According to Halban, the substances released by the ovary did no more than kick-start puberty; it contained no special power to feminine the body.1
In 1912 and 1913, a Viennese colleague of Halban's, Eugen Steinach, proved him wrong with a set of studies that had something of the circus act in them. Steinach published results that suggested that the ovaries and testicles produced different chemicals, and that these excretions exerted their own unique effects on the body. He demonstrated his point by performing some of the world's first sex changes. On guinea pigs. Steinach castrated young animals, then transplanted ovaries into males and testicles into the females. The male guinea pigs grew to maturity bathed in female hormones; as a result, they did not develop into ordinary males. Far from it. Steinach's altered guinea pigs behaved shockingly like the other sex. Milk dribbled from the males' nipples, and they exuded "feminine sex appeal," according to Steinach, meaning they responded coyly to the advances of other males.2 Meanwhile, the female guinea pigs' clitorises swelled into small penises; they grunted; they fought; they chased other females around the cages; they displayed all kinds of unladylike behavior. Steinach had proved, he believed, that "in every individual there is the . . . potential for either sex."3 Therefore, he thought it was sex hormones, not some predetermined pattern in our bodies, that caused us to become male or female.
He vividly illustrated his point with a photograph of a male-born guinea pig suckling a couple of babies. The guinea pig's little eye glitters inscrutably as the creature stands on its tiptoes to let the two babies suck milk from its belly—a haunting and eerie testament to just how much power hormones might have to shape our personalities, our very selves.
Steinach had proved the power of sex hormones to blur the lines between male and female. But he had no interest in changing men into women or vice versa. Instead, he dreamed of rejuvenation. If he could find a way to deliver testicle juices into the bodies of old men, initiating a second puberty, octogenarians would throw away their canes and perform feats of strength! His guinea pig sex-change operations were only the way station on the road to a different destination. Steinach was determined to defeat death itself.
And this made him famous. Though he's largely forgotten now, Steinach was so well known in the 1920s that his name became a verb. A man "got Steinached" by submitting to a fifteen-minute operation that was supposed to stimulate his testicles to produce more of the hormones that masculinized the body. (Words such as testosterone and androgen and steroid had not yet come into common use, but Steinach grasped that the testes produced a chemical that bulked up muscle and amped up the sex drive, and whatever that as-yet-unnamed chemical was, he wanted to give men more of it.) Steinach's fifteen-minute rejuvenating operation was nothing more than a glorified vasectomy; he believed that by cutting or blocking the tubes that release sperm from the testes, he could raise levels of "vital juices" in the body. His operation was utterly wrongheaded. It did nothing to alter hormone levels, but it did apparently act as a powerful placebo. Men madly pursued the cure during the 1920s, and it became the fad operation of its era.
"For several years past, that great biologist, Dr. Steinach, Director of the Biological Institute in Vienna, had been much discussed in European scientific circles, owing to his successful experiments on rats and guinea pigs, which he had restored to youth and reproductivity," wrote bon vivant and novelist Gertrude Atherton. "He had then operated on men with equal success. I had heard of him myself, for a well-known Englishman of sixty-odd had been re-energized by Steinach, and was so enthusiastic that he announced he would take Albert Hall and tell the world about it. But alas, he felt so young and energetic that he plunged into the wild life of a young man about town, caught pneumonia, and died."4 In fact, Steinach's patient Albert Wilson died the day before he could give his lecture, "How I Was Made Twenty Years Younger." Even that turn of events failed to dampen enthusiasm for the Steinach operation.
W. B. Yeats got Steinached in 1934, in hopes of shaking off depression and satisfying his twenty-seven-year-old girlfriend; Yeats claimed that the operation had given him a surge of vigor that cured his waiter's block. Even Sigmund Freud—the very model of a skeptical thinker—got Steinached, in 1926. Freud, worn down by his battle with cancer of the jaw , sought out the operation in secret. He confided in Harry Benjamin that the treatment had worked wonders; he brimmed with energy and his jaw seemed to be healing. Freud begged Benjamin to tell no one he'd resorted to the fad operation until after his death.5
In the 1920s—an era drunk on slim hips and jazz and hot-cha-cha, on bare legs and bathtub gin—growing old suddenly seemed unacceptable. Women bound their breasts in hopes of looking like fourteen-year-olds. F. Scott Fitzgerald declared that there were no second acts. Advertisements for creams and tonics promised pep, glamour, zip. In 1928, LI.S. doctors met for the first national conference ever on the problems of old age—they dared to discuss what would have seemed unthinkable only a few decades ago: a "cure" for old age.6
Sex hormones—with their power to kick off puberty, to soften skin and build muscle—offered the most hope. Even today, researchers debate whether testosterone or estrogen should be taken to ameliorate the symptoms of old age. While the benefits remain unclear, we do know that hormone treatments come with significant risks, including prostate and breast cancer, heart disease and stroke.
In the 1920s, estrogen and testosterone had yet to be synthesized in large enough quantities to make them usable as drugs. Therefore, an entire field of quack medicine, called organology, bloomed. Its primary purpose: to change the levels of sex hormones in people's bodies in an era before drugs were available to do just that.
In 1923, a surgeon named Serge Voronoff snapped off the lights in a lecture room at the International Congress of Surgeons in London and showed a series of before-and-after movies of some of his patients: decrepit old men sprung out of sickbeds to row dowm a river. The surgeon claimed that he'd given the men their vigor by grafting slices of chimpanzee testicles into their gonads. The procedure was simple: Voronoff would etherize both man and chimp and place them side by side on operating tables. He would then cut slivers from the chimp's testicles and insert them into the man's testicles. For Voronoff, there was only one hitch: not enough chimps.7
In the United States, a doctor with a mail-order degree from the Kansas City Eclectic Medical University hawked his own cheapo version of the Voronoff treatment. Dr. John Brinkley used goats instead of chimpanzees—which drastically reduced the price of the operation. If you came into Brinkley's "hospital" in Kansas, you could get yourself rejuvenated for under a thousand dollars. Hell, you could even pick out your own goat.
"The subject for discussion at this time is your health. Not my health, but the health of my listeners and friends throughout radioland," Doc Brinkley would implore over the airwaves of KFKB, his own radio station. Old men flocked to Milford, Kansas, and as many as sixty a day left with slices of goats sewn into their testicles.
The monkey- and goat-gland practitioners, for all their promises, did not give their patients much beyond nasty infections. By the 1930s, they'd mostly packed up and scuttled away—driven off by the medical advances that made them obsolete. During that decade, lab-manufactured, synthetic testosterone and estrogen both became available. But even then, the dream of life extension died hard. For instance, in 1935, when Lavoslav Ruzicka and his partner Adolf Butenandt produced the first synthesized testosterone, most scientists still believed that it might provide the key to recapturing youth. "The male hormone has been isolated from the testes," Ruzicka told the New York Times that year. "We may be able through injections of synthetic hormone to produce some degree of rejuvenation, [that is] we may [be able to] postpone old age." Ruzicka, one of the world's preeminent chemists, still clung to the hope that testosterone might push back death.8
It was still not clear in the late 1930s what the sex hormones could and could not do. But for transsexuals, the new availability of such drugs would make all the difference. They could now self-medicate, transforming their bodies with nothing but a daily pill or a monthly injection—if they could get access to those drugs. Dillon could.
It was thanks to the pills that Dillon became a man—that is, within a few months he was able to pass among strangers. The regular dose of testosterone, along with manual labor, puffed up his shoulders. He had a bit of stubble now. His voice was growing gruff. And he'd begun to use the name Michael when he introduced himself to people. Working at the petrol pumps in a pair of coveralls, Dillon easily blended in. "Hey, boy, fill 'er up," the customers called. Out front, among strangers, Dillon became himself: the hard worker who collected the customers' ration coupons. In his grease-monkey suit, he hurried from car to car, a man like any other. The relief was enormous.
But when he left the pumps and went to work inside the garage—among men who knew his secret—that was another matter entirely. The mechanics and car-parkers jabbed their thumbs in his direction and guffawed, "You see that fellow over there? Well, he's not a man, he's a girl." Dillon became the butt of jokes that repeated tunelessly all day long and echoed in his head at night.
A deaf foreman ran the repair shop. For a while, he was the only one who treated Dillon as a regular bloke—because he didn't know. But Dillon's tormentors could not leave the old man out of the fun. One of them scrawled a message on a pad of paper, handed it to the foreman, and they all watched as he puzzled over the inscription. Then he studied Dillon and, after a heartbeat of delay, joined in the laughter.
Just when Dillon started his job, war came to Bristol. German planes roared over the city at night. Sirens wailed. Incendiary bombs crashed into churches and shops, and flames leapt up, blazing through roofs. On Regent Street, burning Christmas cards circled in the air, spreading sparks; by morning, the whole street had been reduced to ashes. The shells of buildings—strewn with shrapnel, scraps of furniture, and charred bodies-—still exhaled wisps of smoke. Ambulances darted around uselessly.
The Germans intended to level Bristol because of its ports and airplane factories. Residents wore metal bracelets printed with their names and addresses, so that if their bodies were burned beyond recognition, they could still be identified. Because of the constant threat of explosions, local businesses began to hire "fire watchers," guards who slept on the premises through the night, ready to wake up at the first howl of an air-raid siren. Fire watchers battled encroaching flames, using whatever they could find—dirt or tires or blankets—to pile on top of the conflagrations and steer them away from buildings.
Fire didn't scare Dillon, and he desperately needed extra money and a free place to stay. So he volunteered to watch the garage at night, sleeping on the floor of the office.
When Christmas came, Dillon offered to spend the holiday in the garage, watching for bombs. He had nowhere else to go, certainly not Folkestone, where they still called him Laura. Instead, he spent Christmas alone, puttering around among tires and tools, in the bleak light that filtered through blackout shades.
The garage contained barrels of gasoline, sometimes as much as a thousand gallons. Should a spark from a German incendiary device hit the building, the whole place could explode in flames. The boss had advertised for a partner to help Dillon, but no one answered the ad; it was too dangerous a job to attract any takers.
Luckily for Dillon, the garage never took a direct hit. But bombs did explode nearby. When he heard a crash anywhere in the neighborhood, he would rush out into the street and help other fire watchers extinguish them. He didn't bother to wear his tin hat, because he was so miserable he thought he might as well die. Better, he thought, to be a dead hero than a living outcast.
During his nighttime vigils, Dillon kept his mind occupied by scribbling in his crabbed handwriting. He had begun to study medical books that summarized the recent, stunning breakthroughs in the use of hormones. Dillon took notes on his reading and then elaborated on the themes, spinning out his own theories. His notes would eventually lead to his groundbreaking book, Self To become the man he wanted to be, Michael Dillon would have to do more than just dose himself on testosterone. He would have to invent the very idea of a transsexual—a person who used hormones to change his sex and then lived happily ever after.
One winter's day in 1940, Dillon found a teenage boy with a tumble of blond curls hanging around the garage office, waiting for the boss to come back from lunch. The boy, Gilbert Barrow, had just arrived from Swansea. That word alone told the whole tale, why Gilbert had washed up here and why he needed a job: the port town in Wales had just been pummeled by a maelstrom of bombs that had obliterated several city blocks and killed hundreds.
Barrow had grown up in the Muller Homes, an orphanage in Bristol, where he'd been beaten and starved; now he'd been orphaned again in Swansea—every one of his coworkers had been killed. He had nowhere to live and nothing to lose.
Dillon decided this qualified Barrow to become his partner in fire-watching, and to live in the garage office with him. Barrow happily agreed—no one else had offered to take care of him, and so he immediately clung to Dillon as a best friend. Now, every night when the other workers drifted home, the two young men pulled down the blackout shades in the garage office and waited for the bombs to fall.
On quiet nights, when they grew bored of the radio, Dillon would pace back and forth and lecture Gilbert in his Oxford accent, going on about philosophy and theology. Once he finally had an audience—this boy who listened raptly to his disquisitions—Dillon could not seem to shut up. Gilbert called Dillon's lectures "stuff-shirt nonsense," but that was only teasing; he had never received a proper education, and Dillon's speeches introduced him to Plato and Aristotle, to the Socratic method and the life of the mind.
On other nights, the announcer on the nine-o'clock news would warn of bombing raids, and then the sirens would go off. The two friends would try to snatch some sleep, curled up side by side on the floor. They might wake up to screams and the tinkle of falling glass, to explosions and the whoosh of flames.
One night, a bomb erupted somewhere down the street. Bareheaded, Dillon hurried toward the door. Gilbert Barrow pleaded with him to put on his tin safety hat. Dillon had hardly used the thing, but now, at Gilbert's insistence, he shoved it on.
Pieces of paper were falling from the sky. White sheets circled and fluttered around, like propaganda. A bomb had hit John Wright's printing press at the end of the block.
Dillon darted up a flight of stairs, into the storeroom where the boss kept the tires; he rolled these down the stairs. Come down, come down, Gilbert yelled up to his friend, as flames from the neighboring building began to lick up the stairs of the garage toward Dillon. Dillon bolted down the stairs and jumped through the flames; then he and Gilbert grabbed and pushed at the tires, piling them into a fire line. Just after they finished, a second bomb blew through the roof of the printing shop, and the tires flew into the air and came raining down again. Somehow, Dillon and Barrow survived. In the morning, the boss gave them a small bonus: hardship pay. Though he'd been barred from the military, Dillon had finally gotten a chance to prove his bravery—though, of course, no one but Gilbert had seen.
One fall day, Gilbert received his call-up papers from the navy. He packed his meager possessions, ready to report for duty in Plymouth the next day. With Gilbert's departure impending, Dillon worked up the courage to allude to the awkward subject that had thickened the air between them all these months.
The garage hands must have told you I was a woman, Dillon said.
Of course they did, Gilbert replied. He'd figured out Dillon's secret on the very first day, he said, but it had never stopped him from recognizing Dillon as a man. In fact, Gilbert had told the garage hands that his friend was as much a man as any of them, which baffled the tormentors. Then Gilbert had threatened to punch any of the garage hands who called Dillon a girl. He confessed all this to Dillon now, laughing at his own bravado. And then, the next day, he left.
With his only friend gone in the fall of 1941, Dillon felt himself descending back into despair. He didn't see how he could leave the garage. To find a new job, he'd have to show his driver's license, then go through the foot-shuffling ordeal of explaining that, yes, he really was Laura Dillon. Everywhere he went, his identity papers would dog him, making it impossible for him to establish himself as a born male. It did not occur to Dillon that he could petition to the government to change his legal status. As far as Dillon knew, there was simply no way to delete the F on his documents. The letter was tattooed onto his birth certificate, seemingly as impossible to erase as a scar.
The earliest technology that people used to change their sex was not hormones or surgery. It was clothing: skirts and trousers, jackets, scarves, earrings, scabbards. In the nineteenth century, a delicate-looking man did not have to ask anyone's permission to become a woman: he could simply move to a new town, costume himself in gowns and rings, and find a job as a seamstress. Meanwhile, a number of women escaped poverty by melting into an army or taking up the life of a sailor. References to such "female men" pepper the newspapers of the 1800s. "Amongst the crew of the Queen Charlotte [ship] . . . was a female African who had served as a seaman in the royal navy for upwards of eleven years," according to one report. The woman, known as William Brown, "has served for some time as the captain of the fore-top, highly to the satisfaction of the officers . . . She says she is a married woman and went to sea in consequence of a quarrel with her husband . . . She declares her intention of again entering the service as a volunteer."9
But that kind of do-it-yourself sex change had become nearly impossible by the 1940s, when Michael Dillon wanted to switch. Years before, governments had begun tracking citizens as they changed address—and now just about every major transaction, from getting paid to buying property, required an identity card or driver's license. The military, which had once admitted men with hardly a glance at their bodies, now required recruits to parade naked before medical examiners. At the same time, governments had no legal mechanism for recognizing the transformation of a man into a woman or vice versa.
The "sex-change operation" therefore was more than just a product of medical breakthroughs that could stunningly retool the body. It was also a mid-twentieth century cultural invention, necessary in a new world of computer databases and routine medical exams. During the 1950s and 1960s, the sex-change operation would become a rite of passage that allowed a small number of people to be reclassified from male to female, and occasionally, from female to male.
In the 1940s, however, only a handful of people had ever managed to convince their government to change the sex listed on their birth certificate or passport. Dillon, certainly, had never heard of such a thing. He believed he would always be ensnared in Laura Dillon's documents.
As much as he might loathe the garage, as much as it had become his dank, oily hell, at least he earned a measure of freedom. The boss promoted him to tow-truck driver, allowing Dillon to roam around Bristol. With his Oxford accent and his upper-crust manners, Dillon got along better with the customers than he did with any of the other garage attendants. He was also the hardest worker in the shop: two decades later, Dillon could still remember the license-plate numbers of the regular customers.
Now that Dillon had become the public face of the garage, delivering cars and negotiating payments, he could no longer go under the name Miss Dillon. It only confused the patrons. And so, simply out of a concern for his business, the boss declared that from now on Miss Dillon would be called he. The other workers had to treat Dillon as a man—but only so long as customers were around.
The nights turned silent, or what passes for silent in the city during the war. In the garage, Dillon pushed piles of keys and receipts aside and went to work again on the manuscript that he'd started two years before. With Gilbert gone, he had no one to lecture, and so he poured his thoughts onto the page. He'd managed to amass a library of books on endocrinology, and he quoted liberally from these, and also from a few rare pamphlets on homosexuality and perversions he'd smuggled out of bookstores; they were all slim books, as if the authors were ashamed to have taken on the topic at all. He wrote with hands stained by oil. He smelled of petrol and pipe smoke. He had no medical training, of course. Nonetheless, he was penning a scientific book of stunning originality. He argued for medical practices that were decades ahead of their time.
In Self Dillon asserted that there's only one way to determine whether a person is male or female: ask that person. True sex may have nothing to do with the appearance of the body; rather, the sense of being male, female, or something in between results from a "psychological build," according to Dillon.10
He posited that transsexuals develop their identities while they are still in the womb, and that aside from their desire to switch physical sex, they are perfectly ordinary. "The child would seem to develop naturally enough if only he belonged to the other sex," Dillon wrote.11 He criticized psychiatrists for their ignorant belief that people could be talked out of a core identity—this kind of therapy was worse than useless, because it prevented transsexuals from obtaining what they really needed: surgery and hormones. Dillon argued that patients themselves, not doctors, should have the final say about their bodies. "Is it not for the individual to judge whether he should be 'mutilated,' experimented on or left alone?"12 he wrote, arguing for a new kind of medical practice in which the patient would be the boss. If an operation or a pill could help the patient achieve "a tolerably happy life," then the patient should be given the option. "Is not this an end worth striving after?"13 he asked rhetorically.
Today, such ideas have become our truths: in the West, millions of people every year undergo cosmetic surgeries to look prettier and younger, or to sculpt their bodies into the shape that conforms to their aspirations. But in Dillon's day, these procedures were rare. Before World War II, Britain had only one plastic surgeon; in the limited States, there were only a handful.
At the same time, thousands of people endured their own mysterious urges in silence and confusion, wrestling with the compulsion to cross-dress as they fought to fake their way through life in bodies that shamed them. Most would-be transsexuals in the 1940s had no idea that transformation was possible, or that others suffered as they did.
As Dillon scrawled out his theories in that garage, about a hundred miles away in Coventry, an army captain was undergoing a battery of tests to prove he could join Britain's elite team of fliers. The young captain half-believed that if he could escape into the sky, if he could break through the sound barrier, then he might be able to conquer the compulsions that tormented him. Unlike Michael Dillon, this young man did not know how to explain his strange urges. For now, he was doing everything he could to pretend they didn't exist.
In 1941, Robert Cowell stood in front of a board of medical examiners, balancing with one leg up in the air and his eves shut. The twenty-three-year-old had applied to become a pilot in the Royal Air Force, and now, with a team of doctors watching, he had to pass a series of tests to prove that he could fly a one-seat plane into battle without getting airsick, dizzy, or light-headed.
Within ten years, this seeming paragon of British manhood would transform himself into a curvy blonde: Roberta Cowell. But if you study early photos of Robert Cowell during his military career—Lie poses in an army uniform or with racing goggles pushed up onto his forehead—it's hard to find any foreshadowing of the woman he would become. He looks young and brash, with an arch smile, as if he's about to mutter some droll comment. Years later, Roberta Cowell would claim that she had been born a hermaphrodite, or a man with a feminine body. But if there was any trace of femininity in Robert Cowell back in 1941, the Royal Air Force medical examiners did not detect it; they did not discover nascent breasts when they examined the young man's chest for tumors, nor did they find genital anomalies when they palpated his groin for hernias. Cowell's military identity card noted only one defect on his body—"scar under chin"—and the accompanying photo shows him as an intense young man with close-set eyes. The RAF accepted him as a fighter pilot.
Under his flying jacket, that young man wore a talisman around his neck—a tiny vial of hot-rod fuel affixed to a chain. He liked to open it up and breathe in the smell of fuel, the perfume of velocity. Cowell had begun racing cars as a teenager, rattling around tracks at top speed with his teeth chattering. He was happiest when the world blurred around him, trees and clouds and faces softened by speed. And because he loved to go fast, to push past limits, he volunteered to fly RAF planes at an altitude of forty thousand feet—at the very rim of the atmosphere, so high that he once nearly passed out from oxygen starvation.
He survived bullets whistling by his ears, crashes, a broken altimeter, all of it proof of his luck. The constant danger delighted him, and the Spitfire planes he jockeyed "were all I had hoped for, and more."14 Then one day his luck ended.
On his very last mission against the Germans, a piece of flak ripped into the hull of his plane. The engine sputtered and went silent. The plane plummeted. Cowell readied himself to jump out and yank his parachute cord, but the ground was rushing up too fast for that. He crash-landed somewhere east of the Rhine. When he crawled out of the wreck—miraculously alive—he found German soldiers standing over him.
Cowell became a prisoner of war in Stalag Left I. He had always lived for the blur of speed, that softening of edges when he roared past trees and buildings. Now he was stuck behind barbed wire, a prisoner in slow-motion hell. Rats crawled over his body with precise little pats of their paws. German guards wore scimitars of dirt under their nails. A piece of bread glittered with beautiful crumbs that turned out to be broken glass—the Stalag cook had gone crazy and tried to kill the prisoners. Once, when the Red Cross packages failed to arrive, Cowell became so desperate for food that he chased down the prison cats, killed them, and ate them raw. "There is very little that you cannot eat if you are hungry enough."15 He saw a prisoner shot down for drunkenness; his best friend in the camp went mad; and Cowell lost fifty pounds. Through it all, he retreated from his surroundings by fantasizing about what he'd do after the war ended. While he huddled in the mud, an image took shape in his mind: a twelve-cylinder engine with Aspin rotary valves. As soon as he was free, he decided, he would build that engine, drop it into a race car, and enter it in the Grand Prix.16
He must also have thought about the woman inside him, must have felt Roberta beginning to assert herself. But a prisoner-of-war camp is no place to nurture taboo urges. And so he dreamed of engines.