[Woman of WWII 02] - Poppy Redfern and the Fatal Flyers

by Tessa Arlen

  Keith yawned and Huntley said, “Yes, interesting, but not fascinating. We need a stronger lead.”

  I was ready for him. “And then there is Annie Trenchard. I know she’s down in our notes as a mother of two little girls who live with their grandmother, but there is far more to her than that. She had a brush with the Luftwaffe too. Before France fell to Germany she was delivering a plane to an airfield in France. It was about this time of the year and the light was failing. As she neared what she thought was her destination, a heavy ground mist came in off the river. She was touching down on the airstrip when out of the corner of her eye she saw a swastika on the tail of a large German bomber!”

  “You’re joking—what on earth did she do?” Keith leaned forward.

  Got you! I thought and laughed. “Well, in the parlance of my American friend: ‘she hightailed it out of there’ and found her way back to France, but it is certainly an adventure worth telling, don’t you think? Annie is still teased to this day about visiting her German boyfriends.”

  Huntley was so pleased with the image that he clapped his hands together. “I think her being a mother makes the story even more dramatic.” He turned to Keith. “How much footage did you get of them all having lunch?”

  Keith shrugged. “Plenty,” he said, blushing, because there was probably more of Grable than anyone else. “I was shooting for fun, really.”

  “Exactly!” I pulled my notebook toward me. “They were all relaxed and at ease with each other: eating sandwiches and drinking coffee on the edge of an airfield full of planes! Their work is difficult and dangerous, but they also know how to have fun!”

  “The cheerful takes-danger-in-her-stride woman of action,” Huntley said. “A sisterhood of heroes.” His voice imitated the even tones of the commentator as he mimed a cameraman shooting film. “‘And as they wait for their next mission, the Attagirls enjoy a quick, lighthearted lunch together before they are off again, delivering planes to RAF airfields all over Britain!’ Well done, Poppy. We show a group of attractive, youthful women taking the war in their stride, and if Edwina is in the shot, that’s okay too.”

  “She wasn’t with the group at lunch,” I said. “She was really quiet after we had eaten. She was off by herself on the edge of things.”

  “What about the one that looks like Betty Grable?” Huntley wasn’t interested in what Edwina had been doing.

  Glamorous Grable, I said to myself and read from my notes: “Daughter of a peer of the realm, Lord something or other and related in some way to H. H. Asquith, our prime minister in the last war. She has been flying since she was tall enough to see out of a cockpit, but unlike Letty, whose father encouraged her to join the ATA, Betty’s parents were actively against her flying in wartime. She tried to join the WAAF as a pilot, but since the RAF doesn’t believe that women should fly in combat she had to join the ATA instead.”

  Huntley sighed. “Let’s try not to pioneer for women’s rights, Poppy. What about Letty?”

  “Letty Wills is one of the few women pilots who can fly one of those massive Avro Lancaster bombers. I think that’s pretty sensational in itself. They are all working tomorrow morning, but I can have breakfast at the mess and ask Letty a bit more about her experiences.”

  “What about the Polish girl?” Keith asked. “She’s a looker too.”

  “She is a countess, actually.” I wondered if Zofia would mind her title being referred to. “Hers is a story of pure romance. She was married to a handsome Pole: Count Lukasiewicz . . .”

  “Easy for you to say.” Huntley was smiling. “I love where all this is going, by the way.”

  I looked up and caught the admiration in his face. When Huntley’s thick, dark brown hair flopped forward and his eyes lit up behind his round-rimmed glasses, he looked like a youthfully myopic Oxford don, an attractive one. I turned pages in my notebook. “When Poland fell to the Nazis, the countess and her husband managed to escape and find their way to England. Count Lukasiewicz joined the RAF and was tragically killed in the Battle of Britain, so Zofia joined the ATA. You see? All their stories are fascinating, even if they didn’t get nearly shot down by the Luftwaffe.” I looked up from my notes. “I am sure that all of them would love to share their experiences on film!”

  Keith made a triumphant whooping sound. “I think we should get something on them tomorrow morning as they take off for work!”

  “Good idea, Keith, and well done, Poppy. No, really, very well done. I’m going to telephone Fanny and give him an outline of what we want to do. We’ll run through the film Keith shot right now, draft up a framework; then you can stay on for a couple of days to get more stories and write up the commentator’s script.” He got up from his chair. “Right, who wants another beer?” He looked at his watch. “Oh God, look at the time. Did you get a darkroom set up?”

  Keith nodded. “Bathroom across the hall from us. Take me minutes to process the film.”

  “Okay, you get the next round, Keith, and I’ll see if I can get hold of Fanny. And ask them if they have anything hot to give us for dinner, would you? I am sick of sandwiches. The one I ate at lunchtime is still repeating on me.”

  * * *

  * * *

  I DIDN’T SEE Griff come into the inn’s parlor; I was too busy writing.

  “Hullo there!”

  I nodded as I marked a passage in Annie’s story before I looked up. Bess, sleeping on her back with folded paws, was so exhausted from her day of filming that she merely opened one eye by way of a greeting. Griff hesitated in the doorway. “Hope I’m not interrupting anything.” I decided that I quite liked a bit of uncertainty in this abundantly self-assured man.

  “No, we’re taking a break for dinner—want to join us? I think Keith is trying to rustle up something for us.”

  “I’m always hungry and then when dinner arrives I suddenly lose my appetite. Can I get you a drink?”

  “Keith is getting me one.”

  “Oh, I see.”

  He sat down in a chair close to me. “Are you still going ahead with the movie?”

  “Yes. Edwina was a perfect heroine, but in their own quiet ways so are the other girls. Anyway, we can tell their stories in more detail now there is no . . . no star, so to speak. There will be some group shots with her, but that’s all to the good, because it will be a sort of homage to her bravery.”

  He nodded. “She was quite a character,” he said after a moment. “Not as likable as the other girls.” He glanced at me out of the corner of his eye.

  “But a heck of a lot more inneresting,” I said in a terrible imitation of an American accent. His smile was sheepish, and he was about to say something when Keith arrived carrying two tankards of beer and half a lemonade shandy for me.

  “Howdy, mate.” It was an eccentric greeting, but Griff seemed to appreciate it.

  “Keith is a huge fan of American movies,” I whispered. I could tell that the thought of spending an evening with a real live American was a tantalizing one to our young cameraman. He set down a tankard in front of Griff. “Saw you come in; hope you like English bitter . . .”

  They lifted their beer. “Here’s how,” said Keith. His eyes swiveled over to me to check that I didn’t think he was a complete idiot.

  “Mud in your eye,” said Griff, his face quite composed. He paused and looked at me.

  “Here’s to Edwina,” I said as I raised my glass of shandy, and we drank in silence.

  The formalities dispensed with, Keith reported on the inn’s menu. “Not sure if turnip soup is your idea of dinner or not, pal. I saw some and it looks a bit gray.”

  Griff clearly loved being called “pal”—he ducked his head and looked up at me, his eyes alight with laughter. “It’s a no to the soup. The ATA’s Spam sandwiches are still with me. But there is a fish-and-chip shop in Didcote, and if the innkeeper doesn’t mind our bringing food in here
—I’d be happy to drive down.”

  Mr. Evans said he didn’t mind. And so Griff redeemed himself—thoroughly, in my esteem—by treating us to fresh local-caught fish and lovely thick chips, and a gloriously delicious dinner it was too.

  SIX

  I WOKE EARLY TO CATCH THE REMAINING FIVE ATA PILOTS AT BREAKfast before they all went to work and was unprepared to find Griff waiting for me outside the inn in his Alvis.

  “Thank you for dinner last night,” I said as I lifted Bess into the jump seat behind us, where she immediately crouched forward so her head was between us. “And how nice of you to drive me to Didcote Airfield.”

  “It’s a pleasure,” he said. “Then, after you have talked to the Attas, we can drive back to London after breakfast.”

  And here was that moment again. An opportunity to emphasize my independence, without being mean-spirited or scoring points. “Actually, I’m not leaving this morning after all. Huntley has the green light from our boss to go ahead with the film. I am to stay behind for a couple of days and get a little more background on the Attagirls.”

  “Then I’ll stay too,” he immediately offered.

  “Very sweet of you, Griff, really it is, but I am going to be busy. I need to start my rewrites and Keith and Huntley will only stay a few minutes this morning to get some film of the Attagirls leaving Didcote in their air taxi, but thanks for the offer.”

  “Okay, I get the picture. How will you get back to London?”

  “By train.”

  “And what about Bessie?”

  “If they won’t let me have her in with me in the railway compartment, we can travel in the guard’s van. But since she’s such a little girl I’m sure it won’t be a problem, will it, Bess?”

  A resigned nod as he started the car. “Okay, I’ll drop you at the ATA mess and be on my way. Any thoughts on Edwina’s accident?”

  Any thoughts on Edwina? I’d had a million of them. I turned in my seat to face him. Last night he had been quite determined that her crash was an accident—surely, so far as he was concerned, there were no more thoughts. “What do you mean?”

  “Well, I didn’t like to bring this up at dinner last night, but Sir Basil talked to Mac Wilson, the ground engineer who worked on Edwina’s plane. And Sir Basil reported to Vera Abercrombie that the Spitfire was in tip-top working order. All the planes flying for the film were gone over that morning. There was no reason Mac could give for the engine stalling that way. But . . . I heard Sir Basil ask Vera Abercrombie if Edwina had been drinking.”

  “Drinking?”

  “My reaction too. No one in their right mind drinks when they fly. But apparently Edwina was given a dressing-down by Abercrombie because she had a skinful a couple of times last week with a hangover so bad that she couldn’t go to work.”

  I couldn’t believe my ears. Competent Edwina, with her bossy know-it-all swagger, tended to overdo the gin and tonic?

  “She wasn’t drunk yesterday afternoon,” I said. “She was alert and completely sober. I should know. I spent most of the day around her.”

  “Not one little tipple out of a hip flask?”

  “Not that I could see. She ate enough sandwiches for ten men. Drank a couple of cups of coffee. She spent more time with her lipstick and her comb than she did with anything else.”

  He nodded with his eyebrows raised, as if he suspected I couldn’t tell the difference between drunk and sober. “I didn’t think you saw her stumbling around the grounds, taking swigs from a whiskey bottle, you know. People can get quite seriously drunk in a quiet way. Did she appear to concentrate a bit too hard on little things like, say, putting on her lipstick? Or maybe she dropped her comb a couple of times?”

  “Not all. Did she seem drunk to you?”

  He shrugged off the question. “I honestly wouldn’t know. I was trying to avoid her. To be frank, she came on a bit strong the night before last.”

  “Not drunk, even then?”

  He laughed and shook his head. “Girls don’t usually have to have a couple of drinks so they can spend time with me.” I realized I had hit a nerve: good-looking men do have a way of being easily disconcerted when things don’t quite go according to plan. I realized I hadn’t quite forgiven him for being so attentive to Edwina.

  “I meant to say did she drink at all that evening?”

  “No, she had a beer with her dinner, and that was all. After that she took me over to look at her Spitfire, and I was back at the inn by ten.”

  Dinner had ended at half past eight. That meant Griff and Edwina had spent a little over an hour together out on the airfield— alone.

  It would be foolish not to admit, even to myself, that I hadn’t thought about Edwina last night as I had worked on my script. Repeatedly, my tired mind had replayed the paralyzing sight of her plane hurtling toward the earth. And when I went up to bed, every time I was on the verge of dropping off I remembered her last words: “I should never have asked him how he . . .”

  I repeated them to Griff, and he pressed his lips together in a tight line before he said, “Yeah, it was a strange thing for her to say. But people say the strangest things when they are dying. She was barely conscious, Poppy. Her last thoughts could have been about anyone, anything. Something that had happened years ago.”

  I left it there. The last thoughts of dying people were part of his world, not mine. Heaven only knew how many friends and comrades he had lost in this war.

  But I had too many thoughts about how and why in my sleepless hours not to try to seek some answers today. “If the plane was in perfect working condition, and she was not drunk, then why did she muff a maneuver that was apparently a piece of cake for someone of her experience and expertise?”

  He cleared his throat and reached his right hand over to stroke Bess’s long ears down the back of her neck. “Yes, I thought about that too.” He returned his attention to the road. “If she had been drinking, it would have had to have been a lot for her to make the kinds of mistakes she made up there. And surely one of us would have noticed that level of inebriation before she took off.” He turned his head to me, his eyebrows raised in inquiry, as if he needed confirmation.

  “I would say she wasn’t drunk at all. But I haven’t seen anyone really drunk, except for a sailor in London once, and he was passed out in the gutter.”

  “So, we both agree that she was not drunk yesterday before she flew. But apparently she was in the habit of drinking a lot, and more than just occasionally.” He slowed down as we passed a cyclist wobbling along the side of the road. “And since we must accept that the plane was in good working order, then she was either ill or lost consciousness . . . but even that doesn’t quite ring true, because she did regain control and then seemed to lose it again.”

  “Who says the plane was in good working order? I can’t seem to let go of questions that point to an intentional accident.”

  “Such as?”

  “All right, then, and please remember I’m just thinking out loud.”

  “Fire away, Sherlock.”

  “Just supposing someone benefited by her accident and wanted her out of the way? The Attagirls, including Sir Basil and Vera Abercrombie, are all such proficient aviators, so knowledgeable about the planes they fly. Surely any of them would know how to fix a plane to make it stall in the air. So instead of asking myself how Edwina crashed her plane, I find myself thinking who would want her dead?” I knew I had all his attention because our breakneck speed slowed considerably. “According to Letty, June was a gifted flight engineer.”

  I saw June’s pretty, open-countenanced face. She was such a straightforward and unaffected woman. I couldn’t imagine her doing anything as underhand and treacherous as sabotaging a plane, but that was not the question I was asking. I was looking for motive, something that would drive someone outside of their ordinary everyday self enough to kill Edwina. �
�Neither June nor Letty liked Edwina. In fact, Letty actively disliked her!”

  He was genuinely surprised. He turned in his seat and stared at me as if I were mad. “What made you think that? I thought they all got on well together. They were certainly enjoying themselves yesterday. It was all laughter and sunshine.”

  Then you clearly don’t understand women as well as you think you do, chimed in Ilona.

  “I didn’t mean yesterday when we were filming. It was something I observed about Letty in her manner to Edwina when we arrived.”

  I remembered the brief interlude between June and Edwina. “June attempted to draw Edwina in to relate her Luftwaffe adventure, and Edwina snubbed her. She told June to tell the story and then turned her back. It put Edwina in a bad light, it was ungracious behavior, and June had every right to be insulted. But if she was, she didn’t show it. Her expression was impassive and then she attempted to laugh off Edwina’s bad manners, but there was an almost gratified expression on June’s face, as if Edwina’s behavior was confirmation of a more widely held belief.

  “On the other hand, Letty’s reaction to Edwina’s antisocial response was far more outward. Her expression was openly contemptuous. She made her disdain evident. She reminded me of an old aunt of mine who expressed disapproval so eloquently, without saying a single word, that you just wanted to shrivel up and disappear.” I laughed at how accurately Letty had depicted the expression on my aunt Grace’s face. I had been left in no doubt that she considered Edwina’s manner odious.