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

by Tessa Arlen

  She recovered her equanimity. “He said it was careering about, as if it was ‘as drunk as a lord.’”

  “She must have been ill.” Sir Basil shook his head “Letty didn’t drink.”

  “She ate a large breakfast and seemed quite as usual.” Vera glanced at me as if she wished I weren’t there.

  “No one was quite as usual after yesterday, Vera. Perhaps they shouldn’t have flown.” It was the first time during this awful conversation that he had criticized her. I wondered how much flack Vera would catch at ATA White Waltham headquarters simply because she was a woman. Men will go out of their way to support a hardworking colleague if he makes a mistake; a woman simply shouldn’t make them at all.

  She picked up a pencil and tapped a rapid tattoo on the desk. “There is a war on, Basil. We can’t give everyone a day off when there is an accident.”

  “Accident? Is that official, that Edwina’s crash was an accident?” The sharpness of his tone was almost derisive.

  A intake of breath and Vera looked across the desk at her friend. Her stare was steady and reproachful. “Yes, it is. Until we have the ATA Accident Committee’s report, we must assume both were accidents.”

  He turned and walked to the window, jangling small change in his pocket. “I’m afraid I see a difference in the two incidents already.” He shifted more change about and Vera closed her eyes. “Letty Wills was a conscientious and levelheaded woman: a responsible member of your team. Edwina was always a risk taker and a bit of a show-off . . . and a—” Vera cleared her throat and he glanced at me. “Letty Wills was the most rational and practical person at Didcote. There was something wrong with that ruddy plane: I hate those damned Walrus! What was it doing at Supermarine— in for repairs again is my bet!”

  Vera’s face was still set in a rigid mockery of composure. “Of course I haven’t ruled out engine problems, Basil. But we won’t know a thing until the ATA Accident Committee have done their job. And just for the record”—another glance at me, but I pretended not to see it—“Edwina might have been a bit reckless in her personal life, but I never saw her take a risk when she was flying. Ever. She was about to demonstrate an Immelmann turn, for God’s sake, hardly what we would call risky.” She lost her calm for a moment to frustration and despair. “So, please, will you not call her reckless? I find it . . . painful when you say things like that.”

  An exclamation from Sir Basil as he threw up his hand in disagreement. Good-looking, rich, and successful men, I realized, are far too adored and respected by the world. It is hard for them to deal with little things like disagreement, or failure. “Oh, come off it, Vera. She was a bloody fool, and she has been behaving badly and irresponsibly ever since the Luftwaffe attack. You should have grounded her. I told you so at the time.”

  They fell silent. Vera gave the man in front of her a long, hard look, and he glanced away, perhaps embarrassed for criticizing a young woman who was not there to stick up for herself.

  “We don’t usually have so many fatalities at Didcote,” Vera explained to me as I stood there, still holding Bess in my arms.

  “I had no idea that ferrying aircraft was so dangerous,” I said.

  “It’s not . . . usually.” She was instantly defensive.

  “Yes, it is, of course it is! We lose one in ten,” Sir Basil said, despite Vera’s frown. “We calculate about one in ten pilots don’t make it in the course of a year.” He waved his right hand in a circular motion as if to summon all the reasons. “The weather can turn on you in a split bloody second. Airfields don’t get their barrage balloons down in time for you to land.” He snorted down his nose. “Even our own antiaircraft artillerymen aren’t always sharp enough to tell the difference between a Spitfire and a Messerschmitt flying overhead.” He looked at Vera as he said the last phrase with emphasis.

  “What are they calling Edwina’s incident?” I asked, wondering who the “they” were. Senior officers at HQ White Waltham? Commander Vera Abercrombie?

  “Edwina’s plane was in perfect order before she flew it. Until proved otherwise, she had an accident or it was pilot error.” Vera quoted another authority. Clearly a decision had been reached. “Of course, we have to wait for the ATA Accident Committee to confirm their findings. And that is confidential information, Miss Redfern, not to be mentioned outside this office.”

  This morning it was “Poppy”; now it’s “Miss Redfern.” They’re closing ranks, Ilona observed.

  “And what about Letty?” I asked. “Was that pilot error too?”

  “The Walrus was not a new plane. It had been damaged in combat and repaired at the factory. The single engine is above the cockpit, and Mackenzie said it was smashed to pieces on impact. We might never know why it crashed.” She crossed to the map on the wall again and retraced Letty’s last flight. “Letty was a seasoned pilot. She had a Class Five license—the only one here at Didcote,” she said to the map. “She was thorough and careful.”

  Sir Basil stopped his pacing up and down Vera’s office in front of the large window that looked out on the airstrip. “I don’t like the farmer’s description, that the plane’s flight was erratic. I don’t like that at all. What did he say? ‘As drunk as a lord’? He saw the wrong accident; he should have been here yesterday!” His voice rose in derision. Vera barely threw him a glance. She’s much better at dealing with bad news than he is, said Ilona. He’s behaving like a spoiled four-year-old.

  “That wasn’t Letty’s problem,” she said under her breath. “Now, if you will both excuse me, I must contact Charlie at White Waltham, and I’m not looking forward to it.”

  I could only imagine that ATA headquarters would have a lot to say about a second dead pilot and two smashed-up planes. I glanced at Sir Basil as we left Vera to the privacy of her conversation. His cheeks were still red, and his usually immaculate silver hair was sticking up at the back. He looked like a disgruntled old man.

  * * *

  * * *

  I WALKED OUT into the damp of a gloomy day. The wind had brought the rain inland and had then dropped. I dislike days when the sky is low and oppressive—it shuts in the air like a tin lid—but it was better than being in the pent-up atmosphere of the ATA mess.

  I stood and watched Bessie sniffing around in a ditch. “There is something awfully wrong going on here,” I said. At the sound of my voice she looked up at me, her long ears cocked to interpret my tone: was there food in the offing? A walk? When I sighed and scuffed my toe in the gravel of the path, she continued rooting about in the lank grass.

  Ilona, however, didn’t let me down. You can say that again, darling. Two girls who knew their jobs inside out going down like that is too much of a coincidence. I could almost see her standing beside me with her arms folded and her fine, pale forehead wrinkled in disbelief. I imagine that Ilona has a flawless complexion and fair hair: fine and glossy, arranged in a thick roll at the back of her head, because she’s a fashionable girl. Unlike me, she is petite and always looks perfectly turned out in a beautifully cut suit that emphasizes her curves and her stunning legs. She has large, intelligent green eyes and a face that expresses every thought. She comes from a good family, without being posh or affected, and she is what we would call a thoroughly modern young woman. In her clear voice she shared her thoughts: One pilot crashes doing a stunt she has done since she was a teenager, and the other wallops her plane into a bridge after months of flying Lancaster bombers all over the country.

  I calculated the time of this morning’s events. Breakfast had started at seven. At eight the Attagirls were walking to their air taxis and somewhere between half past eight and eight forty-five they had been airborne. How long did it take to fly to the Supermarine factory, check in at the flight office, and walk to their assigned planes for takeoff to their destinations? And how long did it take to fly from Supermarine at Eastleigh to Elton, where Letty had crashed her plane? And what the hell was a S
upermarine Walrus, anyway? Did it look like a fighter or a bomber?

  I looked at my watch. It was eleven. Vera had been told twenty minutes ago that Letty had crashed the plane half an hour before that. Fifty minutes. I did the arithmetic on my fingers: Letty must have crashed her plane at ten minutes after ten. There were so many questions batting around in my head that I had no answer for because I hadn’t a clue how long it took to fly a plane anywhere. How fast did planes go? Faster than trains? If she had been following the railway line, perhaps I could look up a train timetable and get some idea of airspeed and distance. “Damn,” I said in my frustration, finally attracting Bess’s attention.

  I remembered Edwina’s scornful observations about Crown Films sending a scriptwriter who didn’t know anything about planes. Now would be my chance to learn. And if I was going to write my next novel with Ilona in the cockpit of a Spitfire, I had better start paying attention to the technicalities of flying. I needed the advice of an expert on why a pilot would or could crash her plane into a bridge. Had she run out of petrol? As this query came into my head I knew I needed help. Well done! I said to myself as I realized I had sent off the only person I trusted to help me.

  I did more calculations, made easier because they involved the speed that Griff usually travels in his car. Surely he had arrived at Reaches by now? There was a telephone box a hundred yards down the road from the entrance to Didcote Airfield. “Come on, Bessie.” I called her away from whatever awful thing she was sniffing at under a pile of dead leaves with such joy. “Walkies.”

  * * *

  * * *

  IF GRIFF WERE willing to return to Didcote, perhaps I could dream up a reason to stay here for the rest of the weekend? Would my need to rewrite the script be enough of an excuse? I would have to pay for my room at the inn. Miss Murgatroyd of Crown Films had made it quite clear when she had issued my travel vouchers for second-class train tickets that I was supremely fortunate not to be traveling in third and that I was responsible for footing the bill for all my meals during my visit to Hampshire.

  As I strode up the drive and into the lane, Bess brought me a stick and I swung back my arm to pitch it ahead of us. She watched it sail through the air and land in a wet ditch. I had achieved perhaps twelve feet. She turned her head and looked at me in a pitying sort of way before she waded in and, picking it up delicately with her teeth, shredded it to pieces.

  “You are supposed to bring it back!” I said to her. She wagged her little bob of a tail and brought me a twig, dropping it at my feet. “I’m not that delicate,” I said. “He’s much better at throwing, isn’t he?” If she had nodded I wouldn’t have been a bit surprised.

  I stood outside the phone box with an open purse and quickly calculated the cost of two more nights at the inn and my meals for the next two days. I could just about do it if I cadged meals at the mess, which left me five bob for emergencies or for the expensive telephone call to Griff at Reaches. This is an emergency, I told myself.

  The telephone box smelled of stale cigarette smoke and wet dog after Bess squeezed in with me. I emptied out the small change in my purse next to the half-full ashtray. Then, taking a deep breath, I picked up the telephone receiver, dialed the operator, and placed a trunk call to the officers’ mess at Reaches American Army Air Force Base, Little Buffenden.

  “Little Buffenden in Devonshire or Buckinghamshire?”

  There were two? “The one in Bucks, thank you.”

  “That will be tew shillings and sixpence, please.” A small fortune: there would be no sherry for me tonight. “When you hear the pips, please put the correct change in slot A.”

  Why, I wondered as I waited, did all telephone operators and train schedule announcers always have such terribly posh accents? The pips sounded and I counted change into the coin slot.

  I prayed as I waited that Griff had driven back to Reaches and not stopped off somewhere for lunch with someone fascinating.

  “Good morning, Reaches officers’ mess.”

  I hastily pressed button A and heard the coins clatter into the box. “Hullo? Hullo, this is Miss Redfern, I want to speak to Captain O’Neal, please. Is he there?”

  “Just one moment, ma’am, I’ll go check.” After what seemed like an eternity, Griff finally came to phone.

  “Poppy?”

  “Hullo, Griff, I’m in a phone box, so I don’t have much time. I am afraid that something is terribly wrong here. Letty Wills crashed her plane this morning and was killed outright.”

  Silence.

  “Hullo, hullo, are you still there?” I only had half a crown left!

  “Yes. I was just thinking. Did she crash at Didcote?”

  “No, she was ferrying a Walrus from the Supermarine factory in Eastleigh and crashed northeast of there at a place called Elton. She flew her plane into a railway bridge. The accident was seen by a farmer. He reported it to his local Home Guard, and they contacted Vera about an hour ago.”

  Another long silence. The operator’s voice came on the line: “Caller, thet will be tew shillings and sixpence, please, for anothah faive minutes.” I dropped the rest of my silver into the coin box.

  “Griff, I’m running out of change. Can you come back and spend the weekend here? I need help understanding how planes can be made to crash, or pilots made to err. And most of all how long it takes to fly from one place to another, depending on airspeed.”

  His response was immediate. “I thought you’d never ask. I’ll be there by two o’clock and meet you at the inn. Can you reserve a room for me?”

  “Yes, of course. Thank you so much, Griff!”

  “Since you have time, why don’t you wander over to that large hangar by the airstrip and have a chat with one of the maintenance guys there? I talked to our ground crew and they told me some pretty interesting stuff about early Spitfires. Try and find out a bit more about the one Edwina flew. It was an early mark, so they might have had to fit a Shilling orifice to it. If that’s the case, then all anyone had to do was remove the orifice and the plane would stall when Edwina put the plane into a steep dive.”

  An orifice? What on earth was he talking about? “A what? What did you say it might have been fitted with?”

  “An orifice.” There was a second of silence and I could have sworn I heard him chuckle. “On second thought, perhaps don’t go and talk to them; it might seem a bit odd your knowing about that.”

  The operator’s voice came on the line again. “Thet will be anothah tew shillings and sixpence, caller.”

  “Griff, I have to go. I’ve no more change. I’ll see you at two!” I said and was answered by a dial tone.

  I put the phone down and breathed a sigh of relief. I could write up the rest of my script and be done with it by the time Griff arrived. Then we could spend a pleasant weekend of snooping and sleuthing, and he could talk to the ground engineer about an orifice.

  NINE

  IT WAS A RELIEF TO LEAVE THE FUG OF THE TELEPHONE BOX FOR THE sweet, tangy air, no matter how wet it was. Overhead a patch of sky was clearing and then clouding over again, and the wind came in salty and strong from the Solent. Early October is the best time of the year in England if it stays dry.

  I was humming as Bess and I set out up the lane toward the inn. The cloud cleared and shafts of sunlight slanted through the rich canopy of autumn leaves overhead. I walked quickly, swinging my arms and breathing in lungfuls of air as if it would exorcise the ugliness of the morning. I felt the tightness in my neck and shoulders begin to ebb as Bess sprang ahead of me, delighted to be away from human tension.

  Surely, no one from ATA Didcote could possibly have sabotaged the Walrus’s engine at the Supermarine factory? Perhaps Letty’s accident had been an awful coincidence. I hoped I hadn’t called Griff back on a silly whim, just because my fluttering stomach had told me that the details of Letty’s crash sounded suspicious to me.

 
“I don’t know why I’m interfering in something I know nothing about!” I exclaimed one minute. And in the next: “But it is suspicious—isn’t it, Bessie? Two pilots lose control of their planes in as many days—that can’t be a fluke.”

  Bess gazed up at me in approval, her bobtail wagging as she trotted beside me, happy that we were on the move together.

  We walked under the heavy branch of an apple tree that hung over the lane, and Bess stopped to pick up an overlooked windfall from the grass verge. She ran ahead of me with her neck bowed, shaking her head from side to side. When she was sure the apple was quite dead, she dropped it and started to chew it apart. A second later she cried out, and as I ran forward she was pawing her mouth and moaning in distress.

  “Poor darling, you just got stung, didn’t you?” I picked her up and examined her mouth. Her lip on the right side was swelling and I could see the black tip of a bee’s stinger on its pink inside. “I’m going to pull it out, Bessie, so hold still.” I laid her back in my arms with her short legs stuck up in the air and her eyes showing white around the edges in fear and pain. “I’ll be quick, Bessie, don’t be scared.” I gently pulled out the little barb and kissed her nose. “You have to stop eating fallen apples, girlie.” Her muzzle on the right side was still swelling. “When we get to the inn we’ll put some baking soda on it. That will help.”

  I put her down, and she trudged along beside me with her ears down like a sad donkey, stopping every so often to balance on three legs and paw at her mouth with her right front. She would only make her lip worse if she carried on like this. I picked her up and, cradling her in my arms, walked on.