by Wendy Orr
He takes her up for the first time one absurdly springlike November morning—typical of Miles, Ruth thinks, that he can coerce even nature into stage-managing his performance—but grey skies would have made no difference. Flying is noisier, colder, smellier than she’s imagined, but when she steps out onto the field at the end of it she’s determined to return as often as she can, and preferably as the pilot.
Suspecting that flying is not quite what her parents had in mind as a university hobby and seeing no reason to upset them unnecessarily, her weekly letters neglect to mention that most of her allowance is now devoted to flying lessons. Once, when they visit her rooms at St Hilda’s, she has to borrow a dress because her own would have shocked by its shabbiness; after that she saves enough to have a presentable outfit when she returns home for Christmas and the summer holidays. Working out the flying time she can buy for the price of a new hat and gloves, she quickly adopts a bohemian, hatless image.
By the time Miles leaves Oxford to join the air force in the June of 1938, Ruth is the proud possessor of a Class A flying permit—she can fly solo. She’s dreamed of the airy freedom, of being at one with her machine and the skies, of being in complete control of that power and speed. It’s one of the few things in life that surpasses expectation. Her final university year is dominated by adding hours, and by September 1939 when civilian aircraft are grounded by the declaration of war, she has sixty-one hours of solo flying in her logbook. Torn between guilt and excitement, she wonders whether this is the moment she’s been waiting for all her life.
Germany’s invasion of Poland is overshadowed for the Townsends by the presentation of this logbook and the licence behind it: ‘I’m joining the air force,’ their only daughter announces.
Mama bursts into tears.
‘I very much doubt,’ Papa says weightily, ‘whether even Mr Hitler can induce the RAF to commit the folly of allowing young women inside aircraft.’
‘If I already know how—’
‘You know nothing whatsoever about fighting. That’s what counts in war: killing the other chap before he kills you, and it doesn’t matter whether you’re using an aeroplane or a bayonet. Women simply don’t have that sort of courage; if you must do something useful, be a nurse. There’ll be plenty of wounded young men to comfort.’
‘I imagine that flying would be most unhealthy for women,’ Mama says anxiously. Childbearing, Ruth guesses, although she is no more likely to ask for clarification than her mother is to volunteer it.
The evening is uncomfortably silent. Only Nanny, remembering the moonlight vigil and scrapbook, is unsurprised.
In the end, Papa is right—the RAF doesn’t want women pilots. Amy Johnson, Amelia Earhart, Beryl Markham and other pioneers of the air notwithstanding, it is decreed that women are too highly strung, too weak both physically and mentally, to fly military aircraft. Join the Women’s Auxiliary air force, Ruth is told; a fighting force is kept in the air by the strength of its ground support and women can be a useful part of that, in anything from ops rooms and offices to maintaining the floating silver whales of barrage balloons (Flossie and Blossom, Chelsea residents call theirs) or as drivers for the men who will do the flying and the leaders who organise them. Out of principle and pique Ruth refuses; from lassitude and some desire to make her mother happy, she instead joins the Women’s Voluntary Services. It is ladylike but worthwhile work and fills the days through the strained calm of that autumn, when the country is at war but nothing seems to happen. There are new rules and officious notices but no invasion, rationing but no bombing, many rumours but little news.
Christmas brings an invitation from Miles to a party at his parents’ home in St John’s Wood. The emotion Ruth had felt for him at Oxford had been a mixture of romance and hero-worship, and because Miles had been seeing several other women at the same time and sleeping with three of them, he hadn’t been whole-hearted in his efforts to seduce her. It’s over a year since she’s seen him, now a handsome uniformed flying officer explaining the intricacies of aeronautics and aerial combat. Hero-worship flares into passion; they spend two nights together before he leaves for France in April 1940. He is not a gentle or a patient lover but Ruth, having nothing to compare him with, is infatuated enough not to mind. Poetry might overstate the sensation, she decides, but sex is not unpleasant—and there is something patriotically thrilling about giving a man his heart’s desire before he flies off into mortal combat. It will be the last time the thought of mortal combat rings with echoes of chivalric gallantry; she will recognise courage in the future but little romance.
On 9 May she receives an enthusiastic letter full of the wonders of the new improved Hurricane fighter plane and schoolboy glee at having shot down his first Messerchmidt: flying out of Longuyon when I spotted him—chased him low over a valley and got off a telling shot as he tried to crest the hill. The kite was on fire by the time he hit the ground.
It strikes her simultaneously that this is another man’s death Miles is glorying in and that identical letters are being written in German about the killing of some of his own comrades. For the first time she understands that the only luck these young men can hope for is to continue killing other men, day after day until the war ends, and she wonders how they will pick up normal lives and loves again when that day comes.
For Miles the problem is irrelevant: the day after his letter arrives, the Luftwaffe begin their blitzkrieg over France, pouring wave after wave of bombers, dive-bombers and fighters across the sky. The Ashbys tell her that he’d reached a score of six by 14 May, the day he was shot down over the bridgehead at Sedan. Is that supposed to assuage the grief? The most horrifying thing is that, ever so slightly, it does. It doesn’t change her loss; it hasn’t even affected the humiliating defeat of the French and the British Expeditionary Force supporting them—Miles’s Hurricane is merely one of five hundred lost before retreat is complete—but there is still a fierce satisfaction in knowing that he accounted for a few of the enemy before he died.
Two weeks later the WVS is called on to serve refreshments to the troop trains coming home from Dunkirk. Ruth sees men who set out for France as a disciplined army and were driven back to the Channel’s edge, strafed on beaches, boats and water with apparent impunity by the German Luftwaffe. They have been rescued piecemeal off those beaches by troopship, fishing boat and private yacht, and although tales of courage, of extraordinary resourcefulness and determination will soon circulate to become a legend of English grit, at the moment there is little to see but defeat. These are men with shocked, blank faces; men who’ve seen friends blown into fragments of flesh and muck, seen them die messily, obscenely, in the stench of blood and fear; men who’ve lost their helmets, their weapons and most of all their pride. Ruth sees for the first time that England might lose this war, and although she isn’t arrogant enough to think that she can singlehandedly do much to change that, she does know that she has to do something more active towards it.
She is still determined not to enlist in one of the regular services, although her reasons have now altered: she needs to be able to leave the instant the Air Transport Auxiliary accepts her application.
The ATA, unlike the WAAF, is not a female branch of a male service. Originally designed as an alternative air system in case air raids or invasion destroy the roads and communications systems, it has quickly been directed into the ferrying of aircraft from factory to airfield, from airfield to factory for repairs, or airfield to airfield—any routine flying which does not need the specialised skills of a fighter pilot or bomber captain. Many of its first pilots are men determined to keep flying when age or disability has rendered them unfit for the RAF, but a female commissioner of the Civil Air Guard can see no reason why women pilots should not join them. Pauline Gower, a small, indomitable woman who took up flying after being told she was not strong enough for any active sport, and who in a tragic twist of fate will die in childbirth shortly after the end of the war, has over 2000 hours of flying time,
earned in an aerial circus and her own air-taxi service. Begrudgingly, the ministry allows her to establish a female contingent of eight elite pilots.
There is a predictably enraged outcry at the temerity of women ‘without wit enough to scrub floors’ stealing men’s jobs by attemping to pilot planes. ‘The hand that rocks the cradle wrecks the kite,’ someone quips and is quoted around dinner tables across Britain. However, the women prove so capable of safely ferrying Tiger Moths to the airfields of southern England that they are soon allowed to deliver these small open trainers to northern Scotland, frozen-faced flying that the men are probably quite happy to relegate to their female counterparts.
And, as the phoney war ends and more pilots and more aircraft are needed—perhaps as the country realises that winning this war will take every bit of effort from every available person—aptitude begins to outweigh genitalia. Both the number of female pilots and the types of planes they’re allowed to fly are increased, giving Ruth some hope that one day her offering of sixty-one hours’ experience will be smiled upon. In the meantime she will drive ambulances.
She passes her test on the second attempt in a brute of a van with grinding gears and faulty clutch, though most of her driving will be in the family’s more amenable Austin Seven. The war, briefly glimpsed on that train from Dunkirk, seems contained to the battle in the skies overhead and, despite the loss of Miles and two other Oxford friends, on the clear bright days of that summer it is difficult to believe that the pretty silver planes trailing white tails across the blue enclose flesh-and-blood young men duelling to the death. Children evacuated to the safety of the country are returning to their parents in London, which shows no sign of being bombed or invaded; Ruth’s most dramatic moment so far has been delivering a pregnant woman to a nursing home in Hertfordshire and wondering whether she’ll have to deliver the baby as well. Despite the sure knowledge that a roadside birth would be a terrible experience for mother, baby and probably herself, she can’t help a flicker of disappointment when the trip ends without the slightest twinge of labour pain or gasping.
That is July. On 23 August the Luftwaffe carries out its first all-night bombing raid on London: the Blitz has begun. The Townsends’ whippet doesn’t recover from its hysterics and has to be put to sleep.
Two weeks later, at the height of the fiercest raid yet and in the midst of arguing that Mr Hitler is not going to force her to spend one more minute in ‘that mole’s burrow in the garden’ (‘the safety of the Anderson shelter,’ Papa retorts), Nanny collapses and dies. No one is comforted by the thought that, at eighty-seven, her heart would not have ticked on much longer even without Hitler’s interference—and Ruth, who’d left only moments earlier for night duty at the ambulance station, is particularly bitter. If she’d been out saving someone’s life, she thinks, she wouldn’t feel so frustrated, but the bombs that night had once again concentrated on the slums of the East End, so that she had done nothing but play cards and wait for something to happen in Chelsea, while Nanny died of fright.
However, as autumn slides into long and bitter winter, Ruth sees enough horror and drama to make up for a lifetime of whist. The war has long since lost any glamour: Mama spends her days in endless queues for food and her evenings knitting balaclavas for the troops; Papa, the war having providentially delayed his retirement, leaves for the City every morning with bowler hat and umbrella but spends his nights patrolling for black-out infringements (he prefers to stay out of the air-raid warden’s post since the council decided that it would be cheaper to contribute to funeral expenses than strengthen the shelter). Nights are the scream of sirens, the thunder of heavy aircraft, the tympani of guns trying to bring them down, the crashing of bombs and the flare of fires; mornings are the tinkle of broken glass being swept in the street, children searching for trophy shrapnel, and a sense of thankfulness at seeing familiar landmarks intact. Despite the determination to carry on with life as usual, everyone is grey-faced with lack of sleep; nearly a third of the Townsends’ neighbours have very sensibly fled to the country, increasing the sense of beleaguerment of those who remain.
Driving through the horrors of an often unrecognisable city, dodging craters that have swallowed buses, burning gas mains, piles of rubble and blood-stained debris, losing her way around unexpected detours and torn-up streets, Ruth feels some sense of adventure and considerable frustration. She has little knowledge and less equipment, carrying her own bottle of brandy for shock and scissors for bandages, but quite unable to supply the comforting touch and jollying manner that a bombing victim might respond to.
‘Oh, I am vexed!’ an old woman tells her, one arm limp in her lap and blood streaming down her face as Ruth attempts to work out the best way to reach the hospital around the blockades. ‘It’s taken me six months to finish a layette for my grandson’s baby and now it’s gone with the house. Where ever will I find the wool now?’
Vexed! Ruth thinks, intrigued at the understatement as well as the focus.
However, despite tragedy and sleeplessness, there are still concerts, cinemas, bookshops and dances; London is full of young men in uniforms from around the world determined to enjoy life while they can and Ruth occasionally enjoys it with them.
Going straight from a dance to the ambulance station on the clear, full-moon night of 10 May, Ruth tries to remember what London looked like when nights were lit by streetlamps and house windows instead of bomb flares and fires. The siren starts as she reaches the door; by morning over three thousand people are dead or seriously injured; the House of Commons is gutted, the British Museum, Westminster Abbey and the Tower are all damaged. On Monday Papa leaves for work unshaven, a symbol of the city’s shocked exhaustion and a forcible reminder for Ruth of her parents’ humanity and corollary mortality.
The next night there is no raid, nor the one after that; it will be a long time before the end of the war and London is not yet through with horror, but the worst of the Blitz is over. Ruth continues to transport patients with minor injuries in her little green Austin, drives the occasional dignitary in an ambulance service vehicle and spends the rest of her time washing teacups and floors. Nothing that she does couldn’t be done just as well by anyone with rudimentary driving skills or a mop. She writes to Pauline Gower at the ATA and receives a refusal that is so encouraging she continues to apply every three months until finally she receives the letter requesting her to present herself for a flying test.
It’s over two years since she’s flown; at the back of her mind she thinks that even if she doesn’t get in, the chance to be up in the air again will be worth the disappointment.
It was Mary who’d phoned. ‘My dear,’ she began, which was close enough to a blow to the midriff to knock Jane into the old chair by the hall phone.
Twenty-nine years ago, in that most significant summer of her life, Jane had stayed with Ruth’s cousin, before Ian and with him, but there’d been nothing but brief Christmas notes since and she could not remember Mary ever calling her dear. The best she could hope for, in that split second before the sentence was pronounced, was that the story had not yet ended and there was still a chance to say goodbye.
But even as she hung up, as she told Ian and tried to believe it herself, even before—responsible big sister—she picked up the phone again and began to dial the long sequences of numbers that would wake Mike in Yellowknife, Rick in Toronto, she knew that if it wasn’t the best she could hope for, it was also not the worst she’d dreaded. The worst would have been the scenario that had been at the back of her mind for years, certainly since her father died and maybe before: a call from the hospital—Ruth incapacitated, unable to live on her own. For two years now, before Jane goes to bed, when she’s washed the dishes and made two weak cups of tea, she has switched on the computer to check the email. And for two years, as she waits for the screech of dialling, the password acceptance, she’s wondered what she’ll do if her mother’s message isn’t there.
The notes had been caustic at first:
Aged P; miraculous survival (the message went to all three offspring, after Rick had set up Ruth’s machine and talked Ian into the new gadgetry as well, but it was tacitly expected that responsibility for the daily check and reply was Jane’s, being the daughter). After the initial resistance, Ruth had begun to enjoy the technology; there were sometimes three or four brief messages waiting in Jane’s mail. Re: Exotic Australians and Canadians. A red cardinal arrived in the orchard today, a beautiful and bright exotic. Exotic seems an infinitely kinder word than alien, migrant or the old dp; unfortunate that in humans the word has come to mean dancers, with the x a euphemism for r.
Which suggested that Ruth and her wit were both alive and well, and the question—just where will Mom go if she can’t live on her own?—could be shelved again.
Last November’s devastating ice storm had brought it to a head, in Jane’s mind if not her mother’s. The only television news she’d seen had said, ‘New York and Toronto,’ accompanied by images of iced and buckling electricity pylons in what looked like rural Quebec, but the same freezing rain and wind had frozen the Valley too, with phones and electricity off intermittently for a week. ‘She’ll be fine,’ Rick had said, from his thermostat-controlled, twelfth-floor apartment with power and phones intact, and Jane could not big-sister bully him into travelling two thousand kilometres to check just how fine their mother actually was. ‘If we haven’t heard by Sunday,’ he’d agreed, but on Saturday morning Ruth had called Mike on Gordon Gillespie’s cell phone and the panic was over.
But images of Ruth unconscious on the floor, Ruth freezing to death in a snow-bound house, Ruth breaking a hip on an icy path, had lingered in Jane’s mind; briefly, she’d schemed alternatives, which her mother, without exactly consenting, hadn’t refused to consider for the future.