Spitfire

by John Nichol

  She was gripped by the idea of being a pilot. Aged sixteen, Mary was allowed time off from school for flying lessons in Witney, near the 1,000-acre Oxfordshire farm owned by her father, and in 1941 Mary heard a radio announcement asking for women with a flying licence to join the ATA.

  Her father acquiesced on one condition: ‘I don’t mind the flying, but I don’t want you to go to war.’ After a brief test flight in a Tiger Moth, Mary, now aged twenty-two, was accepted into the ATA in October 1941.

  The idea now took hold that one day, maybe not in the too distant future, just maybe, she might fly a Spit.

  When Mary arrived at nine one morning to get her ‘flying chit’ she was quietly delighted and proud that it read Spitfire. The destination was RAF Lyneham, a short hop from South Marston, near Swindon. She’d be landing the shiny new plane in front of the RAF’s finest pilots.2

  For the last twelve months she had devoured the ‘Blue Book’ of flying notes, paying particular attention to those on the Spitfire in anticipation of the moment. Thus, on 13 October 1942, trying to look neither overly anxious nor overexcited, she carefully walked around the Spitfire’s wings, nose and tail.

  Remaining professional, she went to climb into the cockpit. As she did so an engineer tapped her on the shoulder.

  ‘Your parachute, miss,’ he said, handing up the pack. ‘Hope you enjoy your flight.’ She gave a brief nod, saying nothing.

  ‘How many have you flown?’ he enquired.

  ‘This is my first Spitfire,’ Mary said in a voice she hoped conveyed confidence. The engineer looked momentarily horrified. Mary jumped in the cockpit and quickly waved the chocks away with a hand signal to the ground crew.

  She fired up the engine and taxied over to take-off point. ‘My little heart was beating very fast but . . . I was off. And somehow I managed an excellent take-off. Once I was in the air I did a few manoeuvres to make sure I knew what I was doing. And then I set off for RAF Lyneham, a thirty-minute flight. Thankfully it was a very nice day. The Spit handled beautifully. It was thrilling.’

  Mary did a few laps round the aerodrome looking for a space between other aircraft coming in.

  ‘I made a perfect landing. All my anxiety disappeared completely. From that day on I fell in love with flying fast and furious aeroplanes.’

  She returned to South Marston via the transport aircraft to ferry her second Spitfire. ‘As for those guys on the ground who watched me take off, I think they were horrified that this little fair-haired young girl was flying a very valuable war machine twice in one day. But they seemed happy when I got back to ferry the second one. One guy even gave me some of his sweet coupons as a reward.’

  * * *

  Diana Barnato Walker had learned to fly before the war at Brooklands, Surrey, where as a child she watched her father, Woolf, speed round the motor-racing circuit.

  Diana shared her father’s skill for speed. After a mere six hours’ flying, her instructor climbed out of the Tiger Moth and told her to get on with it on her own. Diana taxied to the take-off point then was abruptly waved to a standstill. A pair of gnarled, ugly hands reached into the cockpit, followed by a hideously scarred face.

  ‘The man implored me not to fly. He had been a flier and had crashed and the burning aeroplane had seared and burnt his flesh. He didn’t want this to happen to anyone else, far less a pretty young girl. I didn’t take any notice of his words and took off.’

  Diana turned up for her ATA flight test wearing her stepmother’s leopard-skin coat and was told that she looked far too attractive to know much about flying. She flew flawlessly. It was late 1941 and, after her ski jaunts, fashion shopping and a failed attempt to become a Red Cross nurse, Diana had at last found a way to contribute to the war effort.

  Her competence was such that soon she read Spitfire on her flying chit. It was a clear, bright day. She was delighted to discover she was to fly a photo reconnaissance, or PR, variant. The advantage of having up-to-date photographs of the battlefield and enemy deployments had been long recognised. The Spitfire was a perfect vehicle to give commanders ‘near real-time’ intelligence. She was small, unobtrusive, and could fly high and fast. A handful had been deployed to France in 1940 with a camera fitted to each wing.3 Photo reconnaissance was also becoming increasingly important to assess the damage following Bomber Command strikes. Guns made way for fuel tanks to give the Spitfires greater range.

  With no guns or armour, the PR Spitfire was light, agile and glorious to fly. It was also easy on the eye, with smooth lines and a pleasing azure camouflage.

  Love at first sight, thought Diana as she took the controls. The flight took her forty minutes, perhaps a touch longer than it should have done. ‘No one would have blamed me for those extra few minutes of familiarisation, not to mention pure pleasure, in that, my very first Spitfire.’

  Being an independent-minded woman, Diana Barnato Walker was not always going to play strictly by the rules. With no instrument or navigation training and flying exclusively in daylight, most ATA pilots could only ferry planes when visibility cleared to 1,500 yards and there was 800ft cloud clearance. If the weather deteriorated they were to put down or turn back. In Diana’s case, the choice usually depended on whether a date awaited back home or on the ‘star rating’ of accommodation at the destination aerodrome.

  Monday, 6 April 1942 was a particularly gusty day, so she followed the rules and put down her Miles Magister trainer at RAF Debden in Essex and waited for the storm to pass.

  During lunch in the Officers’ Mess she sat next to the blue-eyed, thick-set commander of 65 Squadron, noting he had one of the worst hairstyles she’d ever seen. ‘None of it seems to stay put.’4

  Despite the unruly mane, she was soon chatting easily with Squadron Leader Humphrey Gilbert, a capable pilot who had accounted for several Luftwaffe during the Battle of Britain, flying in his blue-nosed Spitfire.

  After lunch the wind dropped. Diana said her goodbyes and went to fire up the Magister. It did not start and she was forced to stay. Gathering in the mess with some old acquaintances, along with Gilbert, they made a night of it. The next morning the Magister again refused to start and, despite several attempts, failed to do so the rest of the day. Gilbert placated Diana’s irate commanding officer in a phone call and she was allowed to stay another night.

  Romance soon blossomed with the Spitfire commander. Diana made regular visits to Debden, with one of Gilbert’s junior officers ferrying her back and forth. Within a month they were engaged. A few days later Diana dropped in for a brief visit but could not find the blue-nosed Spitfire anywhere. An ashen-faced officer took her aside.

  Gilbert had been killed the previous day in a Spitfire accident. Diana was devastated. ‘This was the first time that someone who really meant something to me was no longer around.’ She carried on flying, letting out a howl whenever she flew over Debden.

  It was only a few days later, when she spoke to one of Gilbert’s friends, that she found out the real reason for her three-day delay at Debden. After their initial lunch Gilbert had ordered a mechanic to remove the Magister’s spark plugs and sworn the ground crew to secrecy.

  Diana had just presumed Humphrey Gilbert had been shot down. She was given a day off to attend his funeral and was out ferrying planes the next day. Sometime later she found out the true cause of his death. Gilbert had once flown in the single-seat Spitfire with a friend on his lap to get to a party in London after their two-seater light aircraft had broken down. It appeared he had repeated the performance, but this time with a large, heavy male RAF aircraft controller, and they crashed.

  * * *

  Joy Lofthouse, along with her sister Yvonne, were among a generation whose friends were not surviving beyond their teenage years. Three years into the war and eight had died. Among them was Yvonne’s childhood love, Peter Comley, nineteen, shot down over the Channel in 1940.5

  The uncertainty of life intensified relationships. When her pilot boyfriend, Tom Wheatley, proposed i
n late 1941 after less than a year’s courtship, Yvonne readily agreed. ‘Something told me, as young as I was, that I had to spend as much time as possible with Tom. The war itself made you hurry. Better to make a decision and do something because tomorrow you might be gone. It was a strange time for decision-making. In a way you didn’t really think you’d be spending your life with someone. Not when all around you people you knew were being killed. At one point, I’d gone to see a boy I knew at his base, only to be told he’d had an accident and been killed. The whole thing made you feel as if the ground was constantly shifting under your feet.’

  Joy Lofthouse in 1944

  Yvonne had been married for less than a year when a church minister and woman volunteer turned up at her door. She knew instantly that it was ‘my turn’ for bad news. Tom hadn’t come back from his first mission over Germany. He was piloting a Halifax bomber when it was shot down by a German night fighter over Holland. Tom went down with the plane while the crew bailed out.

  The first thing Yvonne did was call Tom’s mother. ‘She’d just lost her son but she’d also lost her husband six months before. He was killed at El Alamein and they never did find his body.’

  When Yvonne met with his mother at York station, the widow’s first words were: ‘I can be brave if you can.’ They went back to Tom and Yvonne’s Kent home and stayed the night together, the mother sleeping in the same bed her son had slept in the night before.

  ‘I would often go for walks in the country and just lie down, looking up at the sky, watching the planes. After Tom died I was always thinking about what had happened to him, in the last few minutes, when he knew the plane was going down. Again and again I’d think: “Did he know it was hopeless?” You can’t help asking yourself those questions.’

  Yvonne stayed for a while with Tom’s mother. It was a difficult time, especially when she walked Tom’s dog Buffy. ‘If Buffy saw anyone in uniform he’d gallop up to them eagerly. Then, as soon as he saw it wasn’t Tom, he’d trot back to us.’

  Soon afterwards, in early 1943, Yvonne saw an advertisement for women pilots in Aeroplane magazine. She told her sister Joy and they both volunteered.

  Joy and Yvonne knew absolutely nothing about aircraft. However, they were both bright and sporty, winning scholarships to Cirencester Grammar School. Out of 2,000 women who applied for the ATA, they were two of only seventeen accepted.

  Joy left her job at a bank and entered the rigorous three-month training programme flying numerous aircraft. Six months later she was in a Spitfire.

  ‘I went to the corner of the airfield and there was my first Spitfire. Oh, it was so powerful. After everything else you’d done before, this was like someone kicking you up the backside.

  ‘It was so light, compact and incredibly easy to manoeuvre. You almost had to breathe on the controls and they moved.’

  Yvonne agreed. ‘Flying the Spitfire was a kind of freedom you never got any other way. More than anything, with the Spit it was as if you had wings sewn on your back. It was so manoeuvrable.

  ‘Once, on a cloudy rainy day, I ran my right wing through a rain cloud: rain on the right wing, on the left there was sunshine. You could do almost anything with those planes.’

  * * *

  While they faced many dangers, at least the ATA did not have to confront the gnawing worries of the dispersal hut, awaiting the order to scramble.

  Diana Barnato Walker described a more relaxed atmosphere as they awaited flying orders at Hamble, near Southampton.6 ‘A jumble of chairs and tables and a few well-arranged flowers first meet the eye, which scans to see “Jackie” from South Africa turning her morning somersaults at the far end of the room. A radio provides the background to a cacophony of voices.

  ‘In the midst of these can be seen the more domesticated type cutting out a frock on hands and knees, with the material stretched beneath her on the rather uneven linoleum floor . . . a backgammon game is going on and Maureen is trying to do a jigsaw puzzle.

  ‘Suddenly the loudspeaker blares: “Will all pilots report to the Operations Rooms for their chits!”

  ‘Everyone immediately drops what she happens to be doing and goes to the hatchway to be briefed for her job for the day. Then follows a scurry into the lockers for maps and helmets, followed by a visit to the Met for the weather . . . If a pilot gets a type of aircraft she has not flown before she goes to the book of Pilots’ Handling Notes which will tell her all she requires to know about how to fly the machine. The taxi pilots study their carefully worked-out itineraries and go out to the Anson or Fairchild [transport aircraft] to get the engines started and warmed up.

  ‘The day’s work has begun; as the pilots plod out one by one across the grass, lugging parachutes and overnight bags, none knows what the day may bring or whether she will manage to get back to base in time for that long-standing date of a lobster dinner at the Bugle Inn on the edge of the Hamble River.’

  In an age when most women stayed at home, or at the most worked in the factories and fields to aid the war effort, Diana, Joy, Yvonne and the other ATA women were trailblazers of their generation. They were at the forefront of a feminist revolution, years before the term had been coined. But there were still important matters of the time to be dealt with. Like socialising.

  Diana had spent a long night in the 400 Club. The Leicester Square venue was filled with its usual smoke, banter and close dancing. After all, the club was, according to the press, the ‘night-time headquarters of society’. And they were probably right.

  On one side of Diana was Max Aitken, fighter pilot and son of Minister of Aircraft Production, Lord Beaverbrook. On the other was Old Etonian, Oxford graduate, British international skier, stockbroker and Hurricane ace Billy Clyde. The two men were listening intently, and with a degree of jealousy, as Diana described what it was like to fly the latest Spitfire.

  ‘What’s it like for blind flying?’ Aitken asked in passing. He referred to the pilot’s necessary skill for poor weather, when they had to rely on a few key instruments to stay aloft: the altimeter, artificial horizon indicator, airspeed and the climb and descent indicator.

  ‘Oh, we’re not taught how to blind fly,’ Diana said blithely, sipping a martini. ‘We’re told if we stay in sight of the ground we should be all right.’

  ‘What?’ They both looked dumbfounded.

  ‘Oh yes,’ Diana replied, warming to the often talked about theme in ATA dispersal. ‘We don’t have radios or any ammunition either.’ She chuckled. ‘They say if we should come into contact with the enemy we would normally be low enough for ground defences not only to recognise us but to engage and shoot down our enemy marauders. People in authority do come up with some wonderful theories, don’t they?’

  ‘Bloody hell!’ Splashes of Clyde’s whisky and soda frothed onto the tablecloth.

  ‘But blind flying?’ Aitken interjected. ‘Not teaching it is damn near criminal, especially with our lousy weather.’

  ‘Well, I have to tell you, Max,’ Diana found herself laughing slightly nervously, ‘I have absolutely no idea how some of the blind-flying instruments even work.’ She giggled at his stunned expression.

  Aitken then grabbed one the 400 Club’s pink napkins and began to draw diagrams explaining blind flying, followed by a lecture on how to deal with cloud.

  ‘Straighten up first,’ advised Aitken. ‘And think. You usually go into cloud sideways if you’re trying to avoid it.’

  ‘Watch your safety height, so climb up high enough,’ interjected Clyde. ‘And get back on your original course, then turn slowly round. Keep that turn ever so shallow.’

  ‘Leave your throttle setting where it was when you went in then let down in as shallow a dive as you can,’ Aitken added.

  Then they lectured her on the ‘safety break-off height’, the minimum height to avoid high features such as hills. Aitken took Diana’s hand and looked her in the eye. ‘If you get to your break-off height and you’re still in cloud . . . then forget it. Get up again.
High. And quick. Then bail out!’

  Flying in a brand-new Spitfire, Diana smiled to herself as she recalled Aitken’s urging of ‘if in doubt bail out’. Despite the late night she was in excellent spirits. In blue skies above the rolling Cotswolds in the ‘truly frontline fighter’, she relished the evening’s memories. She yawned then looked down at her smart uniform skirt and jacket. Running late after her night out, she had not had time to get dressed in flying fatigues before being flown to her pick-up point.

  Her thoughts turned back to Aitken’s words. He was right of course. The ATA girls were told that their flying skills were far more valuable than any aircraft, even the latest Spitfire. The order was ‘save yourselves and forget the plane’.

  In the interests of getting pilots quickly qualified the ATA did not teach blind flying. The idea was ATA pilots only flew when visibility and cloud level were optimal.

  Diana continued in beautiful weather towards Cosford in Shropshire enjoying the freedom of flight when she looked up from her map and suddenly found herself engulfed in thick cloud. She was mystified. There was no Met forecast of a weather front.

  Although the Met reporting was a bit haphazard they would not have missed a whole front! Well, would they?

  At first Diana thought she’d flown into a patch of cloud so she followed the advice of the night before. ‘I straightened out, got back onto my course and thought! I didn’t seem to climb up, but when I glanced at the altimeter it was at 6,000ft, with thick cloud still outside.

  ‘I was faced with two alternatives: bail out or turn round, then let down towards lower ground behind me where I knew the sun had been shining.’

  But there was a problem with bailing out. She was still in her skirt.