During my first year with the V.R. I qualified for preliminary Wings. Not, I should make it clear, the full Wings worn by qualified R.A.F. pilots. Though I had many thousands of hours I was not considered the equal, rightly so, of the air force pilot with three hundred hours who has completed the fully integrated and comprehensive R.A.F. flying training course. My background and experience had too many serious limitations – no night flying, Jet flying, formation flying, gunnery, advanced aerobatics, instrument flying and familiarity with radio equipment – for me to be considered a fully competent pilot.
Jill presented no problem. Reg and I were rarely on duty simultaneously. If our week-end duties clashed I took Jill with me to the aerodrome, where she explored hangars and cockpits and soon possessed the privileges of squadron talisman. Once I suggested that Reg take her to the Territorials but apparently they do not do that sort of thing in the Army.
She also accompanied me when, in addition to the V.R. I got a job as part-time pilot with a flying club. On Bank Holidays and week-ends when I was not scheduled to fly with the V.R. I took passengers on short joy-ride flights, the joy being confined to the passengers and, occasionally, carried out private charter flights for gentlemen in loud tweeds to point-to-point and race meetings. It was a tepid occupation but it kept Jill in shoes and me away from Mrs Beeton.
30
During the war I had no opportunity of night flying for all A.T.A. ferry-flights were conducted during daylight. On a few flights when I deliberately dawdled in order to descend with the sun the mild flirtation with the darkening sky merely increased my envy of those who, in Bomber Command, thundered into the night; even though their destinations were the pitiless skies over Germany.
It was therefore something of an occasion when I received orders to report for night-flying training and in the evening drove to the aerodrome past others destined for the pub or the cinema to whom the darkening sky held no significance.
The pupils and the two instructors who were to give us our first night-flying lesson had a late supper of the traditional bacon and eggs in the mess and drove out to the aerodrome when day had long gone. The aerodrome, no longer familiar, presented a night-scape of shadow broken only by the flickering flame of goose-neck flares outlining the runway. Around the perimeter of the aerodrome further lights twinkled guidance for taxi-ing. Flanking the runway stood the flying control van, a converted truck with a perspex dome that glowed eerily and outlined the head of the control pilot standing inside.
I felt nervous and tense. My day experience seemed peculiarly irrelevant to a setting that had dismissed the guiding horizon and substituted a small cluster of instruments. Instruments that had to be coaxed and guided until they indicated that the aircraft is following a normal course and not plunging to the ground or pointing to the stars; ultimately the same thing.
The stars shone brightly, promising a sky untrammelled by cloud. All the pupils were subdued; the instructors omnipotent.
I climbed clumsily into the cockpit, knocking against protuberances that hid themselves in the darkness. The instruments gleaming fluorescently in the shaded cockpit lights, indicated information that had acquired a more urgent significance in the darkness. A car passed distantly, the gear change registering clearly in the silence of the night. Momentarily I envied the driver his destination.
The confident voice of the instructor echoing through the speaking tube left me wondering at his nonchalance as he instructed me to sit back and gather impressions whilst he did a circuit and landing. I felt most impressionable. My eyes but not my mind noticed the familiar movement of the controls as he prepared for starting. Petrol on, throttle slightly open; ‘Contact,’ he shouted to the dim figure waiting to swing the propeller. The engine coughed into action, spitting meteoric sparks as though clearing its throat before subsiding into a steady blue flame that licked and curled from the exhaust. With a wave of his hand we taxied towards the runway with sharp, crackling blips of the throttle. Confidently I assumed we were taking a logical path through the bewildering taxi-ing lights.
Lining up between the two parallel rows of goose-neck flares the instructor flashed our recognition signal on the navigation lights. An answering steady green from the perspex dome signalled the all clear. ‘All set?’ asked the instructor nonchalantly. I nodded stupidly at the dim silhouette in the front seat before grabbing the speaking tube and answering: ‘Yes, sir.’
Snorting flame we charged at the windmill of night. The wheels bumped and jarred interminably as we accelerated and the tiny islands of light flashed by on either side. With the detachment of a passenger I counted them... three... four... five before, like a tube train leaving a brilliantly lit station, we soared into a tunnel of darkness. The flares dropped away and were left behind as the midnight blue enveloped us in welcome. Mechanically I looked ahead for the horizon. But there was nothing except the instructor’s head bent intently forward over the instruments as we climbed like a submarine into the sea of night.
The haze of lights of a city gradually approached as we climbed and became a sparkling star that looked like a snow-flake under a microscope. The arteries of life, illuminated by street lamps, radiated from the brilliant core and curved through the darkness to other communities glowing like fireflies on the horizon. We climbed steadily to 2,000 feet before levelling out. I regretted the obtrusive roar of the engine. Without that reminding cacophony I could have imagined true flight and fulfilled the childish dream of joining the pixies, the fairies, the birds.
‘Jackie!’
‘Sir?’
‘Did you fall asleep? Take OVER!’ I grabbed the controls and continued the gentle turn to the left started by the instructor. It was easier than I had anticipated. I relaxed and enjoyed the carnival of fight beneath.
‘O.K. I’ve got her,’ shouted the instructor through the speaking tube. ‘Well do a landing.’
Below, the runway twinkled like illuminated parallel bars and seemed suspended in mid-air. I felt that if we landed on it we would drop through to the bowels of the earth. It was small, too small. I was glad of the confident silhouette in front as he flashed the navigation lights. Immediately an answering green beam of light from the control van searched waveringly for a moment before glinting sharply in our eyes. Regretfully I watched as the instructor throttled back, lost height and turned towards the runway. Cutting the throttle we glided in a shower of sparks towards the nickering flares that outlined the runway and swayed, rose and fell as though determined to evade us. With a dying swish of slipstream we touched down with a heavy un-instructor-like thud, rumbled the length of the runway and taxied back to the flying control van.
‘O.K., Jackie. Try a circuit and landing.’
I did so. It was tolerable.
‘Another,’ he ordered encouragingly from the front seat. I obeyed and made a perfect landing. Nothing to it, I thought cockily until he climbed out of the front seat, leaving an eloquent void and said: ‘Right. Off you go. Try one on your own.’
I looked up at the sky. It was black. Very black. It had, I decided as I taxied to the beginning of the runway, got very much darker since the last landing. Beyond the perimeter of the aerodrome I could see cosily lit homes where people listened to the radio and faintly heard my exhaust. I envied them as the green light flashed and I was committed to the sky.
A few moments later I was a thousand feet above and no longer envying them. Fear forgotten for night-flying was no longer an unknown. In the slim cockpit the instrument lights glowed with the intimacy of a camp fire. The stars twinkled a welcome. The buffeting of the slipstream that snatched at my helmet and goggles as I looked down was like the roll of drums that highlights a spectacular achievement.
It was another first. My first solo flight at night. I felt the old thrill of achievement and felt content that every step, every decision, every yea or nay had brought me to the night sky over Bristol.
The landing was poor; but what did it matter?
Driving home I
put the car away. It was late, nearly four o’clock, but I searched for Reg’s pen, found my log-book and entered in the night-flying column: 1 hour dual and 30 minutes solo, before going to bed.
31
Contrasting with the slow but sure progress of training in the R.A.F.V.R. my civilian life, despite the love of husband and daughter, freewheeled listlessly. Whether I am to be censured for being discontent, despite such gifts, I do not know; nor really, do I care. It was as frustrating for me not to fly constantly as it is for a woman yearning for a home and family to be a spinster. I knew that flying would not be enough without Reg and Jill. But, equally, Reg and Jill were not enough without flying. It is a man’s right to recognize and admit this by having his career and returning to his family in the evening and week-ends. I do not recognize that this is not also a woman’s right.
During the two weeks’ annual summer camp with the R.A.F. I had a tantalizing glimpse of what might have been. For fourteen days and fourteen nights the only thing I scrubbed was my teeth. The evenings were spent in hangar-talk in the mess and not in darning socks. And the days were spent on the aerodrome or in the skies building memories which must last a year. The other V.R. pilots, released for two weeks from their civilian duties as test or airline pilots chatted with easy familiarity about their jobs. The virtues of prototype Jet aircraft were argued. The impious merits of ground hostesses at Tokio, Montevideo and Reykjavik were discussed with reminiscent anecdotes. And the R.A.F. pilots listened without envy. For, at the end of their careers in the R.A.F., they would step into civil aviation and roam the open skies for another ten, twenty, thirty years. Next week, whilst the test pilots hovered on the sound barrier, the airline pilots set course for exotic latitudes, and R.A.F. pilots engraved the skies with vapour trails, I would be back at Taunton, washing dishes and ironing shirts.
Perhaps the reader detects a note of pique. So be it. I was qualified, had the experience and, through my husband’s gentle understanding, the domestic freedom, to roam the world in airliners. To greet dawn over the desert, sunset over the ocean and know summer when winter is at home. But wings clipped, in toy aircraft, I flitted meekly in England’s back-yard skies.
As the months drifted by I lost that cheerful anticipation of a million corners around which fun lurked. Not a chink of light showed through the curtain of understandable prejudice, that prevented me from following my natural highway. Again and again I had charged at it with a lance of optimism and bounced off, the lance bent but not irreparably. Now the lance had been straightened out so many times it was in danger of breaking off altogether.
But corners did turn up unexpectedly. One was the stage. ‘You dance very well. Why don’t you join the Opera Society?’ suggested a girlfriend who had for months stoically offered a shoulder for me to weep on. ‘I can get you an audition,’ she encouraged as I hesitated.
At her insistence and with Reg’s cautious assent I went for an audition with the Taunton Operatic Society and was given a microscopic singing and dancing part as a soubrette in Vagabond King then under rehearsal.
After a month of rehearsals where the mysteries of acoustics, the vagaries of spotlights and the inhibitions of the newest member of the cast were overcome, the show was on. Clad in black tights, red sequins and raw nerves I contributed my might before packed houses mercifully hidden by the glare of footlights, and did sufficiently well to secure larger parts in subsequent shows.
Inevitably the V.R. pilots at Filton heard of these post-flying activities and invaded the theatre one evening to see a great deal more of Pilot Class IV Moggridge, D.T., R.A.F.V.R., than they had had the opportunity of seeing before. I assume the whistles were a verdict of approval but I felt rather like the person who dreams that he walks the High Street without trousers. ‘It’s nothing,’ soothed Reg during the interval. ‘It’s just like wearing a swim-suit on the beach.’
Later, after ballet lessons with an epicene Russian teacher who insisted that I should give up singing because it spoiled my posture, and singing lessons with an Italian professor who insisted that I give up ballet because it spoiled my breathing, I appeared in professional pantomime. The press notices were flattering and prompted a producer to sign me up with a touring company as leading dancer and singer in a revue. But the reaalys and deaarlings of the professional theatre were too much for me. After one successful short tour and a comfortable scrap-book of provincial press notices I returned home and confined myself to the Taunton Operatic Society. Grease-paint, I decided, was no substitute for vapour trails.
The next corner was totally unexpected. After a year with the R.A.F.V.R. I was promoted to commissioned rank as Pilot Officer. Once again I collected a uniform from Moss Bros. A sleek elegant affair of worsted and patch pockets; a pleasant change after the itchy flannel of Pilot Class IV. The thin pale-blue stripe on my sleeves was almost infinitesimal but now I would be addressed as Ma’am though it was some weeks before I could divest myself of the habit of still being intimidated by other officers and addressing them as ‘Sir’. I regret to confess that, in fact, I was rarely addressed as Ma’am by the other ranks. They were almost as stricken as I with the comic absurdity of my transformation into a gentlewoman officer. In some endeavour to remove the anomaly I was dispatched on an officers’ course for three weeks shortly after I was Gazetted and learned something of the totems and taboos of military etiquette.
Being commissioned, apart from feeding my vanity, improving my appearance in uniform and giving me the delightful pleasure of signing P/O after my name, altered very little the routine of my life. In the V.R. it was rather like being promoted Minister without Portfolio. I wore the trappings of authority but had no one over whom it could be exercised. Not that I cared to. I am not the type who gives orders with equanimity.
32
We were putting up the 1952 Christmas decorations. Reg exuded an air of seasonal goodwill.
‘Reg.’
‘Uh-huh,’ answered Reg absently from the top of the ladder.
‘What do you think about going through the Sound Barrier?’
The ladder shook dangerously as he looked down at me.
‘Apropos what?’ he asked, warily.
‘It hasn’t been done by a woman yet.’
‘So?’
‘Well. It would be nice if an Englishwoman were the first woman...’
‘Admirable patriotism. You mean it would be nice for you if you were the first.’
‘The publicity might help me to get a job,’ I urged, passing him the end of a streamer.
‘You haven’t flown Jets,’ he countered. I waited until he had a drawing-pin in his mouth before confessing that I had written to V.P. Headquarters for permission to fly Jet aircraft at an R.A.F. station.
‘Do you think you can do it?’ he asked.
‘Of course. Just a question of getting hold of the right aircraft.’
‘Have you told the air force?’
‘Not yet. I want to get some more Jet time in first.’
He sat on top of the ladder, looking at his watch. I got the tears ready.
‘It’s Christmas,’ he observed irrelevantly. ‘All right. Go ahead; but take it easy.’
After a few weeks of training with the R.A.F. on an ‘old boy’ basis I did a few hours solo flying on a Meteor Jet aircraft. What followed is best told by the following letters selected from a vast file of correspondence dealing with that period:
To: Officer Commanding,
R.A.F., Pucklechurch. 13th March, 1953
Dear Sir,
Thank you for your kindness in obtaining permission for me to fly in a Meteor at Merryfield.
I would be grateful if you would help me again by applying to the Air Ministry for permission and facilities making it possible for me to achieve a faster-than-sound women’s international speed record before this is achieved by Madame Auriol of France who is backed by the French Government or Miss Jacqueline Cochrane of America.
Yours etc.
Royal Ai
r Force,
Pucklechurch. 8th April, 1953
Dear P/O Moggridge,
With reference to your letter dated 28th March, with the details concerning your recent interview at the Air Ministry, the Air Officer Commanding is pleased to know that your request to realize your ambition to fly faster than sound received sympathetic consideration, but notes that the Air Council are unable to help you at the present.
Under the circumstances, it is considered that no useful purpose could be served by your continuing to fly as a passenger in two-seater Jet aircraft. The question of your qualifying for ‘Wings’ and an ‘Instrument Ticket’ will be dealt with as a separate issue in due course.
Yours etc.
The Secretary of State for Air,
Air Ministry,
Whitehall. 23rd April, 1953
Dear Mrs Moggridge,
The Secretary of State for Air wishes me to thank you for your letter of the 16th April in which you request that you should be given assistance to enable you to fly faster than sound.
He admires greatly the spirit which has prompted you to make this suggestion, which is typical of the Women’s Royal Air Force Volunteer Reserve.
He wishes me, however, to point out that whilst you have a great deal of general flying experience, before you could apply this experience to Jet aircraft, a great deal of further flying training would be necessary.*
Furthermore, as you are no doubt aware, aircraft capable of flying faster than sound are not yet in general use in the R.A.F. in this country, and aircraft belonging to civil firms do not normally come under the control of the Secretary of State for Air.
He very much regrets therefore that for this reason, among others, it is not possible for him to arrange for you to undertake this enterprise. He trusts that you will still enjoy the flying facilities which the Women’s Royal Air Force Volunteer Reserve performs, and he is sure that you and other pilots of the W.R.A.F.V.R. will continue to be a source of inspiration to the young women of this country.
Spitfire Girl Page 13