Britain’s ‘guarantee’ of Poland’s territorial integrity turned out, in the face of blitzkrieg, to have been more of an open-dated IOU. But certain individual Britons had the wit and compassion to advocate swift action to help those Poles stuck in Romania. One of these was Group Captain A. P. Davidson, former air attaché to the British Embassy in Warsaw, where he had been impressed by the Polish Air Force’s professionalism. Hurriedly evacuated to London, Davidson urged the French and British legations in Bucharest to help General Zajac spring his people from Romania on the grounds that they were a key strategic asset. He knew that extricating them would not be easy. There was no question of enlisting Stalin’s help; those Polish officers who had fled east had been shipped to the Gulag or executed in the forests of Katyn. Nor was there any hope of an amnesty from Hitler. He might still have been hoping to avoid war with Britain, but his chosen method of dealing with the Polish military – to crush it – had served him well so far and he saw no reason to change it.
Romania was thoroughly infiltrated by the Gestapo and its informers. In the mountains, where unauthorised possession of skis was punishable by death, refugees were liable to be hunted like animals and shot on sight. In homes like the one where Leska found herself a lodger, who was she to know which side her hosts were on?
After a week she received a message from her squadron leader. She was to meet him at seven that evening at a crossroads near the house. There would be a car, and she was to wear a skirt. It took them a week to reach Bucharest and once there seven months to get visas for France.
By the time she arrived in the south of France in May 1940, Anna Leska had had no contact with her family since her escape from Poland. Her mother and sisters, as far as she knew, had stayed behind. Her father might have tried to escape, like her, to join the Polish forces gathering in exile, but by what route and with what success? Dozens of routes were being tried, some via South Africa to avoid the North African war, some ending in the gold mines of Kolyma, in the Soviet Far East.
As she checked into a hotel in Menton her own family name, in familiar handwriting, jumped out at her from the guests’ register. Her father had stayed there two days earlier on his way to England. Rather than follow him, she continued to Paris, where the Polish Air Force was still technically headquartered, and where Wojtulanis and two other Polish women pilots had already arrived by different escape routes. For a few weeks, these four became much admired oddities. They would be the only women from the Western allies to wear full air force pilots’ uniforms in the entire war. It was General Sikorski’s idea, and militarily inconsequential since the fall of France was imminent and the Polish Air Force was in no position to prevent it. ‘All four women were commissioned as pilot officers,’ Wojtulanis wrote of her group. ‘In steel-blue uniforms with a single star on each epaulette, they became a sensation on the streets of Paris.’
When Pétain capitulated in June 1940, Leska was bundled onto a boat from St Jean de Luz to Plymouth. From there, she went immediately to London and the Polish General Staff building on Buckingham Palace Road. A Polish officer whom she happened to know saw her as she was waiting, exhausted and more rootless than ever, in the lobby. He advised her to report to Room 303, without explaining why. She set off up several flights of stairs and then followed a series of dimly lit corridors, eventually knocking on door 303. It was opened by her father.
In the late summer of 2006, I took an evening train up the West Bank of the Vistula from Kraków to Warsaw to meet the last surviving Polish woman pilot of the ATA, Jadwiga Pilsudska. I asked her what she knew of Anna Leska’s journey from the Warsaw Aero Club to Buckingham Palace Road. She thought for a while, then said apologetically that ‘there were so many stories, things that happened that you were interested in, that somehow either she told me and I can’t remember, or we never talked about it’.
Had Leska been reluctant to talk about it?
‘No, it just didn’t happen.’
Pilsudska and Leska had kept in touch in England after the war and lived close to each other in Warsaw for ten years after the fall of communism. Not for the first time I got the sense of memories carefully compartmentalised to prevent one set contaminating another.
For Jadwiga Pilsudska herself, the process of reaching England after the invasion had been accelerated by the fact that she was the daughter of the founder of modern Poland. Her father, Marshal Jozef Pilsudski, had conceived a new Polish nationalism for the twentieth century and used it to weld together the Greater Poland bequeathed to Europe by the First World War. He had died in 1935, but his spirit, the spirit of Poland, seemed to live on in his daughter. The press would turn out to watch her glide at weekends at Sokola Gora. Here was the new-model Pilsudski, as brave as the Marshal; and as air-minded as she was beautiful. She was modest, yet self-assured, youthful, yet somehow wise.
When Colonel General Heinz Guderian and the XIX Army Corps rolled in to Poland Jadwiga and her family fled with her father’s uniform in a black leather suitcase.
I went with my family – my mother and my sister – when Warsaw was evacuated. We stayed in the country for a few days in a farmhouse belonging to my cousin, and then went to Vilno [Vilnius, now the Lithuanian capital]. Vilno was our family place and we had relatives there. And then of course the Russians crossed the frontier on 17 September.
When the Russians came my mother decided to go to Lithuania, and then there was a plane to Riga, and we were advised to go via Stockholm. My mother was urged to go to Paris, where most of the Polish who had escaped were gathering, but the plane was going to England. And that’s how we arrived.
While those of her uncles who had stayed in Warsaw were arrested and thrown in the Lyubianka, Pilsudska and her mother and sisters stayed with the Polish ambassador in London. They did what they could for less fortunate children of the diaspora. One, a medical student and friend of Jadwiga’s, had been an intern on a cruise ship bound for South America when the country was overrun. She returned to Southampton instead of Gdansk and started a new life with nothing but the trunk she had taken on the cruise.
It was not impossible to go back, not if you had the desire and a purpose and the right connections in the underground. Pilsudska wanted to, she told me, but it seems she was dissuaded from doing so partly because the loss of Marshal Pilsudski’s daughter would have been too great a blow for the morale of the Home Army and the government and armed forces in exile. But she would sooner not talk about it. The explanation is the compartment wall across her memory: ‘My life stopped on the 17th of September,’ she told me with sudden clarity. ‘I left everything behind and had to start something completely fresh.’
That something would be flying, but she did not know it yet.
7
‘None of Us Is Snobbish’
‘Now, none of us is snobbish, but somehow we do object to writing our names on bits of toilet paper.’
Pauline Gower, on the tendency of young boys at pre-war flying displays to request pilots’ autographs on scraps of paper picked up after the popular trick of cutting streamers into thousands of small pieces with one’s propeller.
Gower was right. The early ATA women were not snobs. Far from it; they were ardent meritocrats. They just happened to be meritocrats in a discipline for which one hour’s instruction cost roughly what the average shop worker could expect to earn in a fortnight. This made them a self-selecting elite in terms of daring to risk their necks and ignore social conventions, but first of all in terms of money. Rose Rees’s idea of ‘poor’ was most people’s rich. Amy Johnson was practically blue-collar by ATA women’s standards, because she was from Hull and her father was in trade – but he was still one of the city’s most prominent businessmen.
So it surprised no one that the ninth recruit to the ATA women’s section was Lois Butler, wife of the chairman of De Havilland; nor that the tenth was Lady Bailey, the daughter of an Irish peer and wife of Sir Abe Bailey, an indulgent South African millionaire.
/> In 1929 Lady Bailey had won the admiration of millions, and the Britannia Trophy for the year’s most outstanding air performance, by flying solo to Cape Town and back on the pretext of meeting her husband. It took her ten months. Unlike her friend and rival, Lady Heath, who had taken off from Pretoria for London the previous year with a shotgun, fifty rounds of ammunition, a tennis racquet, high-heeled satin shoes, a black silk evening dress and a fur coat, Lady Bailey travelled light. In addition to undergarments and a tweed flying suit she carried only a pair of mosquito-proof boots, some tinted goggles and a flying helmet. She crashed on both legs of the trip: outbound, she turned her plane over on landing in Tanganyika and had to wait there while Abe replaced it. Apologising to him for her late arrival at the Cape, she said she had got ‘muddled in the mountains’. On her return she landed heavily soon after leaving Cape Town and had to wait four months for spares and repairs. Geoffrey de Havilland, who knew her from Stag Lane, said she ‘knew much more about the technique of navigation under almost impossible conditions than most people were prepared to credit’. But Amy Johnson said she never seemed to plan her flights or even to have any clear idea where she was going.
That apart, the trouble with Lady Bailey’s appointment to the ATA was that she was aged fifty. Even by the standards of the ‘Ancient and Tattered’ this was pushing it. The National Men’s Defence League and readers of Aeroplane resumed their eruptions about women encroaching on men’s work, and rather than endure public accusations of pulling rank, Lady Bailey resigned within a week.
For a few days she had epitomised the ATA’s defining ethos: quietly brave, deceptively casual, defiantly eccentric. But any void she left was quickly filled by a stream of new recruits infused not just with Bailey’s limitless enthusiasm for flying but also with the energy of youth. And few combined these quite so strikingly as Audrey Sale-Barker.
When the Sale-Barker name began appearing in aeronautical dispatches in the summer of 1940, it had a certain resonance. Skiers would have remembered her as captain of the British women’s team at the 1936 Winter Olympics in Garmisch-Partenkirchen in Bavaria, and the winner before that of a string of alpine trophies as fabulous as their names – the Lady Denman Challenge, the Kandahar Ladies Ski Club Championship, the Donna Isabella Orsini Cup – all fought for on the precipitous east face of the Schilthorn above Mürren (which Ian Fleming would later rename the Piz Gloria for the purposes of James Bond’s imprisonment by that most unscrupulous brainwasher of young women, Ernst Stavro Blofeld).
Society types would have known of Sale-Barker as an elegant fixture of the London season and its satellite events in Paris and Le Touquet. They would have recognised her delicate features and slightly upturned nose. They might have heard her charming lisp at parties, and they might even have heard her name linked with the impossibly dashing Lord Knebworth (who would later die in an air crash).
Hardcore aviation buffs would have recalled her winning free flying lessons in a competition sponsored by National Aviation Services at the 1929 Aero Exhibition, Olympia, for her performance on a ‘Reid pilot indicator’. This was an elaborate contraption that supposedly measured pilot aptitude with coloured discs connected by a maze of push-rods to pedals and a joystick. Sale-Barker scored higher on it than all other competitors, male or female, and having won those flying lessons she shone from her first touch of the control column. Then nineteen, she earned her private ‘A’ licence after just seven hours of instruction at the new Hanworth aerodrome near Twickenham. And on her first solo, spectators – including a man from the Daily Express – were surprised to see this ‘pretty, dark haired society girl’ climb to nearly 3,000 feet and loop the loop, then plunge into a spinning dive.
Like Rosemary Rees, Sale-Barker was not ‘rich’, but neither was she ‘poor’. She was the daughter of a doctor and an actress and lived in one of the smart new mansion blocks behind Sloane Square. As a teenager she was such a fine and fearless skier that her winters in the Bernese Oberland were sponsored by the Kandahar Ski Club (of which Lord Knebworth was president). Since she did not have to pay to learn to fly either, the question of whether she would have been able to afford to on her own did not arise. As the diarist for the Daily Sketch put it after a visit to Hanworth aerodrome, she simply ‘excels in all manly sports’. She could not quite love them all equally, however. After that first solo loop and spin she confessed to finding flying even more exciting than skiing, which might have dulled her competitive edge on snow. In 1931, after years as the dominant women’s racer in the Alps, she lost the women’s downhill at Mürren. And when she came into an inheritance at the age of twenty-one, she spent it on a Gipsy Moth.
Friends started calling her Wendy, after Wendy in Peter Pan, who learns to fly. For her own part she started whispering about South Africa. She told her mother she planned to spend Christmas in Cape Town with their friends Lord and Lady Clarendon – not to make any headlines, but as a holiday. Her mother forbade it unless she could find a chaperone. Audrey produced one in the form of Miss Joan Page, fellow pilot and daughter of Sir Arthur Page, Chief Justice of Burma.
When the two young pilots realised that Sir Arthur and Lady Page would be passing the South of France in late October 1932 in a steamer bound for Rangoon, they had the makings of a plan: a surprise call on Joan’s parents in Marseille, a stimulating aerial potter down the Nile in the cool of the Egyptian autumn, and a warm African Christmas in relative comfort (Lord Clarendon was South Africa’s Governor General). If the skiing season still held any appeal after all that, there would, thanks to the invigorating miracle of private aviation, be plenty of time to get back for it.
Audrey and Joan told Mrs Sale-Barker not to breathe a word of their plan to anyone. They told the chaps from the Express, the Mail and the Mirror to keep quiet too. The whole thing was secret, they insisted. It was a holiday, after all. No records would be broken and in any case they loathed publicity. Even so, someone managed to persuade them to pose for a cheerful-looking pre-flight portrait in front of Audrey’s new machine at Heston, and the papers entirely misunderstood their intentions with regard to coverage. Their ‘secret’ trip, less ambitious and ostensibly less newsworthy than those of Amy Johnson, Lady Bailey, Lady Heath and others before them – except, of course, in being secret – was extensively reported from day one.
Even the Tatler columnist known as ‘Eve’ betrayed them: ‘I was sworn to secrecy,’ she wrote as the agencies flashed back the news of their safe departure from Marseille for Corsica: ‘[Miss Sale-Barker] particularly dislikes the publicity given to women, just because they happen to be women, for attempting or accomplishing feats which would be quite ordinary for a man.’ But Eve could not resist plugging someone so ‘eminently paragraph-worthy’, and added that Sale-Barker was ‘an extremely attractive person with a lovely figure’ who ‘happens to be one of the best ski runners in the world’. The Tatler added that Sale-Barker hoped to be back in time for the season at Mürren.
But she didn’t make it. All went well as far as Benghazi. The women put in an 800-mile day worthy of Johnson herself, following the Libyan coast and descending, tired and after dark, towards Cairo’s Almaza aerodrome. The runway was unlit. Sale-Barker was at the controls in the Moth’s rear seat. According to one report, the ground crew heard the engine and scrambled to create a makeshift flarepath with car headlights. Sale-Barker skilfully swerved to avoid a house seconds before landing but came to rest against a windsock pole, which put the aircraft out of action for at least four days.
The Cairo press corps picked up the story. They reported – or concocted – a rumour that the RAF had agreed in advance to escort the defenceless young aviators across the Sudanese desert to Khartoum, and had then reneged on the plan. True to their professed abhorrence of publicity, Page and Sale-Barker never explained how they got to Khartoum. At Malakal, Nairobi and Bulawayo they had no comment for reporters. (Even on her return to England six months later, all Sale-Barker would tell Aeroplane magazine was that the ques
tion of RAF desert escorts was never discussed.) Into this news vacuum an increasingly intrigued and desperate Fleet Street inserted at least three male chaperones, among them a mysterious American pickle salesman who took Page’s seat from Wadi Halfa on the upper Nile to Khartoum; a second passenger for Audrey from Khartoum to Juba; and a third man to accompany Miss Page upriver by boat.
When they reached Cape Town the ‘Air Girls’ continued their stonewalling. In the absence of usable quotes, one paper printed a quite pitiful fictional transcript of the encounter that ended with:
Fifth Reporter: ‘Don’t you really like reporters?’
Miss Sale-Barker and Miss Page (together): ‘We certainly do not.’
Chorus of Reporters: ‘But we like people who don’t like publicity.’
And the newspaper reporters of Cape Town have decided that the two girls’ ‘go-as-you-please’ flight was a good effort.
But it was not quite over. The press left Page and Sale-Barker alone for Christmas at the Governor General’s Cape Town residence, then picked up the story again as they began their homeward journey. For 1,200 miles it was uneventful. The first indication that something was wrong reached London in time for the evening papers on 16 January 1933 in an excited Reuters cable datelined Nairobi and with almost limitless scope for embellishment.
BRITISH AIRWOMEN MISSING!
Planes Searching in Lion Country
Two young Englishwomen who left Moshi (at the foot of Mount Kilimanjaro) on Saturday afternoon at 5.15 are missing … Three aeroplanes are searching an area of 100 square miles … they decided to follow the local East African mail plane … heavy rain … gusty winds … the male pilot decided to turn back …
Spitfire Women of World War II Page 9