The Paris Secret : A Novel (2020)

by Lester, Natasha

  ‘Thank you,’ Skye whispered. ‘I’ll apologise to everyone. I’ve learned my lesson.’

  Which was: don’t be Skye Penrose again. Not ever.

  ‘Good.’ Pauline’s voice was firm. ‘We only just landed on the side of good fortune this time. So the warning stands, as does me begging you to fly the planes with nary a smile nor a wing-waggle until this settles. Don’t bugger everything up.’

  Skye returned to work determined to never get another warning, to forget she knew aerobatics at all, and to tame every maverick part of herself.

  Five

  On their first real day of flying, the ATA women juggled themselves into the few chairs – Skye perching on an arm and letting Joan take the seat – and Skye saw that Pauline looked tired again. As if she’d been fighting through a hailstorm and had acquired a lot more bruises.

  ‘Tell us,’ Skye said, and she felt Joan shift closer to her, as if they might need to be braced for whatever Pauline would say.

  ‘This won’t be like any flying you’ve done before,’ Pauline began, somewhat carefully. ‘You’ll rarely be able to take a direct route to wherever you’re ferrying as you need to avoid barrage balloons, anti-aircraft guns, coastal defences and restricted flight zones. But you won’t have any instruments for navigation. Instead, you have to fly by dead reckoning, using only maps, a compass and your watch, flying in sight of the ground at all times – that’s the only way you’ll know where you are. You have to become expert in identifying railway lines, Roman roads and other landmarks as those are the navigation aids that will get you from the start to the finish of your route.’

  Skye found herself squeezing Joan’s hand and avoiding Rose’s eyes entirely because she didn’t want to see the incredulity she knew she’d find there. But, she reasoned, if they got lost while taking a plane from one side of Britain to another with only a watch and a railway line to guide them, they could always radio in to check both their position and what obstacles – like a German Messerschmitt – might be lying in wait for them along the flight path.

  Then Pauline said, ‘You’re not allowed to use radio. Ever. Which means you can’t fly if the cloud base is less than eight hundred feet. If it’s lower, it’s scrub for the day. No going up into the clouds and trying to find a way over the top. Without radio and navigation aids, that would be suicide.’

  ‘But …’ Skye couldn’t form the words. She could scarcely believe what Pauline had said. They might as well be flying with blindfolds on.

  ‘Righto,’ said Rose, and Skye could hear the effort it took for her to be her usual chirpy self. ‘No instruments. No radio. Are we allowed a little luck?’

  Nobody smiled. What they were being asked to do was not just risky but possibly deadly. Skye could easily set out on a day that looked clear, only to run into cloud fifty miles further along and be stuck in the thick of it, like her mother had been, unable to see the railway lines on the ground and flying blind into a hill, with no way to call for help. Or losing her way and ending up somewhere over the North Sea with no fuel left.

  Pauline allowed them a moment before passing them each a map. ‘You’ll notice,’ she said drily, ‘that it says on your maps: Areas dangerous to flying not marked on this sheet. You’re not allowed to mark the location of hazards like barrage balloons in case your plane goes down and you and your map are taken by the enemy, thus giving them valuable intelligence.’

  Skye couldn’t bear it any more. She let a little of her old self escape. ‘As the editors of Aeroplane magazine don’t ascribe to us any intelligence, it shouldn’t matter what we write on our maps.’

  Rose was the first to laugh, then Joan, then Mona and the others. What else was there to do?

  ‘And these are for you.’ Pauline handed Skye a pile of letters.

  ‘Me?’ Skye tore one open to find a request from a pilot to accompany him to dinner and a dance. The next was a similar request, this time from an engineer. And so it went on, through the pile.

  ‘Your picture in the newspaper has made you somewhat sought after,’ Pauline said.

  Nary a smile. ‘I’ll decline them all, of course,’ Skye said, pushing to the back of her mind the Skye who had danced all night in Parisian jazz clubs with handsome Frenchmen. She dropped the letters into the nearest rubbish bin.

  ‘Quite,’ Pauline said. ‘You’ll need to save your strength. Nobody will let us touch operational aircraft, which means the only planes the women of the ATA will fly are Tiger Moths. To Scotland.’

  ‘Bloody hell.’ Rose said what everyone must have been thinking.

  Tiger Moths had open cockpits. It was winter. The air over Scotland was not even warm enough to be considered freezing. It was arctic.

  The women were given fur-lined boots, a Sidcot flying suit and a leather helmet for protection. But when you were flying for four hours in minus thirty degrees windchill, it was like being naked in a snowstorm, Skye reflected through chattering jaw on her very first flight. She could barely concentrate enough to fly the plane as her body shut off every function besides keeping the blood moving through her.

  She almost didn’t register the RAF base when she saw it, almost flew on, over the North Sea and into oblivion. She could see that her hands were still attached to her, but she couldn’t feel them. Somehow they moved, muscle memory still functioning, and she slowed the Moth for her final approach, thankful that some guardian angel ensured she landed safely.

  She taxied the Moth after the follow-me car to dispersal, and at last heard the sound of the chocks being placed under the wheels. It was time to get out. But her legs wouldn’t work. Pauline needn’t have bothered to forbid her from smiling. She simply couldn’t.

  An engineer climbed onto the wing and stared disgustedly at her. ‘The only good thing about having women in the ATA is your weight,’ he snapped.

  He reached into the cockpit and lifted her out, bodily. It was the most mortifying thing that had ever happened to her.

  After he put her on the ground, she held on to the wing for dear life, knowing that if she fell down right now she would cry, not because she was hurt, but because she had never, in all her life, imagined having so little dignity.

  ‘I’ll have to quit flying and become an engineer,’ a pilot called out as he walked past. ‘Isn’t that two for today?’

  The engineer laughed, and Skye understood that Mona or Joan or someone else had landed before her and had also had to be removed from the aircraft. It didn’t make her feel any better to know she wasn’t the first whose body had so let her down. Nobody, not even a man, could survive such a flight in bitter cold and be capable of movement at the end. But the men were ferrying closed cockpit planes to bases further south where the air was milder, so it was just the women who looked weak.

  The engineer threw her parachute down at her. ‘Don’t forget that,’ he said.

  It slipped through her arms. While she might be slowly defrosting, she didn’t yet have the range of movement needed to catch a heavy parachute when thrown at her from above. He tossed her bag down after it.

  ‘Thanks,’ she mumbled as she bent to pick it up. Then she forced one foot in front of the other so she could find somewhere to change, to abide by the ridiculous regulations that stated she must take off her much warmer flying suit immediately after she had landed and put on her skirt.

  Once she’d pulled on thin lisle stockings and her skirt, she had to catch the overnight train from Scotland to St Pancras. Still colder than she’d ever been in her life, Skye found a blue-lipped Joan on the platform, and was momentarily grateful for her prewar habit of swimming most days, even in winter, which had perhaps made her more robust.

  On the train, Skye boosted Joan up into the luggage rack where she could at least lie down. Skye sat on the floor, head resting against a pole, eyelids closing occasionally but flying open with every noise and movement around her.

  They arrived at St Pancras in time to catch the train to Hatfield to start a new day’s work, barely thawe
d from the previous evening. Pauline handed Skye and Joan hot cups of tea that they swallowed gratefully.

  ‘Sorry,’ Pauline said grimly.

  Then Rose appeared with a pile of fur and wool, which she dropped on the table. ‘I phoned Mummy and asked her to bring some things from home.’

  Each woman took a garment. Skye passed Joan a fur stole and selected a heavy shawl for herself. Once they were all wrapped in fur and cashmere and mink, as glamorously attired as if they were attending a winter ball, it was time to leave, to face a day that was forecast to be colder than the previous one.

  ‘Look at this,’ Pauline said, holding up a newspaper.

  Pictured there was of one of the ATA women – taken from the rear so it was hard to tell who it was – parachute bumping against her behind as she walked, accompanied by the caption: How d’ye like the togs, girls? The answer to that question, according to the newspaper, was: We LIKE you in your harness, and the bustle, which is a parachute. We like your air. In fact, we LIKE you flighty!

  Skye’s eyes met Joan’s, then Rose’s, and finally Pauline’s. She saw in them the anger that burned empyrean, a realm of pure fire, in them all.

  ‘You are being given every opportunity to give up, to retire to life as a flighty bird who entertains men in her bustle, to prove that women cannot fly planes,’ Pauline said plainly. ‘I will not judge you if you choose an easier life. But if you stay, know that this is how it will be. You must deliver every plane intact, in dreadful conditions, and you must never make a fuss. Here are the chits for those who decide they will do just that.’

  Every single woman in the unheated, muddy hut took a delivery chit from Pauline and marched outside. Skye marched with them, knowing none of them would ever give in.

  She never discovered if the Scotland route was punishment for her loop-the-loop escapade, or whether the RAF had planned it all along. She supposed they couldn’t have known it would be the worst winter England had seen for decades. But the RAF did coordinate the ferrying movements and so could dictate what the women flew and where. And they flew those Tiger Moths right the way through the record-breaking winter to Scotland. Two thousand planes. Two thousand arctic journeys in all.

  The summer of 1940 brought with it the fall of France to the Nazis, followed by the Battle of Britain and the Blitz, which turned England into a nation determined to keep calm and carry on in spite of the fact that everyone believed the Germans would arrive on their shores at any moment.

  Summer also brought the news from Skye’s aunt in France that Liberty had been persuaded to leave for England before the German occupation. Skye was so thankful her sister had escaped. They hadn’t seen one another nor spoken for three years, and Skye’s letters to her sister always remained unanswered. Now she waited, braced, for her sister to come and find her, but Liberty remained stubbornly absent. A small and terrible part of Skye was relieved – she wasn’t sure she wanted to discover whether Liberty’s malice had developed from punctured tyres and stolen assignments to something worse – but another, larger part of her shed a tear or two in bed at night at the awful possibility that Liberty might stay away from Skye forever.

  Through August and September, as the bombs fell like a vicious and unrelenting rainstorm, Skye, Rose and Joan spent every night huddled in the Anderson shelter, resurfacing when the all clear sounded at dawn. The acrid stink of incendiaries hung in the air like fog and it seemed as if all of England were alight. Everywhere, ordinary people died, people who had nothing whatsoever to do with Hitler and war.

  Following one such night, and after only an hour’s sleep, Skye found herself readying a Magister to land at RAF Biggin Hill. She tried not to think about what Rose had whispered to her the day before: ‘One of the RAF boys decided to do some fancy low-flying past his friend’s house to show off. Broke the plane and his leg. They forgave him, of course.’

  They forgave him. What if, right now, Skye decided to do some fancy low-flying of her own? What if she decided to buzz through the arches of the Severn Bridge, a dare undertaken – but without punishment – by so many RAF pilots that a guard had been posted by the bridge to prevent such escapades. What if she stopped being so twisted up with fear that flying to Scotland in the Siberian nightmare of a winter they had just been through had been a punishment for the photograph of Skye that had turned so much attention their way? What if she put the plane into a spin and didn’t just smile but laughed for the full-body thrill of it?

  Skye clenched her hands on the stick. She would do nothing of the sort. She would fly perfectly and never smile again. Being joyless was easy when everything she could see below her – ruined houses, parts of cities obliterated, ever-expanding cemeteries – reminded her that it didn’t matter a bit what the RAF boys did. The nation needed them to get in their planes every night to stop the Germans taking England for themselves.

  Skye lined up behind a squadron of Spitfires coming back from a sortie to land, then put her plane down, taxied to a hangar and waited for an engineer to climb onto the wing and unbuckle her.

  It was Ollie, one of the men she’d come to know over the past couple of months, one who treated her like a human being rather than a hindrance. She said hello – but didn’t smile – climbed out, and was about to leave the hangar when something flashed gold on the ground at her feet.

  She bent to pick it up and what she found knocked her back into the past with all the force of a hurricane. A pocket watch made of gold with a misshapen half-moon on the face that Skye now knew was called a chronometer. It looked so much like Nicholas’s father’s watch that Skye couldn’t breathe.

  ‘Do you know whose this is?’ she asked Ollie when at last she straightened.

  ‘Nope. But if it’s his good luck charm, he’ll be hopping mad he’s lost it. You should see the stuff the pilots carry – letters from their sweethearts, their baby’s socks, the scarf their mum knitted them. That,’ he tapped the watch knowledgeably, ‘is going to have some pilot turning his squadron’s flying suits inside out.’

  Skye felt a thump to her chest at the idea of a tiny sock sitting in the pocket of a jittery pilot who wanted only that most basic of things – to live.

  ‘I’ll ask around, see if anyone’s lost it,’ Ollie said. ‘A squadron came in ahead of you so it could be one of theirs.’

  He left Skye staring at the watch. She jumped when, a moment later, a distinctly American voice called out, ‘Ollie? I dropped my watch.’

  A man rounded the nose of the plane – and there stood Nicholas Crawford.

  Six

  Skye stared, speechless.

  Nicholas did the same.

  She felt her mouth move, forming shapes that didn’t become words. There were too many things to ask: How did you get here? Why didn’t you write? And, Is it really you?

  That last question was the most troubling of all because it both was and wasn’t Nicholas. This man was tall, well built, his dark hair cropped, and his blue eyes held a kind of sensual intensity that was – she couldn’t halt the thought – awfully alluring.

  Finally her mouth escaped her constant self-regulation. ‘Nicholas?’ she said. ‘It can’t be. You’re handsome.’

  Immediately she stepped back, wishing the aeroplane might take off with her clinging to its wing. If she wasn’t allowed to smile, she was definitely not allowed to call anyone handsome.

  ‘Skye?’ Nicholas said, seeming not to have heard her reckless words. ‘What are you doing here?’

  ‘Flying planes,’ Skye said stupidly, as if that wasn’t obvious from the fact she was dressed in flight overalls.

  Nicholas took a hesitant step towards her but Skye didn’t move away from the safety of the plane. If anything, she pressed her body closer to it, not trusting herself to speak lest she say or do something else that might cause trouble.

  He studied her face, which she imagined must look as bewildered as his but also more guarded than he’d ever seen it. ‘What’s wrong?’ he asked, skipping over all the ord
inary pleasantries people might exchange after a long separation and cutting straight to the heart of the matter.

  ‘Everything,’ she said quietly, eyes fixed to the ground. When she looked up, she realised that his face was shadowed by sadness too. ‘Don’t you think?’

  Nicholas ran a hand through his hair in frustration. ‘I just heard that one hundred and three RAF pilots died last night,’ he said, his voice disbelieving, wild, trying to make sense of the incomprehensible.

  ‘One hundred and three,’ Skye repeated. ‘In one night?’

  ‘And now they’re rushing in men to replace the ones who’ve died. Most of them haven’t even finished their training courses; they have less than twenty hours in the air. Twenty hours. We’ll be lucky if there aren’t two hundred and three dead tonight.’

  The sun slipped behind a thick bank of clouds and the light vanished. Darkness descended upon the hangar, transforming it into a space like the cave of their childhood, where they had lain on their backs sharing secrets. And she felt now as she had back then: that Nicholas was the one person in the world who wanted her to speak the truth. So she did.

  ‘That’s why I’ve never spoken of the fuss that was made about the women flying despite our hundreds of hours’ flying experience,’ she said urgently. ‘It’s why I fly wherever and in whatever weather I’m told to and never complain. It’s why I’d never say that if I so much as looked sideways at the Severn Bridge, let alone flew through it, I’d be fired. It’s why I’d never point out that the men of the ATA have had accidents and the women have had none and yet we’re still only allowed to fly non-operational jets. Because none of it matters when set beside one hundred and three men dying.’

  Nicholas didn’t interject. That had never been his way. Nor did he leap to the defence of the RAF and thus dismiss everything she’d said.