Spitfire Girls

  Look at Valerie!

  She had encouraged the overtures of a Jew, and her destiny had been fractured … What, she pondered, would Hitler do with Armenians? Had any of her relatives been taken to those camps?

  It was 3 a.m., and Angelique thought she could hear a distant thumping. She rose again, holding her abdomen as if to support her child in its own slumber, and as she approached the window again she could see flashes of light. Germany again, she pouted. They would be daft enough, and cruel enough, to bomb Britain in the small hours. It might, of course, be the Northern Lights, and some thunder to accompany the colourful show. Even with the daily rush from sunrise until last shadows, to collect and disperse aircraft for a desperate RAF, she did not have a burning sense of war.

  Where were these hordes of Nazis? What did they look like? Did their men behave any differently when in the throes of basic passions, like her Martin, out of his uniform and driven by his eager, wanting member?

  Fear seemed to be the common emotion pervading as the girls spent day after long day waiting over chess and bridge for their next ferry assignment. Angelique stood at the window, watching the occasional burst, and reflected that, like fighter pilots, they too could never know the outcome of a journey: whenever an ATA pilot was lost, the name was wiped from the large blackboard and those underneath moved up – the gap must never be allowed to remain or morale would crash like the victim it mourned. So far only men had perished but she sensed the women would soon start losing their lives.

  Moving to her small chest of drawers, Angelique drew out the Ouija board Mrs Bennell had coaxed from the Polish girl. Hana had stopped visibly fretting about her mother, though all Pool personnel knew how distraught she was inside. She must not have used the Ouija board, Angelique reflected, unfolding it upon her bare thighs. She ran her fingertips along its bewildering array of symbols and wished it would reach out and speak to her. Someone had said the boards were of no use in the hands of one person – there had to be two or more present to initiate a seance.

  What about those poor souls in Marion Harborne’s pictures?

  That roll of camera film had created a sensation – the first photograph of Nazi doctors experimenting on Jews. Had any of those Jews sought guidance from the occult? Certainly their regular God had got lost somewhere else. She stared at the board on her knees and let the flashes of light play upon its shiny surface. Every new illumination meant another death. By talking to the board, she mused excitedly, could she stop the war, right at this moment? Hana had told her that on her first night in England she had sat at a window and watched a light show and had vowed never to take shelter in an air raid. Indeed, Delia had threatened to go up on the roof of Hamble and watch the next bombing of Southampton Docks.

  Angelique had the life of a child to cherish, and the thought of putting oneself at peril for something as silly as a bombing raid now seemed perverse. Delia Seifert, like Shirley, hated life. Perhaps, Angelique muttered to herself, most women felt that way, deep down inside, even in the best houses, even in the best clothes, even at Ascot in the best hat …

  Looking down at the Ouija board she realized the light show had ceased. Angelique wanted information about Zack and Paul and would consult the supernatural anyway, even without a companion, save her unborn infant. Closing her eyes she kept her hands spread across the board and concentrated on images of Spanish countryside and of Franco, whose visage had lately been featured in so many magazines. Some of the women pilots had joked that Time magazine might make him Man of the Year, with Adolf Hitler and Neville Chamberlain reserved for other covers. She concentrated, and soon the birds, not weakened by rationing, were beginning their energetic dawn chorus.

  It was cold in her room but she had to force herself to be oblivious to the elements: Zack and Paul, Sarah and Annabel, all of whom she knew must be in Spain, would emerge in her mind’s eye very soon, and lead the way to her navigational enterprise. Tomorrow Balfour would have to agree to her mission, otherwise she would defy every rule and do something the RAF and ATA would consider unforgivable and insane.

  Natural light was beginning to creep in and Angelique felt energetic despite having allowed an entire night to pass without slumber. Her mother would have said this could be fatal for her baby, but, barely into her twenties, her strong constitution kept her mind alert and her thoughts reverberating with the prospect of a prohibited mission. Closing her eyes she mumbled to herself again and begged the images to appear …

  Zack and Paul were evading her plan: Annabel and Sarah seemed to float in and out of the darkness behind her eyelids as shades in white sheets. Her heart began to pound as minutes passed and she could not bring her brothers into the picture that was set against the blackened screen. She threw her head back and begged the spirits to enlighten her about the boys’ whereabouts. Letting her head fall forward, she kept her eyes shut and gradually an image emerged in tandem with the two girlish shades: was it Amy?

  She carried a suitcase and had Hamilton Slade in tow. They were about to enter a bright new Oxford with confidence and waving at the shades, whose hair had turned grey.

  Angelique concentrated, wincing as she kept the eyelids tightly sealed, for fear that the images would be cursed and slain should she open up and see light too soon. Her head was still bowed and her hands still spread across the smooth, hard board.

  Amy approached, smiling and looking relaxed, a state of being she had never displayed since joining ATA. She held an envelope marked TOP SECRET and Hamilton, his smile seemingly pasted to his square jaw, waved again. The grey-haired shades stood in front of the Oxford and scowled like small children not wanting their parents to leave them with a nanny.

  As Amy and Hamilton approached the aeroplane someone’s voice shouted to them to stay away, and soon Angelique was crying out. She wanted them stopped, and as she shouted the shades disintegrated like worn candlewick, their remains now a small powdery pile next to the aircraft, the Oxford’s shiny silver now turned instantly to black.

  Is it camouflage? she shouted. Is it camouflage?

  Amy and Hamilton stared back at her, their expressions glazed. Now she screamed as the black machine began to ooze a white goo that wiggled like caterpillars through cracks in the fuselage and fell upon water that sizzled as each blob hit. She cried because Amy and Hamilton were gone and the Oxford was heaving, its body contorted and swelling, swelling, about to burst. Angelique could not move, and thought she would be crushed; indeed she had begun to suffocate, her voice gone. She gasped as the Oxford grew big enough to explode and out of the bulging cockpit window she saw Amy clawing to be set free.

  Angelique’s mouth had dried and she wanted to help but her body was being pushed against a steely wall and her baby being obliterated––

  ‘You crazy mongrel slut!’

  Sally Remington was dressed all in white and Angelique jumped from the chair, her stiffened neck sending a sharp pain down her side and through her shoulder.

  ‘Why are you all in white?’ she gasped, terrified.

  ‘Don’t ask questions,’ Sally replied, pushing the chair against the wall and picking up the Ouija board from the brightly sunlit floor. ‘Mrs Bennell thought you were having hallucinations.’

  Angelique looked at her watch and was grateful her seance had put her to sleep and allowed three hours of rest. It was 7.30, and she had promised to drill Jo, Sally and Barbara before they tested at Upavon and before she set off for London.

  ‘I had a terrible dream – a nightmare.’

  ‘When I was playing champions like Alice Marble,’ said Sally, ‘I had nightmares too. Always the same one: balls flew past me because my racquet kept bending over like a soggy leaf.’

  ‘There were two girls in white,’ murmured Angelique.

  ‘We were required to wear white.’

  ‘I meant in my dream.’

  ‘Especially at Wimbledon.’

  ‘Are you hearing me, Sally?’ Angelique’s voice had returned, and she wanted to s
trike her fellow pilot.

  ‘I haven’t time to chat, Ange,’ Sally snapped, moving to the door. ‘Get dressed and be ready to go at eight.’

  ‘Have you forgotten that I am your superior in rank?’

  Sally smirked.

  ‘You’re pregnant,’ she said, and with that she was gone.

  Angelique heard loud voices. She would have no time for a bath – an aspect of wartime deprivation she had hated since the beginning of the conflict – and now she would have to go to Balfour dirty. She would have loved a day off, hugging Martin and reassuring him that the Scriptures had allowed him this sinful alliance. Nevertheless reality had to take precedence and, as Bill Howes so often said, ‘things were moving.’

  Today was crucial for so many flying folk: 1940 had been a year of month-by-month accelerations and now, after this day’s ordeals at Upavon for Barbara, Sally and Jo, seventeen of the girls would likely be eligible for advanced assignments. Jo might soon be able to track down Vera Bukova, and the Tolands would be moving Beauforts for Britain. Poles were being joined in the sky by Czechs, and soon suntanned girls from Australia and New Zealand would be distracting the pale Slavs.

  Angelique wanted them all to be happy, but her baby was growing and she had her own mission to perform. The country’s youngest female ferry pilot bit her lip as she contemplated Captain Balfour.

  52

  Amy had changed her surname back to Johnson by deed poll in 1937, and in every sense had now parted from Jim, but that did not stop him from hounding her at places like White Waltham.

  And now Valerie listened as Amy told her of Jim’s incessant visits to her home, and of the demands he would make, divorce or no divorce. Valerie’s yearning for Friedrich, which had driven her near to madness in these recent days, seemed trivial beside the problems of poor Amy, who could go nowhere without her privacy being shattered.

  ‘How did you ever work out I ‘d be here?’ Valerie asked, glancing at the hands of her carriage clock. They registered two o’clock in the morning. The women saw each other in shadows, the blackout forcing them to sit by the barest of light.

  ‘It seemed the most logical solution,’ Amy replied. ‘Wasn’t it Edgar Allen Poe who said people always overlook the obvious? I theorized that, with all the wild speculation about your mysterious disappearance, you would be in familiar surroundings. Perhaps I am a mind-reader. Angelique Florian claims she can predict the future, you know.’

  ‘She hasn’t tracked me down.’ Valerie poured preciously rationed coffee into a small, elegant gilt-rimmed cup.

  ‘The Sunday Express claims Jim and I are together again.’ Amy’s hand trembled as she tried to lift the cup. ‘Valerie, did you know he had remarried?’

  ‘Good God!’

  ‘Heaven knows who she is – thank God she isn’t a local girl, or I should become violent.’

  ‘Does that mean you’re jealous?’

  ‘No!’

  Valerie was delighted she had provoked Amy, generating the potent cure for depression that was anger.

  ‘He bores me stiff!’ Amy complained, her grip on the heirloom nearly faltering as the cup rattled back on its saucer. ‘What does make me jealous is bloody ATA, Valerie!’ She jumped up from the sofa and paced the room, her pasty skin casting a death-like glow in the odd shadows of the enforced darkness.

  ‘Dear God, Amy, what’s been happening while I’ve been away?’

  ‘It’s nothing you could change, even if you were on top of things. Jim walks in and gets seven hundred pounds a year, and the women get four hundred and fifty for the same work. Most of the men are amateurs. You know damned well there isn’t a woman pilot in this country who isn’t ten times as professional as these aging boy hobbyists.’

  ‘That’s true,’ Valerie said, gleeful at Amy’s passion.

  ‘The men even have a marriage allowance! They’re raking in the pennies while a first-class instructress, who would fail him on his first circuit, gets less than half as much.’

  ‘We can try to change things when I’m out of this mess,’ said Valerie.

  ‘It will also please you to know’, continued Amy, ‘that I’ve my own personal gunner – a man, of course – in an Anson full of eight female pilots, but the Ministry is still making a fuss about our girls ferrying unarmed Hurricanes on little trips to aerodromes for storage.’

  ‘We will need to agitate.’

  ‘Dear God, Val, you know how desperate these girls are to fly more advanced machines! Here are those men – some barely able to handle one type – allowed to ferry anything, and yet we have learned one hundred different aircraft from back to front, some of us for twenty years as instructors. But we are women, and the Ministry says we may not step inside the things.’

  ‘I think we will be transporting everything by the year’s end.’

  Amy sat again, hesitating at the thought of meeting Valerie’s earnest gaze. She could feel the Commanding Officer’s eyes boring through her blue Second Officer’s uniform.

  ‘I hate ATA, Val.’

  ‘You hate Jim.’

  ‘How can I fit into a girls’ dormitory and be a cog in a giant operation? How can I cope with catty gossip and stupid regulations?’

  Valerie leaned back and closed her eyes, her arms now crossed about her neatly tailored jacket.

  ‘Because there is war,’ she said, measuring her words minutely, ‘women are being allowed to perform a job they have never done before. They were instructors after the Great War, but never before have they been issued uniforms and treated as equals on bases and been granted commissions as Commanding Officers, for Christ’s sake.’ She was astonished that Amy could be the one to enrage her so. ‘Churchill is talking about fighting from the streets and from the hills and Christ knows from where else, so concentrate on the astonishing reality that is being a woman, flying for her country during the Battle for Britain.’

  ‘You know I love it when we have a lot of machines to be taken all over the place.’

  Valerie leaned forward, her face level with Amy’s. ‘You want to bomb and to fight. You want to be the Spitfire pilot who leaves the canteen and at the end of the day is wiped from the blackboard. You want to drop English arms of cast iron made by English housewives, and you want to drop them on Nazi housewives with Nazi arms of flabby flesh lifted heavenwards, their fists raging at your cruelty. You have no pity for their babies, nor they for yours, and you want to be part of death. It’s natural, but only for men, because we are told this is so. Content yourself with transporting machines. You’re still ferrying death and that’s good – that is very good.’

  There was a thudding many miles away and the women were staring at each other.

  ‘Time for a light show,’ Amy murmured. ‘I’m so glad to be here, and not at home.’ The illuminations danced amid the weird shadows.

  ‘What about Hamilton?’ Valerie asked.

  ‘He’s busy at White Waltham, with Jim and the rest of the men. He feels ill most of the time.’

  Valerie smiled broadly. ‘I would love to hear all about him,’ she said.

  ‘He hasn’t the energy to make love,’ Amy said, her head bowed. She heaved a deep sigh. ‘I miss my parents so much.’

  ‘What an odd image – your tired man, and you in pyjamas crying for Mummy.’

  ‘Hana Bukova misses her mother too,’ mused Amy.

  ‘She’s a child.’ Valerie felt a peculiar urge to weep. ‘Tell me all the news, Amy – please.’

  ‘Jo Howes and Sally Met are going with Barbara to test at Upavon. Jo loves Cal March. Cal loves aeroplanes and will this week be full RAF. Josef Ratusz is transporting a record number of aircraft and Noel Slater is being beastly because more girls are entering ATA. He flew into a rage when he heard Nora Flint was made CO Hamble and he’s hardly recovered yet. Shirley––’ She paused.

  ‘What about Shirley?’ Valerie’s voice squeaked uncontrollably.

  Amy stopped, looking into Valerie’s anxious face. ‘She talks of suicide.
’

  ‘When?’ Her mind seemed to be teeming and thumping, in rhythm with the bombs falling on the horizon.

  ‘Frequently – all the time,’ Amy babbled. ‘I shouldn’t have told you. It just popped out.’

  ‘She talks of death, and Churchill talks of death, and we are ferrying thousands of vessels of annihilation.’ Her voice trailed off.

  ‘There are different sorts of death, Val.’

  ‘Tell her where I am!’ she shouted, realizing that for this entire evening she had not once thought of Kranz, except when her loins had wanted a sudden burning and she had leaned against wood that had stayed cold.

  ‘If she came here, she would achieve nothing,’ said Amy. ‘She has been tormented ever since, in her eyes, you deserted her for a man.’

  ‘I did no such thing!’ Valerie cried, her stinging tone echoed by a sympathetic ringing of the crystal on the sideboard.

  ‘She loves you, Valerie.’

  ‘Like a sister.’

  ‘Like a woman.’

  ‘I have never touched her.’

  ‘Oh, dear God, but you have, Valerie – you have.’

  ‘Yes, of course – figuratively speaking,’ she murmured, ‘but now Shirley must let the flying machines touch her heart as I could never hope to do.’

  ‘I don’t think you understand how deeply you have affected that girl,’ said Amy. ‘If only Jim had ever loved me half as much as she adores you, Valerie …’

  ‘We have never slept together,’ Valerie whispered, a tear dropping on her taut thigh.

  ‘That is a pity, you know.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Somehow it would seem as gentle as my misery with Jim is not.’

  ‘Tell Shirley where I am,’ murmured Valerie.

  Amy rose, and as the clock struck three the light show played a game of patterns on the carpet, and she wondered how many houses were awake this night, contemplating the colourful enchantment of a bombing raid.

  ‘Edith Allam will be back soon,’ Valerie said, walking her to the door. ‘She has a coloured lover.’