by Mary Hoffman
“Don’t you die if you crash?” Ruby asked.
“Not always, or I wouldn’t be here, would I?” Amy said.
Ruby picked at her dress and didn’t answer. But being cross was boring.
“I hope we don’t crash today,” she said, after a while.
“So do I.”
“Might we?”
“No.”
They flew in silence for a long while. Every now and then, Amy tapped an instrument.
“Dratted thing,” she grumbled.
“What is it?” Ruby asked.
“The compass. I don’t think it works. And through this cloud, I can’t see where we are.”
“Are we going to crash?”
“No,” Amy said.
The plane dipped down, back into the clouds, and ice crazed the windshield again. As they emerged, the snow started building up, until neither of them could see out.
“Daddy’s car has wipers to wipe the snow away,” Ruby said. “Why doesn’t the plane have wipers?”
“It just doesn’t,” Amy said, her voice snappish. “Can you see anything at all down there? It’s blinding.”
The snow slid from the windshield as the plane turned slightly. Ruby peered downwards. White flakes fell beneath them, around them, in front of them. She could see nothing but falling white.
Amy tapped the compass again and sighed. “We should have got to Kidlington ages ago,” she said. “We’ll have to head east, towards London. There are landmarks to spot.”
“But I can’t go to London! London is where the bombs are,” Ruby said. “That’s why Mummy and I had to go away. Daddy doesn’t want me to be in London because of the bombs. He wants me to stay with my auntie in the countryside where it’s safe.”
“Yes, I’m sure he does. But I don’t suppose one night will hurt,” Amy said. “And it’s not as though we’ve got a lot of options just now.”
“But my daddy said. And he’s in the War Cabinet and—” Ruby stopped. “Daddies don’t always know the right thing to do, do they?”
Amy laughed.
“No, they don’t. My daddy doesn’t like me flying. Though he’s happier now I’m flying around Britain than when I was flying to Australia, or America, or Moscow. This is much safer.”
Ruby wriggled down into her seat, comforted to hear that they were safer than they would be flying to Moscow, wherever that was.
“It’s a bit cold up here,” she said at last.
Amy didn’t answer.
They flew on, through the whiteness. It was tiring to look at, so Ruby looked around the inside of the plane.
“There are lots of dials and things. How do you know what they all do?”
Amy replied to all her questions, but the answers were quite hard to understand. Eventually, Ruby stopped asking and they sat in silence until the plane had climbed above the clouds again.
“It’s like being dead,” Ruby said at last.
“What do you mean?”
“Above the clouds is where heaven is, isn’t it? I hope being dead isn’t so noisy and cold, though.”
“Yes, being above the clouds is heaven,” Amy said.
She smiled, and Ruby thought she looked much nicer when she was smiling.
The blue sky faded to grey, the darkness coming in from above, it seemed, for when Ruby looked upwards it was dark there already.
“My daddy is in the War Cabinet,” Ruby said again. “But I don’t think he really knows as much as he says. He sent me and Mummy away because of the bombs, but there are bombs in Liverpool, too.”
“There are bombs everywhere, I’m afraid. That’s the thing with wars. But he obviously cares a lot for you. It must have taken a bit of work to get you this flight,” Amy said.
The dark shapes of barrage balloons loomed out of the distance, vast, concentrated bubbles of grey in the gloom.
“We must be near London,” Amy said. “The balloons are above the clouds because they’re expecting an attack.”
“Will we be in a dogfight?” Ruby asked. “Do we have any guns?”
“No. We don’t have any guns. If we’re in a fight, we just lose.”
Ruby glanced across to see if Amy was joking.
“But can’t we fight at all?”
“We won’t need to,” Amy said. “It’s not going to happen – don’t worry so much.”
They flew on, keeping the balloons on their left.
“We’re going to dip below the clouds again,” Amy said. “I need to get a bearing from something. Do you have sharp eyes?”
“Very,” Ruby said. “Nanny says—”
“Good. You keep a look-out for the wires that tether the balloons. We don’t want to get caught up in them.”
The cloud crusted the windshield with ice again, making a jaggedy pattern just as it did inside the windows of the cold house in Liverpool.
That didn’t happen in the nice house in London where they usually lived, Ruby thought. She wished they hadn’t had to leave. But then she remembered how Daddy had said everyone has to make sacrifices in a war.
As they descended, a shaft of light stabbed into the cloud and passed away to their right.
“Drat it!” Amy snapped. “Searchlights.”
Soon, a church spire pricked through a thin mist far below and the crawling shapes of buildings broke through in patches. Then without warning the darkness was sliced into triangles by more beams of light swishing across the sky.
Ack-ack-ack-ack.
A sound like the battering of hail, but a hundred times louder, rocked the plane.
Ack-ack-ack-ack.
“What’s happening?” Ruby squealed.
Ack-ack-ack-ack.
“Are they firing at us?” Ruby asked, panic now bursting out of her so violently she started to shake. “Radio them we’re English!”
“We don’t have a radio. The plane’s only just been built – the radio hasn’t been fitted yet.”
“Why did Daddy send me in a dangerous plane?” Ruby whimpered.
“Your father just sent the order for you to be transported. He doesn’t choose the plane. And you’re lucky to get any plane. There are more important things to think about in this war than ferrying little girls around!”
“That’s not fair!” Ruby said, her voice trembling.
“Sorry,” Amy said, and patted Ruby’s knee.
Amy riffled through a rack of canisters behind her seat and fitted one into a pistol.
“Are we going to shoot them?” Ruby asked. “I thought you said we didn’t have any guns?”
“No,” Amy said. “It’s not a gun for shooting bullets. It can’t hurt anyone.”
Amy put the pistol into a chute behind the seat and pulled the trigger. Ruby heard a bang and felt a rush of cold air. Then something streamed across the sky with a whooshing sound and yellow smoke drifted away beneath them.
“What’s that smoke?” Ruby screamed. “Have we been hit?”
“No. It’s a flare. They’re a bit like fireworks – they pour coloured smoke into the air. We use a different coloured smoke on different days. They show we’re friendly – it’s a kind of secret code.”
Amy sent off a second flare, trailing crimson smoke that bled into the falling snow.
“We’re friends?” Ruby calmed a little, glowing at the thought of counting a famous aviator as her friend.
“No, I mean we’re a friendly plane – British, not German.” Amy looked at her. Then she added, “But we can be friends, too.”
Ack-ack-ack-ack.
Amy wrenched the wheel to the right as the beam of a searchlight slashed across their plane, stalled, returned and locked on to them. She reached behind the seat again and a second pair of flares streamed beneath them.
Ack-ack-ack-ack.
“Blast them! We’re not an enemy plane!” Amy said. “They can see that from today’s colours!”
She swung the plane into the searchlight beam. “We can’t dodge them. Look, Ruby, we’ve got to do somethin
g brave. Are you brave?”
Ruby nodded, but she didn’t feel very brave. Then she remembered and said, “Yes,” rather quietly.
“Good girl.” Amy patted Ruby’s knee again. “Let’s show ourselves to the chaps manning the anti-aircraft guns. Show them we have no black crosses, no guns – we’re not a German bomber.”
“Not enemies,” Ruby added.
“No, not enemies at all. Just Amy Johnson, aviator heroine, coming home. With her friend Ruby!”
Now all the lights locked on to them. The beams shone up around the cockpit, picking out the swirling snowflakes in their unearthly dance in the currents around the plane. Amy’s face glowed in the light.
But the next bullets came straight through the cockpit.
Ruby clung to Amy’s neck, too terrified to wail or even speak.
Ack-ack-ack-ack. Ack-ack-ack-ack.
Then the fire started. Flames leaped up at the tip of a wing and began to nibble their way along the fabric.
“We have to bail!” Amy shouted through Ruby’s stranglehold. “Come on, let go of me. You have to be brave, remember.”
She uncurled Ruby’s fingers from the collar of her flying jacket and moved the girl gently back into her seat. Ruby froze, letting Amy do it.
“Are you hurt?” Amy shouted above the roar of engines and rushing wind.
Ruby turned big, scared eyes towards her and shook her head.
“Good. You’ll have to jump.”
Ack-ack-ack-ack.
“But I don’t have a parachute!” Ruby cried.
“I do. I’ll hold you. Come on.” But all the certainty had gone from Amy’s voice.
She pulled on Ruby’s arm, and motioned to her to climb out of her seat. They clambered into the back of the plane, where Ruby had crouched earlier, before they took off.
Ruby watched Amy struggle with her parachute pack, tightening and testing straps, her fingers trembling. Their plane dropped lower, spluttering and tipping towards its hurt wing. As a search beam swung below them, it flashed over rippled darkness and the end of a ship.
“Look! Water!” Ruby shouted, peering downwards.
“Damn it!” Amy shouted. “Where on earth are we?”
“But water is good,” Ruby said. “It can’t hurt if we dive right.”
Amy said nothing. When Ruby looked across, she saw Amy was shaking.
“I – I don’t like parachutes,” Amy said, with a nervous laugh. “Always dreaded having to bail out. I just don’t like heights. How silly is that for a pilot?”
Ruby put her hand on the sleeve of Amy’s thick leather jacket. “How does it open?” she asked.
Amy, her hand trembling, guided Ruby’s fingers to the ripcord. “We have to pull this. Then it opens.”
“Nanny says it’s always best to get bad things over and done with quickly,” Ruby said. “How do we get out?”
Amy pointed at the door they’d come in through, but didn’t make a move to open it.
Ack-ack-ack-ack.
The plane tilted hard to the left and they both stumbled.
Flames crawled from the tail, too, now. Their orange light flickered over diagrams stencilled on the door. Ruby traced them with a finger, followed the instructions and let a blast of freezing wind rip into the plane.
Instantly, Amy clutched her from behind, gripping her so tightly round the waist the breath was squeezed out of her.
“Hold on!” Amy yelled. “The wind can whisk you away!”
Ruby could feel Amy’s body shaking, even through her thick leather aviator coat.
“Can you swim? I can swim really well,” Ruby yelled back. She twisted round to look at Amy, but the woman didn’t answer. “It’ll be just like a dive at the swimming pool,” Ruby went on, turning back to face the tugging wind. “Only, a little further. Shall I count to three? And then we jump? Don’t look down. One…”
Ack-ack-ack-ack.
“Two…”
Ack-ack-ack-ack.
The engine noise died and a sheet of flame spread along the wing towards the door.
“They’ve hit the fuel line!” Amy shouted.
“Thank you, Miss Johnson, for a lovely flight,” Ruby shouted. “Three!”
Ruby leaned forward with all her own weight, imagining she was on the diving board at the lido. It only takes a second, she thought, and then it will be all right.
Then Amy jumped – or Ruby pulled her; Ruby couldn’t tell. They fell together into a wall of freezing wind. Ruby’s fingers found the cord and pulled. She watched the parachute unfurl, snaking into a long, floppy line above them, then exploding into its canopy, jolting them almost to a standstill. The cold was extreme, like needles driven into her body all over.
Ruby clung to Amy’s arms, crossed over her chest, and counted as they swung down through the snow. Four, five, six…
Lumps of burning plane hurtled past in a blur of orange light, streaming flames.
Seven, eight…
The pieces splashed into the water, hissed and vanished.
Nine…
Silence. Its suddenness made Ruby’s ears ring.
Ten, eleven.
And a light flashed across them.
Ack-ack-ack-ack.
Their impact with the water tore Ruby from Amy’s arms. The girl plunged deep into the icy Thames.
When Amy surfaced, gulping in air and water, every part of her hurt.
“Please, somebody help!” she called into the darkness, and at last, a light shone in her face.
Ruby’s body floated beside her, tendrils of crimson weaving into the river water, the little girl’s mouth open in a small, silent ‘oh’ of surprise.
Behind Amy, the last glimmer of sunset faded over the estuary, and crimson and ruby leaked into black.
Why I Chose Amy Johnson
Suspended from the ceiling of the Science Museum in London is a tiny, dull green De Havilland Gypsy Moth biplane with the name Jason stencilled near the cockpit. In 1930, in this fragile-looking machine, little bigger than a car, Amy Johnson became the first woman to make a solo flight from England to Australia. The trip of 10,000 miles took twenty days, with frequent stops to refuel – the plane could fly for only thirteen hours at a time. The bravery (or stupidity) embodied in such a journey, taken in such a plane, is awe-inspiring.
Amy was a hard-nosed, tough woman – she had to be in order to be taken seriously as a female pilot in the early days of flying, a world dominated by men. She was brave, resilient, confident and passionate about flying. She did not have any children of her own, and would have found dealing at close quarters with a child like Ruby quite a challenge!
ANNE ROONEY
Amy Johnson Facts
Amy Johnson was born in Hull, in the north of England, in 1903. She went to university (in Sheffield), which was unusual for a woman at that time, and later became the first qualified female ground engineer for planes. She first flew in 1928 and she became the first woman to fly solo from Britain to Australia two years later when she was just twenty-six years old. She went on to make other historic flights, including non-stop from London to Moscow and from England to South Africa.
In the Second World War, Amy joined the Air Transport Auxiliary (ATA) and worked delivering new and repaired planes around Britain. It was on one of these flights that the Airspeed Oxford plane she was flying crashed into the Thames estuary near Iwade on 5th January 1941. She had gone off course on a flight from Blackpool, near Liverpool, to Kidlington, near Oxford. Details of Amy’s final flight and its purpose are in classified war documents which are still secret. Amy was alive on impact but died in the Thames; her body was not recovered. Captain Fletcher of the HMS Haslemere, which was in the Thames at the time, died trying to rescue Amy. People at the scene insisted that there were two bodies from the plane in the water, but the second person was never recovered or identified.
In 1999, Tom Mitchell claimed to have been one of the men who shot Amy Johnson down, believing her plane to be an enemy craft
when she gave the wrong colour signal. He said they had been told never to reveal their role in her death. The account is disputed.
Please Can I
Have a Life?
A story about the Greenham Common Women
(1981–2000)
BY LESLIE WILSON
1986
I’VE DONE IT. I’M HERE.
I’m standing in a crowd of Peace Women, waiting for a convoy of nuclear missiles to arrive back at their base. Only maybe I won’t see anything, because there’s a line of police in front of me, facing me. Their faces are blank, like machines.
It’s two in the morning and it’s bitter cold. I keep stamping my feet to try and get the feeling back into them.
I can hear the convoy engines roaring now and the women around me start shouting.
“BLOOD ON YOUR HANDS!”
The cruise missiles have been out on exercise at Salisbury Plain; now they’re coming back to the base, and suddenly I’m so scared of seeing them. Because then I’ll have to believe it’s true.
Every missile in that convoy that’s coming is ten times as powerful as the bomb that flattened the whole city of Hiroshima. There are four missiles in every launcher, and I know there are four launchers, so that’s a hundred and sixty times worse than Hiroshima. Margaret Thatcher and the American President want to use them to fight a nuclear war in Europe. They’ll hide in bombproof bunkers when the Russians bomb us back, but the rest of us have been handed a leaflet that tells us to build a hide-out under the stairs with a couple of mattresses for protection.
I’m shivering, not just with the cold.
I stand on tiptoe and now I can see between a couple of police helmets. There it is, the first missile launcher; it’s big and ugly with huge, pulverising tyres – and someone’s thrown paint on it.
It’s really true! A silly childish bit of me kept hoping there weren’t any nuclear weapons, not really. But that thing is all my worst nightmares… I couldn’t possibly look at it and pretend.
“BLOOD ON YOUR HANDS!” I scream, so loud it makes my throat sore, and, “YOU’RE CRAZY! WICKED!”
I’m crying and I don’t care.
A woman tries to break through the police line, but they push her off and give her a couple of kicks. She’s staggering, she’s hurt.