Judith Krantz

by Till We Meet Again

  “Oh, Freddy, I’m so sorry. It was … beautiful to see the two of you together.”

  “You didn’t have to leave me, Mac, you didn’t have to go.”

  “He was certain he did, Freddy. He always told me that he knew he’d done the only right thing,” Castelli said. “He loved you so damn much, it tore him apart.”

  Both of them looked up as they heard the voice of one of Freddy’s instructors outside the office, his question answered by a student. A plane must have landed while they were talking. Hastily, Freddy locked the door of her office.

  “Shouldn’t you maybe go back to be with your family, Freddy?” Swede said anxiously, as her weeping grew more severe. “Remember I met your mother? It’d be good for you to be with her.”

  “Swede … how could I leave our house?” Through her primitive, annihilating heartbreak Freddy tried her best to respond to his efforts to comfort her. “Don’t you know about our house … such a sweet little house … how could I leave it? It’s all I have left of him.”

  “I understand,” he said. “But when you’re ready … promise you’ll think about it?”

  “When I’m ready? I’ll never be ready, Swede, never, never for the rest of my life,”

  “Please, Freddy, you’ve got to let me do something to help you.”

  “Would you … come to the house tomorrow night and tell me everything Mac said to you? Everything that happened to him in Canada? Will you come and tell me again … how much he loved me?”

  That night, after it was dark, Freddy returned to the hangar where the great old airplanes were kept. One by one she rolled the fragile, magnificent, beloved ships outside onto an open, grassy space on the other side of the runway. Each one of them could still be flown, each one could carry a man—or a woman—far, far into the blue horizon.

  When they were all grouped closely together, she half-pushed, half-piled the lightest of them onto the heavier ones. Then Freddy brought out a can of gasoline and poured it carefully over and around the ships. She circled the planes slowly, caressing their wings and their struts and their fuselages for the last time, giving each propeller a final spin, saying their legendary names out loud, names Mac had loved to speak. There was not a ship over which he had not spent hundreds of hours of labor to bring back its original glory.

  At last, reluctantly but resolutely, she lit a match and touched it to the edge of the nearest plane. When the blaze was at its height, when the noble ghost squadron had almost taken off to join him, she said only three words before she turned away.

  “Good flyin’, Mac.”

  16

  “DO you give your chilblains names, Jane, or do you number them?” Freddy asked her roommate, as they inched reluctantly out of chilly blankets into a far colder room early in the morning of the sixth of January, 1941. She pinched a hole in the curtains, peeked out on a black, frozen, British predawn, and shut them hastily.

  “Oh, names, pet, names … boys’ names, only the ones who proposed of course.” The Honorable Jane Longbridge yawned, managing to sound cheerful as she staggered to the washbasin. “Numbers would be too depressing. Does one really want to know how many one has?”

  “But you’ve never complained,” Freddy said, sleepily indignant. Chilblains, those painful raised inflammations, red, hot to the touch, itching and throbbing, which were caused by cold weather, took the form of something between a callus and a wart. They grew and flourished on her toes and fingers in winter, in spite of several pairs of wool socks she put on under her flying boots, or the lined gloves she wore whenever she went outside.

  “I used to at school. Complained madly, but it never did any good. Matron only cared when they got ulcerated. That was nasty, but it got me a few weeks’ excuse from games. Made it almost worth it, Hated games.” Brown-haired Jane hastily splashed her face, brushed her teeth vigorously, and looked at herself approvingly in the mirror, briefly admiring, as she unabashedly did every morning, her straight hair, straight teeth and straight nose, all of which, combined with her naughtily unastonished, big brown eyes, and her wicked, easily provoked smile, made her one of the prettiest girls, as she often complacently but correctly remarked, from John o’Groat’s to Land’s End.

  “It’s sickeningly Dickensian,” Freddy protested, as she took her turn at the basin.

  “Chilblains?”

  “Sending kids to schools where they get them. What’s the point in being a baron’s daughter? Didn’t you tell your mother?”

  “Didn’t bother. Waste of time. Mother’s keen on games. Her chilblains were probably points of pride.” Jane set her teeth and shed her heavy pajamas, one half at a time, and hastily struggled into a set of precious prewar woolen winter underwear. Freddy slept in her own woolies, as well as in the voluminous teddy-bear cloth lining of her Sidcot boiler suit, the only way she knew to attain a body temperature on the verge of comfort in the virtually unheated bedroom of the lodging she shared with Jane. It was one of the worst winters in history. For the last month, even the German air force had had to call off the Blitz. The massive night bombing that had begun after the Luftwaffe failed to knock out the RAF in the Battle of Britain the summer before, was temporarily halted by the impenetrable weather over Britain.

  Freddy had been in England for almost a year and a half, since late June of 1939, when she had wound up her life in California. With Mac’s death, there no longer existed a reason for her to keep the flying school open. When she asked herself what she intended to do, only one answer seemed possible: find a way to join the cause for which he had died. The United States was neutral, and in any case there was no place for a woman pilot in any of its forces. However, there was the British Civil Air Guard, with its four thousand new recruits who wanted to learn to fly.

  Mac had left Freddy everything he owned, in a will that Swede Castelli had in his possession. She sold their house and all the school training planes, including her lovely white Rider. Before she went off to Britain to volunteer, she said farewell to Eve and Paul, making peace, at last, with her father. Freddy had immediately been accepted as an instructor in the pilot-training program.

  Three months later, on September first, 1939, Hitler invaded Poland, and two days later, England and France, pushed over the line they had waited years too late to draw, declared war on Germany.

  On January first, 1940, a small group of highly experienced women pilots who were, like Freddy, instructors in the Civil Air Guard, had been carefully chosen to sign contracts with the Air Transport Auxiliary. The ATA was formerly an all-male civilian organization reponsible for ferrying planes throughout Britain for the RAF, flying them from the factories in which they were built, to the airfields at which they were so desperately needed.

  Now, a year later, the number of women pilots in the ATA was growing, relieving more and more men for aerial combat. The women had proved that they could fly in the same highly rigorous and hostile conditions as the men: working thirteen days in a row before they were given two days off; picking up and delivering planes in weather so risky that no fighters ventured aloft; piloting without radio or any navigational aids except a compass; dodging, twisting and turning above a countryside covered by tens of thousands of barrage balloons, whose steel cables were traps for any plane, friendly as well as enemy. Over the island that was Britain, the utterly unpredictable weather could change without warning to conditions in which a pilot found himself lost within seconds; the landscape was dotted by RAF fields, protected by ack-ack guns that shot first and asked questions later, for the country was in a war where the enemy was so close that an ATA pilot about to land was never surprised to see Messerschmitts diving over the landing strip for which he was heading.

  In winter the sun rose at nine o’clock and set around five, since England maintained the optimistically named “British Double Summertime,” or daylight savings time, all year round during the war. It was still dark outside by the time Freddy and Jane arrived at their base in Hatfield, in the battered MG in which Jan
e had once terrorized the countryside. Today was an anniversary, marking a year after the first ferry trips by women pilots, and Pauline Gower, their commanding officer, had arranged a celebration party for that night.

  Yesterday had been frightful—icy, snowy, foggy, rainy and cloudy, “the whole bloody lot,” Jane had said good humoredly, squinting at the sky—and at Hatfield all flying had been canceled shortly after noon. Both Freddy and Jane had spent the afternoon back at their rented digs, brewing tea, napping and reveling in their rare unexpected leisure. Nevertheless, from other bases a few pilots had made the decision to take off, among them Amy Johnson—now divorced from Jim Mollison—who had joined the ATA soon after Freddy. The world-famous pilot, Freddy’s heroine for so many years, had left Blackpool on the Lancashire coast, ferrying an Oxford twin-engined training plane, the same plane Freddy and Jane flew most often. Her destination was not far, Kidlington, an air force base near the Somerset coast.

  Freddy and Jane hurried from the MG into the comparative warmth of the Operations Room, where they picked up the chits that told them what planes they were supposed to fly that day, if weather conditions allowed. Clutching their chits, they made for the Mess, a wooden hut which was the source of endless coffee, tea, and chat, with a dart board, a billiard table and copies of the daily newspapers. A few pilots even brought chessboards and backgammon boards to the Mess, and there was talk of a bridge school to be established in the Flight Captain’s room, a school Jane and Freddy had pledged each other not to join. Jane’s game of choice was darts; Freddy’s was pitching cards into her cap, which she insisted required more coordination and skill than any of the others. Actually, when she was on standby, she was too keyed up to concentrate on a game of any complication.

  “Oh, oh, there’s trouble,” Jane said the minute they walked into the Mess. Pilots were grouped together, coffee abandoned, as they talked intensely, in low voices, expressions of shock on their faces.

  “What’s up?” Freddy asked Helen Jones.

  “It’s Amy Johnson. She crashed into the Thames Estuary yesterday.”

  “Oh God—no!” Freddy cried.

  “She was long overdue by late afternoon,” Helen said. “She must have been out of fuel and lost above the clouds because she was one hundred miles beyond Kidlington. It’s official now … they recovered her flying bag from the water. She bailed out above cloud cover and landed in the drink. She was almost rescued … a trawler on convoy duty saw her Oxford sink and tried to pick her up, but she disappeared under its stern.”

  Freddy turned away abruptly from the others and went to stand at a window. She looked out, seeing nothing, in a state of deep shock. Amy Johnson, who had survived sandstorms, monsoons and dozens of forced landings when she became the first woman to fly solo to Australia, the daredevil about whom millions had sung “Amy, Wonderful Amy,” crazily courageous Amy, whose endurance knew no limits when she established a light aircraft record from London to Tokyo, dashing Amy who had set a solo round-trip record from Paris to Cape Town dressed in a Schiaparelli suit and a matching coat—it was impossible that Amy Johnson, her Amy, the most experienced woman pilot in England, should be the first of them to die.

  “I know, Freddy,” Jane said, putting an arm around her.

  “When I was nine, she flew all the way to Australia in a little old Moth, and now I’m almost twenty-one and she’s dead trying to fly a steady twin-engine from Blackpool to Kidlington. She was only thirty-eight. I just can’t believe it. How could it happen?”

  “We may never know. Freddy, come on, let’s pitch cards into your hat. Winner pays for dinner,” Jane said briskly.

  “If she hadn’t been over water … if it hadn’t been so icy …”

  “No ifs, poppet. It was up to Amy to decide if it was safe to take off yesterday. She could have stayed in Blackpool. We all have the choice at every moment we’re flying. We can land whenever it looks bad and stay on the ground until it clears. You know that and she knew that. She made the decision to fly yesterday. Almost everybody else didn’t. That route is well inland—we’ve both flown it dozens of times. She went over the top, Freddy, she went above the clouds, and got lost. Otherwise she wouldn’t have been over water. We’re not supposed to go over the top … ever. It was character as much as the weather, pet.”

  “Character,” Freddy repeated thoughtfully.

  “Doesn’t every one of us fly her particular character?”

  Freddy looked around at the many women in the room, her eyes pausing at Winifred Crossley, who too had been a stunt pilot; at Rosemary Rees, who had been a ballet dancer as well as an explorer of new air routes; at Gabrielle Patterson, married and a mother, who had been a flying instructor as early as 1935; at Joan Hughes, who had started flying at fifteen and was no older than she and Jane; at Margie Fairweather, daughter of Lord Runciman, whose brother was Director General of BOAC and whose husband was also an ATA pilot. They were the most splendid and honorable company of women pilots to be found anywhere in the world, and yes, each of them had her own flying character, each approached every new takeoff with a different combination of courage and caution, of competitiveness and humdrum adherence to rules, of precision and chance-taking. Which of them would have taken off from Blackpool yesterday? Quite possibly none of them … or one … or even two. Impossible to say, impossible even to guess.

  She turned to Jane. “I’m beginning to understand why you were Head Girl at your awful school, games or no games.”

  “Are we going to pitch cards or are you going to fawn over me?”

  “Let’s play. From the looks of this so-called sunrise, we may not fly again today. Did I ever tell you about sunrise in California? We have them every single day, believe it or not, even in winter. Did you know England is on the same latitude as Labrador? Odd place to settle.”

  “One more word, and I get another roommate.”

  The ATA anniversary party that night was canceled. Freddy, Jane, and a few of the others gathered at their local pub in Hatfield, drank one drink to the memory of Amy Johnson, and quietly returned to their lodgings through the icy, dark streets of the blacked-out town.

  On the ninth and tenth of January, 1941, Freddy’s and Jane’s schedules gave each of them two days off, and for the first time since they had known each other Freddy was able to accept Jane’s standing invitation to visit her family at their manor house in Kent. Longbridge Grange was the home of Jane’s father, Lord Gerald Henry Wilmot, the fourteenth Baron Longbridge, and Jane’s mother, Lady Penelope Juliet Longbridge, born a Fortescue.

  Under their heavy navy greatcoats they wore their well-tailored, strict, masculine-looking uniforms: navy trousers and a navy blue jacket, known as a tunic, with two buttoned breast pockets and two large pockets, also buttoned, below the brass-buckled belt. Above their right breast pockets they wore a pair of gold wings four inches wide, embroidered in heavy gold bullion, and sewn onto the tunic. On their shoulders were the two gold stripes of a second officer, one broad and one thin. On Freddy’s arm was a red, white and blue insignia that identified her as an American. Under their tunics both girls wore RAF blue shirts and black men’s ties. Because of the cold they had decided to wear their slacks and their flying boots, which, strictly speaking, were never supposed to be worn anywhere but at the airdrome. Each girl had packed the navy skirt and sensible black shoes and stockings that were official dress for all times when they were not flying, and tilted her navy forage cap rakishly over her forehead.

  They managed to get a ride in a sturdy Anson, one of the indispensable, workhorse taxi planes that flew ATA pilots out to pick up planes for ferrying and, once they had completed their missions, brought them back to base. Both Freddy and Jane occasionally piloted an Anson, which was big enough so that fifteen pilots carrying their parachutes could be crowded inside. The loss of a single Anson would have been a catastrophe, so the job was reserved for the most reliable pilots.

  After a short hop they were dropped off at an airfield in Kent, whe
re Janes mother, who had been saving her gas ration for the long-planned visit, picked them up. Lady Penelope hugged her daughter and put out her hand to shake Freddy’s hand, when suddenly she changed her mind and hugged Freddy as well.

  “I’m so glad you’re here at last, my dear. Jane has written about you incessantly. I think she’s finally found a good influence,” the handsome, auburn-haired woman said, with a covertly proud look at her daughter.

  “Actually Jane’s a good influence on me” Freddy protested, laughing.

  “Nonsense. Impossible. We know our Jane. She’s unredeemable … but she can be rather sweet from time to time. Now get into the car before you freeze. We don’t want to be late to lunch.”

  She drove rapidly and expertly, pointing out the many spots where bombs had fallen on the now snow-covered fields during the worst of the Blitz. “I’m sure they weren’t actually aiming at us—we’re not dangerous, after all—but the house is almost directly under the flight path between London and the Channel ports. Such a nuisance … one of them brought down all the plaster in the drawing room … Of course, the tennis court was ruined by that incendiary bomb last autumn, and there’s still that tiresome unexploded bomb on the road to the village. I do trust that someone will remember to come around and defuse it by the time the snow melts. Too silly. However, all the fuss does manage to remind me to make sure that the house is properly blacked out every night.”

  “Who’s the warden, Mummy?” Jane asked.

  “Really, Jane! I am, of course. I couldn’t count on anyone else, could I? Your poor father can’t see in the dark, try as he will, although Small, the new gardener—seventy-five if he’s a day—is rather clever. He makes Molotov cocktails in his spare time, in case of invasion. We have a most impressive stockpile of them. I’ve told him that the invasion scare is over—it is, Jane, isn’t it?—hut he’s too deaf to pay attention.” She turned around to look at Freddy. “Jane wrote us that your parents are in London, my dear. Have they had a bad time?”