Authors: Ellie Dean
‘And ’tis punished we are to have to listen to that dog,’ murmured Fran. ‘Come on, Suzy, let’s get to the hospital.’
‘But it’s still early,’ protested Suzy, ‘and I really don’t want to face Matron with my hair in such a mess.’
‘Facing Matron is the lesser of two evils if you’re asking me,’ said Fran as she swept the cloak over her striped dress and starched apron. ‘If I have to listen to that racket for one more minute, I’ll be going demented.’
‘Hang about, I’m coming with you,’ said Rita as she gave Peggy and Cordelia a quick peck on the cheek and clumped after them in her heavy boots.
Peggy glared at Ron, who was now contentedly lighting his smelly pipe and leaning back in his chair like a lord, and wondered how he had the nerve to lounge about when there were so many things to see to today.
‘Oh, dear,’ sighed Cordelia, seemingly oblivious to the noise and the atmosphere as she read her morning copy of the
Telegraph
. ‘Rommel and his army have reached El Alamein. I suppose now there will be another long drawn-out, horrible battle to take it back. Thank goodness Jim and Frank are still safe in England.’
Peggy smiled fondly at the elderly woman and hoped with all her heart that her husband and brother-in-law stayed where they were for the duration. The thought of either of them having to fight again after what they’d gone through in the first war was unbearable.
It was like a physical pain squeezing her heart as she thought of her scattered family. Jim hadn’t been home since he was called up, and the boys were growing up without her down on that farm in Somerset. Bob was already fifteen – on the cusp of manhood – and in less than three years would be considered old enough to fight.
Please God this war doesn’t last that long
, she prayed silently as the sorrows and frustrations of life seemed to multiply and lie heavy in her heart. She heard the howling dog and held the screaming, squirming baby and longed desperately for peace and order, and the certainties of the time before this awful war had started. They’d never been rich, but they’d been happy, and there was always food on the table and the freedom to go dancing on the pier where the coloured lights blazed through the night.
Unable to bear her thoughts any more, Peggy pushed away from the table and carried Daisy out into the hall. Having buckled her wriggling little body into the pram, she ignored her screams and went to fetch clean nappies and a bottle from the kitchen. There was no sign of Ron and no sound from Harvey, which could only mean that Harvey was on a tight leash and being taken for a walk.
Taking off her wrap-round apron, Peggy folded it into the string shopping bag alongside her purse, the nappies and bottle, and the list of things she needed to buy. With a headscarf over her dark hair and a thick cardigan to keep off the chill of this early June morning, she bent to kiss Cordelia goodbye.
‘I’m going for a walk,’ she said clearly so she was understood. ‘Then I’m due at the Town Hall. I’ll be back at lunchtime.’
‘Are you all right, dear?’ Cordelia asked with a concerned frown.
‘I’m fine,’ she lied. ‘I just need some fresh air before I’m stuck in that crowded hall for three hours.’
‘You do too much,’ grumbled Cordelia. ‘The doctor said you should be resting.’
Peggy just nodded. There would be time enough to rest when she was in her box and six feet under. She had far too much to do to be sitting about with her feet up. ‘Just promise me you’ll use the commode in my bedroom and not go up and down the stairs when you’re alone in the house,’ she said firmly.
‘Yes, dear, of course.’
Peggy knew that look of wide-eyed innocence and didn’t believe her for one minute – but then Cordelia hated using that commode, and if Ron had fixed . . .
Impatient with her thoughts, Peggy went back into the hall, opened the front door and bumped the pram down the steps. She was almost two hours early for her stint at the WVS centre in the Town Hall but she had to escape for a while, for the inner peace and fortitude she’d once possessed had deserted her, and she needed to find it again.
It was a lovely bright morning despite the chill breeze coming off the sea. The gulls and terns were making their usual racket on the rooftops, but it was a sound Peggy had lived with all her life and she found it strangely soothing in its familiarity as she headed purposefully for the promenade.
Daisy’s screams slowly faded as the movement of the pram rocked her to sleep, and Peggy breathed in the salt air and felt refreshed. She would take a long walk along the prom, she decided, and perhaps treat herself to a cup of tea in the café if it was open. By then she would be more able to face whatever dramas awaited her in the Town Hall.
The morning had progressed smoothly, and after a rather bland lunch of corned beef and mashed potato in the canteen at Blackpool, Kitty had avoided the ever-present journalists with their intrusive cameras and picked up the Airspeed Oxford – or Ox Box, as it was affectionately known. She took off in bright sunshine for Kidlington, which lay five miles north of Oxford. There was a report of low cloud further south, but this was thought to be temporary and therefore shouldn’t pose a problem.
The Ox Box was a lumbering, slow plane compared to the smaller fighters she’d already delivered today, but as she sat at the controls and followed the flight path she’d plotted on her map, she knew that this plane was the work-horse of the RAF fleet, and therefore hugely important. It served as a trainer for air gunners, pilots, navigators and cameramen, and was frequently used as an air taxi or put into service as an air ambulance.
Kitty always felt small and rather alone in this particular plane, for there was an empty co-pilot’s seat beside her and another for a navigator behind her. When used for transporting personnel, there was room for six passengers as well. She kept an eye on her instruments and the railway lines beneath her as the twin engines rumbled reassuringly and the skies remained clear.
At this rate
, she thought,
I’ll be back in Hamble with plenty of time to spare to have a bath before Charlotte and I go for that drink – and if I’m very lucky, I might even be able speak to Freddy on the telephone to congratulate him too
. With these pleasant thoughts, Kitty continued the flight towards Kidlington.
She had been flying for over an hour when, without warning, she was faced with a great curtain of rain. She adjusted her speed and took the Ox Box down to just a few hundred feet above the ground, where the visibility was only slightly better. She now had two choices. To turn back and land at the nearest airfield, or to carry on and hope this downpour was just a passing quirk of the weather. It was certainly much further north than had been forecast, so she decided to risk it and keep going.
But the rain slowly became heavier and Kitty found herself engulfed in a thick blanket of cloud, which blotted out the land beneath her with alarming swiftness and forced her to fly blind.
She rammed open the throttles, pulled the control column back and went into a steep climb. Trying to keep the angle of the climb constant and watching her instruments keenly, she saw the altimeter needle pass the two thousand-feet mark and then the three.
It was just touching four thousand feet when the clouds splintered into bright sunlight, and she was able to level off. Looking beneath her she could see only the cotton wool clouds stretching to every horizon, and the shadow of the Airspeed Oxford as the sun lit it from above.
Kitty felt suddenly horribly vulnerable, for she’d never been in this situation before and had now broken the ATA’s strictest rule of all by ‘going over the top’. She just had to pray that she’d find a hole in the cloud to get back down again. But as she checked her instruments she felt a sharp surge of dread. The fuel gauges were showing that both tanks were suddenly, and inexplicably, half empty. They must have sprung a leak somehow during that sharp climb, and now she had no choice but to go down through the cloud and hope she didn’t crash into something.
Experience of flying on instruments alone told her she was still an hour away from Kidlington, but having flown there before, she knew there was high ground to cross, as well as the sprawl of numerous towns and villages, which she had to avoid at all costs if civilian lives were to be spared.
She licked her lips and tried not to grip the control column too tightly as she desperately searched for a hole, no matter how small, in the cloud. The fuel gauge needles were dropping at a terrifying rate and soon she’d be running on fumes. But there was no hole in the cloud and she was all out of options. She had to land.
Her pulse was racing and the sweat was stinging her eyes behind the goggles as she throttled back and eased the nose down. The clouds clung to the Oxford as it slowly descended and the altimeter ticked off the altitude like a demonic clock. Three thousand feet. Two thousand feet. Fifteen hundred – one thousand – six hundred.
Every cell in her body was screaming at her to stop this madness and go back up. But the fuel gauges were hovering dangerously close to empty now, so she gathered all her courage and tentatively eased the Oxford even lower through the cloud. If she’d calculated correctly, then she should be clear of the hills and high ground and approaching the Vale of Evesham and the River Stour. But if she hadn’t then she could be dead within the next few seconds.
There were now less than ten minutes of fuel left and Kitty was sweating beneath her goggles and leather flying helmet. The cloud was as thick as ever and she was flying less than four hundred feet above ground. A church steeple on a hill would be enough to send her crashing into oblivion.
And then the cloud suddenly broke, revealing the great hills and valleys of the Cotswolds right in front of her. She yanked back on the control column and opened the throttle as she went into a steep climb to avoid them.
The engines screamed and the Oxford began to judder as she was once more engulfed in cloud. It was clear the plane didn’t like this heavy handling, so when she reached a thousand feet she levelled out again and slowly turned the Oxford further east.
Unable to see anything in the white-out that surrounded her, she checked her instruments and did some rapid calculations. She now had less than five minutes of fuel left. She had to land immediately – regardless of the dangers.
She took a deep, shuddering breath, blinked away the stinging sweat from her eyes, and forced herself to stay calm as she slowly eased the joystick down again so the Oxford’s nose tipped towards earth.
Breaking through the cloud she gave a sob of relief. The Cotswold Hills were no longer in sight and there was an airfield in the distance. It wasn’t Kidlington, but she didn’t care – any runway was welcome. But another glance at the fuel gauges and the deep tremor of the stuttering engines told her she wouldn’t make that runway. The tanks had run dry and she was flying too low to bail out.
Kitty saw the fallow field, and from three hundred feet up, it appeared to be clean of any anti-aircraft traps. She had to risk it.
The Oxford gave another shudder as she unbuckled herself and opened the canopy above her head to provide a quick escape route. Then, with a muttered prayer, she eased the juddering plane into a shallow turn and reached for the hand-crank to lower the landing gear.
She was a hundred feet above ground, the field dead ahead of her, when the engines died and the propeller stopped turning. The plane lurched, dipped its nose and gave her a bird’s eye-view of the deadly anti-aircraft stakes and coils of barbed wire lying in wait beneath her. Landing gear could catch on the traps and flip her over, so she swiftly cranked it back up and battled to keep the plane level as it glided with ominous determination towards the field.
Her mind was racing with swift calculations as they hurtled towards the ground. If she could stay up long enough to clear this field and hop over that nearby hedge, she just might have a chance. The field there had been ploughed and was clear of traps. She hauled on the control column, using every ounce of strength to try and keep the great, wallowing plane afloat.
But gravity won and the heavy Oxford belly-flopped into the field with a bone-jarring thud and ploughed a deep furrow in the mud before it crashed into the stakes and barbed wire.
Kitty had been thrown clear but was already unconscious by the time it flipped over and broke its back across the remains of an old flint wall that lay hidden by the hedge.
PEGGY HAD MANAGED
to get most of the things on her shopping list, including a large helping of minced meat, before she had to begin at the Town Hall. The walk had cleared her head and made her feel very much better, and she’d happily spent the morning helping people to sift through the piles of donated clothing to find a new coat, dress, nightwear or shoes to replace what had been lost in the latest air raid. With so many families made homeless, it was vital to make sure they were provided with the essentials.
The Town Hall in Cliffehaven’s High Street was a hive of industry, for it had become the centre for the WVS and the Women’s Institute, and their volunteers worked hard to collect and sort through the very generous donations of clothes, kitchen equipment, toys, books and bedding.
Nothing was wasted, for old sweaters were unpicked, the wool wound into crinkly balls to be used again, and dresses, skirts and shirts that were too worn to pass on were cut up for cleaning rags, or scraps to be sewn into quilts. A retired cobbler did his best to repair some of the battered shoes, and the owner of the toy shop that had been fire-bombed came in regularly to collect broken toys so he could mend them in the workshop he’d set up in his allotment shed.
And then there was the busy little café to run, the comfort boxes to be filled with treats and warm socks for the troops fighting abroad – and the sandwiches and tea to be made to take to the station to feed the men on their way to their various postings. An almoner gave practical advice to those seeking help with their children, accommodation or work, and at night the mattresses were laid out on the floor of the main hall to provide the homeless with somewhere temporary to sleep while they waited to be rehoused.