Spitfire Girls (22 page)

Friedrich had already shut the door and was starting the motor when Howes turned around.

‘Hey, I don't even know your name!' Bill toyed with his tools. ‘Shit.'

Watching as Kranz taxied, Cal March was envious of the man who could take to the skies at night. Had he ever been beaten by his father? he wondered.

Airborne, Friedrich made a sharp turn due east. The weather was dismal and the light virtually non-existent. He fumbled with the controls and cursed the plane. Pulling out his map he had a moment of panic, and his seasickness turned to terror. The engine was juddering and the aircraft faltered. What had Howes not finished doing? He shook and the machine made almighty convulsions but underneath he could see nothing. His persona had long gone and he prayed to his gods that the nothing beneath was not humanity practising its first blackout …

Through the steamy windscreen of her motorcar the chaos of Piccadilly Circus was upon Valerie Cobb and she drove up a side street. Parking, she pulled herself out of the wet seat and into a warm cinema. It had been two days since Beaverbrook, and she had not slept. Entering the small theatre, she settled into a chair and noticed she was the only female in the audience. Her thoughts turned to Friedrich, as they had for two consecutive sleepless nights, and she ignored the old man gaping at her from the end of her row.

A newsreel flickered on the fraying screen.

In blaring tones it announced the formation of the new Air Transport Auxiliary and the appointment of Beaverbrook as head of ‘ATA', vociferously backed by Winston Churchill. Valerie sat forward and contemplated whether this film had been put together before her meeting with his Lordship. Animatedly, the voice on the soundtrack blared on:

Ten young ladies will be allowed to fly for their country …

Valerie sat back, and as the main feature unfolded sleep came to her at last. She dreamed of ten young ladies, all in trousers, and of their passions, and of smoke funneling up from factories that once had belonged to Kranz and which now were frying human flesh in the land of Raine Fischtal and Richard Wagner …

*

Valerie had made her new cottage into a warm home in a very short time. She had felt war might bring changes unprecedented since the Norman Conquest, and she wanted to own a small space before it was taken away.

On this evening in late October a large gathering of men and women filled her study. There was no food or drink. She would have volumes to say, and primitive urges would have to be suppressed. Hunger and thirst would creep in, she theorized, but her group would have to get used to self-denial now that the Wagnerians were dominating the world's thoughts.

‘We have had to assemble here,' she said, ‘because ATA has yet to be allocated a base of its own.'

Listening on the floor, between a uniformed Alec and Hamilton, was Delia Seifert, her boyish good looks crowning a tall, athletic body in a boiler suit. Her father had been a brigadier and her mother a dogged slave to his demands, which now constituted regular trips to stock his liquor cabinet. His vicious dependency had by now so depleted her household that generations-worth of money and valuables had disappeared. Other daughters might have brought in a rich young husband to combat the degradation, but Delia had chosen a job. Now, working alongside Shirley Bryce she had learned everything about aircraft types and had passed her A, B and C pilot's licences. As she heard Valerie Cobb delineating ATA responsibilities she contemplated a future in which her father could be sent away somewhere and her mother supported by a pilot's wages.

‘Nora here has achieved much by earning lesson money at Smithfield Market,' Valerie went on. ‘Angelique has been contemplating leaving RADA to fly for us on a regular
basis, and Stella has given up her beloved ballet to be amongst our first ten aces.'

Delia's smile had not faded as she thought of these girls with charmed lives who had not been stung by a parent's creeping madness.

‘Delia Seifert has risen to the top of pilot ranks through the Civil Air Guard's government subsidies.' Valerie meant well by revealing her financial dependency but Delia's smile vanished nonetheless, and she wished she could disappear.

‘Didn't Beaverbrook say he'd go to the Seifert-faces if he had to?' punned Alec, grinning at Delia. She knew he was being his usual boisterous self but still she hated his loudness.

‘Amy Johnson and Jim Mollison we all know,' Valerie continued.

‘Famous and infamous all rolled into one bed,' Alec interjected, reaching over to light Valerie's cigarette. ‘This woman – Miss Cobb – is larger than life, I want you all to know, and she will go down as a legend, mark my words. There is no person in this Kingdom more capable of convincing Lords with colic and Ministers with gout that females should be allowed on to RAF bases.'

Valerie bowed her head. It was her moment of triumph. Bill Howes, curled up in a corner with Jo, clapped enthusiastically, Angelique and Amy adding to the applause. Valerie looked up, her face a deep red. She would have to continue, or the events of the past year might swamp her in a split second and her voice would be sabotaged by thoughts of Friedrich. She cleared her throat and focused again on her notebook:

‘Most pressing, everyone, is my need to brief you on the main points of the net ATA charter. His Majesty's Treasury insists on a percentage of the basic salaries paid to women for the same job as men.'

‘Oh, Christ,' muttered Delia.

‘We mustn't grouse,' Valerie continued, casting a quick glance at the brigadier's daughter. ‘Everyone will come in as Second Officers. Women will receive £230 a year – with, I'm afraid, no billeting allowance.'

‘Why ever not?' complained Delia.

Alec seized her hand and kissed it with a great cheery slurp. ‘Because they'd all rush to billet with me, and the RAF cannot support unwanted offspring!' he gloated.

‘Alec, pack it in,' snapped Jim, lighting a cigarette and blowing smoke in the Scotsman's face.

Through it all, Valerie remained unperturbed. ‘RAF men will get a billetting allowance,' she resumed, ‘but we must make our own arrangements for lodgings. The first women's ferry pool is expected to be based at Hatfield, with a mixed pool at White Waltham – each of us will be expected to fly every type of aircraft – if you do not know the procedure, you had better be a quick learner.'

‘What does that mean?' asked Marion.

‘Pilots in the regular RAF need only know one type of aircraft,' she replied. ‘We will need to know how to fly a new monster straight off the assembly line. There could be one hundred permutations of war machine, and you the first pilot to read any given manual. By the time you have taxied, those notes will be engraved on your memory.' Valerie looked at the rapt faces and realized some, like Bill, had seen atrocities before she was born, and others,
like Angelique, had watched brothers go off to do courageous things in places like Spain while on the home front men chased foxes for pleasure.

‘Churchill is playing Hamlet,' she continued, ‘and no-one seems to have awakened to the fact that Germany could swamp the British mainland. But we must think in those terms. This is war, and even if some are calling it a phoney war, we've got to be prepared – even if others are not. There will be no maps, hence my emphasis on memory. You will have to exercise a capability to retain flight data at short notice, in all conditions. Drinking is discouraged at all times and forbidden when ferrying.' Valerie felt at once the squadron leader, the school -mistress and the mother. ‘Hamilton will speak now,' she announced, sitting down and lighting another cigarette. Shirley leaned over and patted her hand. She withdrew it, feeling ten pairs of eyes watching a moment of intimacy the partners had shared countless times in the privacy of their hut. It meant nothing, but to others it spoke volumes.

Hamilton had risen from his chair.

‘Each morning', he began, ‘you will collect your chit and the Operations Officer will allocate you a plane to ferry. Flying boats, bombers … could be anything. God knows what the Ministry will have in store for us – rumour has it the Germans are manufacturing suicide bombers and killer rockets. Their pilots are testing them off the factory floor. Anke Reitsch, our old friend from happy club days, is starring in the top job. Meanwhile, over here, factory production is well under par. You'll need every ounce of energy to ferry machines off the assembly line to Location
A and then over to C to ferry another plane to D, and so on. A month's work for a junior ferry pilot could involve flying several dozen aircraft to and from places like White Waltham, Hamble and Worthy Down. Some weeks you'll be sleeping in eight different spots.'

His audience was rapt and even Alec remained solemn.

Hamilton looked first at Amy and then at Valerie, who knew all breath was held over the main question. Tense faces awaited her words and she rose again.

‘I have called you together here in one place knowing that some will be chosen for the first ten, and some will not. There were hundreds of names submitted, and do not turn instant bitch if yours is not one of those selected. Not all have been able to attend here tonight but amongst those present Stella Teague, Marion Wickham and Delia Seifert will be on my list of premiere aces to be tested.'

Inevitably eyes moved to Amy, who smiled and applauded. Was she pleased for the others, or relieved that she had been excluded from the next piece of history? Jim rose, dropped his cigarette on to Valerie's Persian rug and stomped the fag-end into the ancient weave.

‘Too bad, isn't it?' he snarled. ‘I'm off to the local.'

Valerie's gaze was drawn to the large dark blemish on the Oriental pattern, but her mind remained on the present-day passion of her ladies. ‘Each pilot will carry a book called Pilot's Notes,' she continued. ‘Eventually, Class II pilots, boys and girls, will be transporting single-engined fighters – they will, in other words, be Spitworthy. Class IIIs may go on to twin-engined. Some of us may even go on to four-engined craft …'

Valerie's lecture continued for some time, as on this pin-
sharp night the stars and moon over her neighbouring East Anglia shone down on the lonely sight of smouldering aeroplane wreckage …

Kay Pelham had heard about Amy Johnson when the avia-trix had landed in Australia and been feted as a heroine. Life along the Great Barrier Reef meant long days and sunshine, and everything that mattered – movies, fads, wars – came from Europe or Hollywood, even if some of those wars were manufactured on a studio sound stage.

Ever since Amy's achievement Kay had become obsessed with flying and had spent every spare moment away from her acting jobs inside an obsolete Airspeed Courier. Now that news of Edith Allam's mission to recruit lady pilots for the British Civil Air Guard had reached North Queensland, Kay was determined to make her way into the American's team, even if it meant abandoning a career in the theatre. She could always go back to it, and after all, she told herself, if she settled in England she could end up in a national repertory company.

Kay's sharp good looks and thick red hair were coupled with a tall, sturdy frame: her youth had been spent barefoot on the Reef, swimming and breathing the good air of a country not yet cursed with the waste products of industrial achievement. Somewhere in her background, Kay knew there had been an unconventional incursion and though she had been sent to a Baptist girls' boarding school she had been told by her mother that she was not descended from a convict, and that ‘Pelham' had evolved from a ghetto in Lithuania.

In recent days Kay had been reading reports of terrible
atrocities in Germany. Her father, a civil engineer, had seen a film at work about the European troubles, its footage so chilling that he could hardly believe a woman, Raine Fischtal, had had the stomach to shoot the hideous frames. All of this gave Kay a secret glee: it meant there was a real war brewing after all, and that Edith Allam's visit was serious business. In the Townsville Central Library Kay had managed to get her hands on every available periodical on aviation, and had devoured stories of Anke Reitsch and of Valerie Cobb. She had laughed at the most recent issue of an aviation magazine and while the librarian wasn't looking she had torn away a prize editorial suggesting that British tax-payers were subsidizing well paid American lady pilots.

‘Look at this! Maybe the Poms'll pay us even more,' shouted Kay, causing every face in the library to turn and ogle the throaty redhead. She read on.

‘The arrival of Americans is a propaganda exercise perpetrated by the present Minister of Aircraft Production, well known for his outlandish capers. We hold no brief against American aviators. But to despatch them across the Atlantic and then have to send them back, some because they could not even handle a trainer, is a waste of time, money and tempers and does not help relations with our American cousins.'

‘Lousy arrogance,' snorted Kay.

Armed with the cutting she ran all the way to her mother's office at the primary school – to beg for the fare to Sydney. Edith Allam would be arriving in twenty-four hours and she simply had to be there to be tested for ATA.

Summer was just beginning, the heat not yet unbearable.
Kay knew her mother would be in a good mood with Christmas approaching, and she mounted the steps of the new school building with powerful strides. The lunchtime bell had sounded, and as the children poured out into the glorious sunlight, Kay wished fleetingly that she had been allowed such freedom instead of the rigours of a damp Baptist boarding establishment, its cold walls making girls feel unnatural. Phyllis Pelham was emerging from the teachers' smoking room and when they walked down the corridor together the athletic daughter towered over the articulate, learned woman whom the pupils revered, year after year.

‘Mum, I can't even stop to have lunch with you. I've got to go to Brisbane for a job interview.'