Spitfire Girls (5 page)

‘You see the nation's females fading into the factories?' D'Erlanger was furious, having regained his powers of concentration.

‘They won't fade, there will be enormous publicity – propaganda campaigns,' Shelmerdine replied.

Now Balfour was enraged:

‘So we're marching them into a corner, are we not? The WAAF doesn't want a flying section. So – no place for Miss Cobb's contingent, and you die happy seeing them on a factory poster.'

‘Nonsense, Harold – these flying girls are adaptable.'

‘Like dogs?' snapped Valerie.

‘It was meant as a compliment.' Shelmerdine and Valerie stared at each other for a moment.

D'Erlanger spoke:

‘An endless supply of pilots does not exist, and I can confirm that the halls of British Airways are nearly empty. War dreams have begun to dawn on my men and they are disappearing in droves.'

‘I will concede, Gerard, that membership of a Civil Air Guard should be open to anyone between eighteen and fifty, of either gender, who can pass the private pilot's A-licence test.'

‘Of either sex, did you say, Sir Francis?' asked Lady Londonderry, smiling.

‘Don't be vulgar,' murmured Valerie.

‘I do beg everyone's pardon. If our gender is to be allowed into CAG, then I move that Miss Cobb have her way. There is no reason why her group of women should not have equal rights, straight down the line, with the RAF.'

D'Erlanger leaned forward in his seat.

‘Absolutely! I second Her Ladyship's motion. As I have said, an endless supply of pilots does not exist. We all need these women – God knows how many there are – to transport fifty different types of aircraft.'

‘Where does Sir Henry Cobb fit into all this?' Shelmerdine boomed.

Valerie stood, her superb figure dominating the room. ‘My father is separate and apart from me, my business and my own personal war effort. As a matter of fact, he hasn't a clue where I am today.'

‘How many do you think you could provide?' D'Erlanger asked, as his eyes bored into Valerie.

‘There are ten with A, B, C and D licences, including Shirley and myself.'

‘How extraordinary,' said Lady Londonderry. ‘They would be squadron leaders if only they could change their gender.'

Shelmerdine rose, face-to-face with Valerie Cobb:

‘One is astonished to think that a girl of your capabilities can persist in wasting her time, and the time of others, busking, as it were, for women's rights.'

Valerie looked around the table, knew she had the female and all males but one in her pocket, nodded in silence to the Director General for Civil Aviation, and left.

Lady Londonderry was the first to speak:

‘Valerie is not one to ask her father for permission, Francis, to lobby the government. I expect she will go to Churchill next, and then the King.'

D'Erlanger, still standing, went to the door, turned for a moment to the others and was gone.

‘That woman has overwhelmed him.' Shelmerdine sank into his chair and wondered why that force known as sex, which as a gentleman he could speak of only as gender, crept into a man's life and complicated every situation. His passionless nation would have to go to war. He did not like that girl. She engendered passion.

Beautiful Polish ladies in boiler suits were pouring out of transport planes in Bucharest, and the refugees they had carried stopped momentarily to see if these were visions. Hana Bukova, the most striking of the Polish Women's Air Corps, jumped from the wing to the ground, splashing her immaculate coverall with Romanian mud. Though starving and exhausted, the men amongst the party she had rescued looked at her with longing then turned to follow their shouting wives.

In the next aeroplane along, Hana's mother Vera was still in the cockpit, reading a sheaf of papers. A tall, blonde and long-limbed girl, Hana clambered on to the wing and motioned to the small stocky woman to whom she bore not the slightest resemblance. ‘They want us in and out quickly,' she said.

Vera looked up and grinned. ‘We have an advantage – if we were men, they would shoot us. I'm staying here for the time being.'

Hana had followed in her mother's footsteps from the day she had first set eyes upon a gleaming Fokker DVII in their backyard in Bialystok. Somehow the First World War aircraft had ended up in the county of Grodno and had made its way to her village. All the local boys had climbed all over the magnificent machine, and she had joined the crowd. Her mother was acting as test pilot and the other women in the neighbourhood clucked in admir -ation. Many young Poles had taken up flying, and it was
as common for girls to do heavy factory work as to commandeer a machine that had wings.

Hana's father Libor was influential in the government, administering the Ghetto in which the Jews of Bialystok were allowed to dwell. Every so often, of an afternoon when she had completed a flying lesson, Hana would go with her father on inspection, and she would catch a quick glance of one of the oddities who lived behind the ghetto walls. She had never met a Jew but had heard only terrible things about them, and thought of them as Christ-killers better contained, for the time being, behind those gates.

When Schicklgruber had begun his crusade, the Bukovas had become keenly interested. If large numbers of people were to be transported, large aircraft would be needed, and pilots could have guaranteed work. If war came, things would be even better. Rumour abounded that Chancellor Hitler was to rid Europe of Jews, but that the Reich's intention was to depend on cattle trains to deport Hana's beasts, as she had been wont to call them.

It was not until early 1937 that Hana Bukova met her first beast in the flesh. He was a teenager, a few years her junior, and wildly interested in flying. His father manufactured aircraft in Austria and, to her amazement, the boy was fluent in Polish, Russian and German. He had come to Poland with his father, a well dressed gentleman, to see if his grandmother and cousins would wish to go to England. On arrival in the town, the gentleman was horrified to discover that his relatives had been removed to this filthy slum.

Young Benno kept company with Hana while their fathers exchanged official papers. The two innocents would
play maddening word games, quizzing each other in one language and demanding an answer in another. They would sit out on the pavement as a Polish guard looked on with a glazed expression. Hana had begun to notice how alert her playmate seemed in comparison with the guard – who was supposed to be keeper of ten thousand beasts.

When his father emerged from the ghetto visit, looking much older than when he had entered, it was time for Benno to go, and Libor Buk was kind enough to give the boy a barley sugar sweet in the shape of a reindeer. Everything was polite and friendly, belying the fact that none of these people would ever have had to meet had Christian Poland not been taught for generations that the beasts drank the blood of Polish children at Passover.

Now it was 1937 and the Buk family had had the resourcefulness to think beyond those teachings and to join the small band of Poles dedicated to saving, not slaughtering, the enemies of their national faith. Hana was a highly qualified pilot and the others at her flying club looked on with envy as her lithe figure slithered in and out of aircraft and her thick blonde locks blew in the wind like her own personal banner. She had kept in touch with Benno and had discovered in their correspondence that his father was the famous Friedrich Kranz, Europe's most distinguished aviation entrepreneur.

‘The Jews seem to get their fingers into everything!' Libor would exclaim good-naturedly, and Hana had recently adopted the habit of responding to such asides defensively. Benno's photograph, which she kept inside her logbook, was a rich sepia and was signed in the corner:

‘Fischtal, Berlin.'

This fascinated Hana. What did the photographer look like? Set inside the deep tones of the picture, Benno's grim, bespectacled likeness seemed of another age, and she wondered if the photographer had been a wizened veteran whose lens had framed images of nineteenth-century wars.

‘You will be expected to move on, madam,' grunted a Romanian soldier.

Hana looked up. ‘My mother gives the orders. I have to wait.'

‘Some of us don't like what you are doing. Why save Jews?'

‘We're transporting personnel – their religions are not our concern.'

‘Nonsense – every last one of them has a Yid star on his ID. Personally I ‘d rather fly dogs out of the country.'

Hana kept silent and smiled.

Her mother approached. ‘You can't imagine what delights are in store for us, darling,' said Vera, putting her arm around her daughter's waist. ‘Sixteen members of top industrialists' families, all smuggled out in a spectacular fashion, are earmarked for our section.'

‘Do we know them?' Hana could think only of the bespectacled old man in the portrait of a sepia-toned child.

‘Not likely. Most of them are women – they'll all be in fur coats, I expect.'

Hana turned angrily on her mother, noticing that the soldier was not far away from the sound of their conversation, and was laughing.

‘You and Father are astounding hypocrites. What about those vulgar women in Warsaw with fur coats for display at Mass?'

‘You know damn well it is a common observation that Jewish women love furs, and gold fillings.'

‘Their money is shit. I spit on them.' The Romanian warrior had joined in. ‘Jewish whores fill up their mouths with gold from their pimps.'

‘And how do you know?' Vera looked up at his hulking presence.

He blushed. ‘I just know.'

Vera turned to Hana. ‘What did I tell you about common knowledge?'

They walked briskly, leaving the soldier smoking and frowning by a dead tree. He wondered about the nature of the relationship between this strange pair of lady pilots. Was the ugly one really her mother?

‘What will happen to Benno?' asked Hana.

‘That's what we have in our Manifest,' Vera replied. ‘One frightened Jewish lady and her three children, amongst others. Your Benno is in the group. This entire operation is being paid for by Kranz, who seems to have turned up in England. Jews travel fast – more common knowledge.'

‘I'll collect them. Make it my job.' Hana was shaking with anxiety, and her mother could only smile.

‘Last but not least in the unwritten section of our Rulebook is the order never to mix emotion with a mission. You can go on to Warsaw to collect Josef Ratusz – that should give you a thrill. I will take the Jews.'

‘Mother, I don't give a damn about Ratusz.'

‘Poland's greatest ace? He's better mileage than a bunch of these pathetic Hebrews. And he's single.'

‘You fetch Ratusz, Mother, and I'll take your manifest.'

Nearby, the soldier listened.

‘I'll bring you the boy Benno on a silver platter. Two Bukovas on a pilot allocation have to obey orders.'

Mother and daughter hugged, and a tear fell down Hana's flushed cheek. It landed on Vera's ample bosom and made a dark stain on her beige flying suit. They looked anxiously at each other, like two fighter pilots about to venture into doom.

Hana handed the papers back and climbed somewhat reluctantly into the cockpit of the large transport aircraft. It looked as if it would never leave the ground, as she taxied at a snail's pace away from the crowd of refugees, now sitting on their bags around the field. She reached the end of the dirt path that served as a runway and as a patch of her blonde hair glistened for an instant through the battered window, her mother and the Romanian soldier watched her while the cumbersome machine lifted into the sky. Neither spoke another word, and, as they walked in opposite directions, Vera to her aircraft and the soldier to his hut, each wondered when next they would see that beautiful girl causing the terrible rumbling above them.

Running up and down the corridors of the Houses of Parliament were endless streams of highly-strung men and women who seemed to know tomorrow's history soon enough to be worried. They carried messages, books, newspapers and giant piles of white paper, their feet seemingly noiseless against the polished floors. Clicking sounds disturbed their organized silence as Friedrich Kranz moved up the middle of one large corridor, his heels breaking the hush of soft English soles. He winced as heads turned, glaring. Were civil servants fitted out with special shoes? he pondered.

He found the door for which he had been searching and announced himself to a secretary with perfect posture, who ticked his name on an otherwise empty tablet. Scrutinized by the soulless female, Kranz took a seat in the cold waiting room of Tim Haydon M P. Elegant furnishings and neatly decorated walls surrounding the Austrian did not allay the brittle atmosphere, the lone visitor keeping his coat buttoned against the damp frigidity of the room. He noticed that Haydon's secretary, in lightweight blouse and skirt, seemed oblivious to the cold, her cheeks flushed by what Kranz called ‘British passion mist', the permanent fog that enveloped the Isles. He saw these mists as the cumulative vapours released by bodies constrained by their national culture from expressing passion. Those vapours had to go somewhere, and like young robin-redbreasts experimenting with newly discovered perches, passion mist settled on soft
faces. She probably thought the same of Teutons, Kranz theorized, looking at her feet … Did this woman have soft soles as well?

Now she was looking at him, sharply. ‘Do you wish to hang your coat?' she asked.

‘No. If you don't mind, I am feeling rather chilled.' Their eyes met, and he felt deep-frozen. ‘Or would you rather have
me
hanged?'

‘I beg your pardon?' She placed her hand by her neck and fingered her neat and very old collar. Passion mist had evaporated.

‘Is that a blouse handed down from generation to generation?' Kranz enquired, fascinated by her mannerism.