Spitfire Women of World War II (23 page)

Mary Nicholson was the only American woman to be killed while flying in Britain in the war. She died a long way from her family home in Greensboro, North Carolina, and there was little consolation for her parents when the telegram arrived there two days later, beyond the cliché that she died doing what she loved best. But she would never have been creeping up the Severn Valley in a Miles Magister on a cloudy late spring afternoon had she not practically begged Jackie Cochran to be among her twenty-five recruits. And she would never have had to beg had she not already been Cochran's most trusted secretary.

Nicholson was as awestruck as Cochran herself by the possibilities of flying. ‘It's not for the thrill that's in it that I love it,' she declared of aviation in a speech to a women's group not long before she left for Montreal. ‘I believe that it has a great future, and I believe that girls and women will take a great part of its development.'

She did love the thrill of it as well. The daughter of a Greensboro banker, Mary left her home state in 1925 with a degree in music and followed her new husband to Portsmouth, Ohio. For three years she worked there as a secretary, and chafed at the ordinariness of married life. In 1927 she flew for the first time. It was a joyride with an itinerant barnstormer. The following year she asked her husband for a divorce, and within a week of signing away her marriage she reached a deal with Portsmouth's Raven
Rock Flying School: if she performed three parachute jumps at the Carter County Fair to publicise the school, they would teach her to fly. She jumped, with no training to speak of (parachuting being less widely practised in those days than murder), from the lower wing of a three-seater biplane that would climb to 1,200 feet over the fairground and circle until she was ready. The chute went up in its own hand-held bag. The role of the second passenger was to unpack it and hold onto it until she jumped.

If Nicholson knew fear, she controlled it well. She kept her part of the bargain and did all three jumps. The Raven Rock Flying School duly coached her for her private licence, and on returning to Greensboro to help her family after the great Crash of 1929 she qualified as an instructor.

As secretary of the local flying club, and a strong, beautiful divorcee, Mary Nicholson was often to be found there borrowing other people's aeroplanes. She caught the eye of a famous aviator and altitude record-breaker named Frank Hawkes. It was he who recommended her to Cochran, who was frequently in need of secretaries because few of those she hired could stand her pace. Nicholson became her constant companion, taking furious dictation but also flying coast-to-coast with her and moving into the fabulous penthouse on the East River with the glass wall of memorabilia and the inlaid compass floor. When Ann Wood showed up for her interview with an anxious smile and a thumping heart in the autumn of 1941, Nicholson was already there, steadying the Cochran mood swings and honing her message.

Cochran gave in to Nicholson's pleading to be allowed to join the ATA only after she herself had flown to London and established herself on Tite Street in Chelsea. At least it would mean a friend and ally in a town where she was short of both.

Nicholson was the last woman to be cleared for action by the prickly Harry Smith in Montreal. She was loyal to Cochran to the last, declining invitations to gossip about her during the crossing to England and at the Red Cross Club in Mayfair where most American pilots congregated when on leave.

After Mary's death, Cochran wrote to her parents: ‘You may be proud of her. She was a real soldier, and she went West well.' There were also letters of condolence from Pauline Gower (who had last written less than a month earlier to tell the Nicholsons how well their daughter was doing) and Sir Stafford Cripps, the Minister of Aircraft Production. Cripps signed thousands of similar letters. He knew this one was unique so far because the deceased was a woman and an American, but he had to assume there would be more like it in due course. So the wording was in the standard two-paragraph format. Mary had been doing ‘… work of the greatest importance to our war effort … She had proved herself a valuable officer and pilot' and would be ‘greatly missed by all who knew her'. Cripps felt able to tell the parents of British pilots that their children had died in the service of their country – but not Mary's, even though this was six months after Pearl Harbor and nearly as many months since Cochran's exhilarating challenge to the airborne women of America: ‘EVERY FRONT NOW OUR FRONT.'

The telegram informing Mary's parents of her death gave them three days to notify White Waltham if they did not want her to be cremated rather than buried. They did not request a burial, so five days later the cremation went ahead.

Gower failed to attend the funeral, even though Nicholson had been based at White Waltham. Sometimes, just when they most needed to be warm, the Brits could be breathtakingly chilly. Ann Wood wrote that evening:

It must have been a disconsolate group of young Americans who made their way back to the Red Cross Club in London for improvised funeral meats that afternoon. Mr and Mrs Nicholson would doubtless have implored them to be jolly, just as Mrs Pitman had a few months earlier, but Mr and Mrs Nicholson were stuck in Greensboro.

Ann Wood peeled away from the wake and decided to go up to the roof terrace of the Red Cross Club to sunbathe. Later she went for a bike ride in the park. Bobby Sandoz, who knew Nicholson better, found it harder to let go. ‘I liked Mary,' she told me, ‘and I cannot understand her crash.' After reading the official accident report she travelled to the crash site and talked to an old man who had witnessed Mary's final moments, and to the farmer whose barn had been destroyed. She became convinced that Mary had timeafter losing her propeller to straighten up and glide in for a relatively routine wheels-up landing next to the barn. ‘The loss of her propeller wouldn't affect her ability to turn her aircraft to the side,' she said. ‘It only needed fifteen degrees to avoid the barn. She was a good, cautious, thoughtful pilot, and she had plenty of time to avoid the barn and land on the field, but apparently the airplane did not change its course. And of course the whole thing burned.'

Sandoz could not stay long in Littleworth before returning to Hamble, but she knew the cockpit of a Miles Magister, and she knew Mary. She put one inside the other in the piece of sky she had studied above the burned-down barn and formed a theory that she could never quite shake – that it never occurred to Mary that she had time to save herself, so she simply closed her eyes and prepared to meet her maker. The theory was more of a judgement on Nicholson's experience, or lack of it, than on her skill. It was also a reflection of Sandoz's frustration, and of what she knew about her friend: ‘She was very religious. I just know that every night, she got on her knees beside her bed and said her prayers. And if she thought she was going to die … you know, you search for an explanation. Well, maybe she had her eyes shut.'

The idea that Mary might have shut her eyes and let the barn come to her in the last few seconds of her life instead of using those seconds to make one, perhaps two, lightning, life-preserving decisions still vexed Roberta Sandoz more than sixty years later. She never said she would have used those seconds differently herself; she didn't need to. She did say, almost apologetically, that flying came easily to her. ‘I just felt it in the seat of my pants,' she told me. And when the conversation moved on to Betty Keith-Jopp's inadvertent descent through cloud to the Firth of Forth, she had firm views. Keith-Jopp had been turning back onto her reciprocal course. So far so good: exactly as per standing orders. But what happened next?

‘As you change your wing from normal flight [into a turn] the tendency of the aircraft is to slide down, so you must give left stick, left rudder and throttle at the same time. All it takes is more throttle so you can hold your nose on the horizon, and that's the crucial thing. Hold your nose on the horizon. The moment your nose drops you're losing altitude.' Bobby thought about it. ‘I think she wasted an airplane.'

Having sat with Betty at the Indaba Hotel in Johannesburg and heard the story from the pilot's point of view, the judgement seemed harsh. But it also seemed significant for being offered at all, with such crisp supporting detail, by such a self-evidently thoughtful person, so long after the event. Betty Keith-Jopp may have erred in letting her nose drop in the cloud but she had strained every nerve and sinew and pulmonary corpuscle to survive in the minutes that followed. That made her a survivor in the most literal sense, and in the end this was the most the women of the ATA could hope for.

Many of them stated openly that they wished they could have flown in combat. ‘I thought it was the only fair thing,' Maureen Dunlop mused. ‘Why should only men be killed?' But men denied them the ultimate proving ground. So all the women could do to prove themselves was get on with the task in hand – delivering aircraft, day in, day out – and stay alive in the process.

Lettice Curtis worked harder than anyone to leave nothing to chance. Her description of psyching up for a difficult flight in marginal weather is illuminating, if typically detached:

On the ground, that solitude was something to be endured, but once airborne at last, especially on a clear day, it became a luxury:

Others gave more flamboyant displays of pre-flight nerves. The two Audreys – Sale-Barker and Macmillan – specialized in what Mary de Bunsen called ‘feminine vapours':

(De Bunsen said she later read a description of Sale-Barker's technique for preparing for ski races, and recognised it instantly.)

There is no question that the pilots who were most constantly alert and most willing to try anything in a fix were the most likely to survive. That said, some simply ran out of luck. Margaret Fairweather, the first woman to fly a Spitfire, lost her second husband in April 1944. Captain Douglas ‘Poppa' Fairweather, too large for a Spitfire and much larger than life, had been tried out as a commanding officer in Prestwick, but was found too disrespectful of rules: when the ATA tried to ban smoking in its aircraft he would start taxi flights by handing round a silver cigarette case offering ‘instant dismissals'. When no-one could be found to look after his pet goat, he flew it round the country with him. When White Waltham insisted that taxi pilots use maps, he used one of Roman Britain. He was also known to leave his pocket diary open at the map pages on his knee, but never to refer to it.

Douglas Fairweather was not tall, but he weighed in at 16 stone at the start of the war and somehow kept most of his paunch despite rationing. This kept him in Ansons rather than single-seaters when he was moved from Prestwick back to White Waltham, and it was in Ansons that he specialised in getting through atrocious weather when no-one else could. His method, when unable to see the ground, was to set a compass bearing and stick to it, chain-smoking at the rate of exactly seven minutes per cigarette.

Diana Barnato once flew with Captain Fairweather from Belfast to White Waltham over continuous low cloud cover. After twenty-three cigarettes he put the last, carefully counted butt back into his cigarette case, eased the stick forward and dropped out of the cloud with White Waltham dead ahead. By 1944, most of his flying was of injured pilots to the Royal Canadian Hospital at Cliveden. On 4 April an especially urgent case was phoned through from Prestwick on an especially unpleasant day. Fairweather volunteered. For familiarity's sake he took an Anson, even though it had no radio and even though for such a special case he could have taken a Rapide with wireless navigation. In thick cloud he
flew into the Irish Sea. He was mourned in the letters column of
Aeroplane
magazine for ‘the rich zeal and relish with which he baited officiousness and mocked men of petty vices'. The same correspondent mentioned Captain Fairweather's wife, Margie: ‘If much has been said about him and little of her it is because he was an extrovert, and to discuss him is permissible; in fact, he would have liked it. By the same mark, to discuss her would be unpardonable.'