Spitfire Girl (11 page)

The crew of H.M.S.
Hazlemere
saw her drop from the clouds and plunge into the icy, storm-tossed waters. They launched a lifeboat but failed to close the gap. Lieutenant-Commander Fletcher, watching from the bridge, saw that the lifeboat would be too late to reach the figure struggling desperately in the water. Unhesitatingly he dived overboard and swam towards the victim, now recognizable as a woman. They were seen to join, but despite the frenzied efforts of the lifeboat crew, they both perished.

The paths of a gallant officer and a brilliant woman pilot had crossed.

The experimental ferry pool at Hatfield, the first to be
staffed entirely by women pilots proved, despite gloomy masculine prognostications, to be an unqualified success. Inevitably the time came, as larger and more complex aircraft poured from the factories, when the authorities were faced with the decision of whether to continue imposing restrictions on the type of aircraft ferried by women. Pressure of events forced the issue and women pilots were, subject to their C.O.’s discretion and a brief period of training, permitted to fly ‘anything, anywhere’.

We were given brief training at the R.A.F. Central Flying School and introduced to the mysteries of hydraulics, retractable undercarriages, flaps, constant speed airscrews and scores of other refinements made imperative by the struggle for air superiority. At the end of the course we were promoted first officers and had the delightful task of sewing another thin gold stripe to our epaulettes. I must admit that for the first few weeks we pushed and pulled knobs and controls with parrot-like obedience and with only the haziest idea of what went on at the other end.

Despite the efforts of the ferry pool commander I led a nomadic life of one-night stops in hotels or fitful sleep in the luggage racks of all-night trains with a disreputable macintosh to disguise my uniform when I subjected it to the indignity of climbing into the luggage rack.

A typical day started by reporting to the pool at 8 a.m. to collect the ferry-chits and board the milk-run aircraft that set off each morning on a round-robin flight dropping off pilots at their first collecting point. From there the pilot would start the day’s programme; usually two or three flights, e.g. a Wellington from aerodrome A to aerodrome B. A Hurricane from B to C and a Hudson bomber from C to D and then a dreary train journey with parachute, helmet and maps, back to base and bed. I was still young enough to enjoy every minute of every day and rushed to the aerodrome each morning with a gay vivacity that must have been irritating to the elders.

The operational planning, a formidable chess-like problem, shuffling aircraft and pilots over the entire British Isles, was controlled by Central Operations at Andover. Such were the magnitude and complexity of A.T.A.’s operations that at the peak of the war over two hundred A.T.A. taxi aeroplanes were being used to return pilots to their ferry-pools at the end of the day and thus end time-wasting train travel.

D
uring the summer of 1941, by which time I had ferried
most of the non-operational types of aircraft and an occasional Hurricane, there was one aircraft, the most illustrious of all, which I longed to fly. Yet the prospect of so doing filled me with trepidation. Like a man who knows a visit to the dentist is inevitable but, when the pain eases, puts off the evil day, I scanned the delivery chits each morning, wanting yet fearing to see: Spitfire.

In August the evoking name stared at me from the ferry-
chit: Spitfire. From: Cowley; To: Tern Hill. Pilot: D. T. Sorour. As nonchalantly as possible I climbed aboard the taxi aircraft and was dropped off at Cowley.

The Spitfire, a machine with the simplicity of features of a beautiful woman, stood outside the hangar basking as proudly as a thoroughbred in the warm sunshine. I clambered into the cockpit as warily as a rider mounting a highly spirited stallion and sat gazing absently at the instruments. It seemed the most natural thing in the world to be sitting there in the cockpit, as though my entire life had led to this moment.

I started up inexpertly and felt the power coursing through the Spitfire’s frame and registering on the instruments. A little awed but stimulated by the urgent throb of the Merlin engine that seemed to tremble with eagerness to be free in its own element, I taxied cautiously to the down-wind end of the field. The brakes were touchy and recalling the warning of my colleagues I used them sparingly. The Spitfire is notoriously nose heavy on the ground.

A few second later I found myself soaring through the air in a machine that made poetry of flight. Carefully I familiarized myself with the controls as the ground fell away at fantastic speed and felt exhilarated by the eager, sensitive response. Singing with joy and relief I dived and climbed and spiralled around the broken clouds, before turning on to course.

I landed uneventfully at Tern Hill, a fighter squadron base, and climbed out with spurious nonchalance as fighter pilots, sunning on the grass and awaiting the call to battle, waved and wolf-whistled in welcome. With an easy
camaraderie
I waved back, for after all I was, almost, one of them.

As the summer closed, a new women’s ferry pool was
established at Hamble aerodrome near the south coast. A few of us from Hatfield, relative veterans, were transferred to form the nucleus of the new pool to which new women pilots, fresh from A.T.A. training schools, were added.

There was an immediate scramble for billets on our arrival at the new pool. We collected our billeting slips and rode off on bicycles like locusts about to descend on unsuspecting pastures. After numerous enquiries and false trails I cycled along a glade, thick with fallen leaves from the overhanging trees, that followed the winding unassuming River Hamble. My billeting slip showed only the name of the house. Picturesque bungalows, their backs to the river, peeped cosily through the rust-tinted trees. One in particular caught my eye with its neat tiny drive and mellow air. Wish that was it, I sighed wistfully as I looked at the name plate. With a second look I slammed on the only brake that worked, the front one, skidded, parted company with my bicycle and sat on the wet leaves gazing at the name plate just above my head: Creek Cottage. Hastily I got up and tried to make myself presentable, but it was too late.

‘You wouldn’t be coming to stay with us, would you?’ enquired the elderly gentleman eyeing me from the drive with a mixture of amusement and concern.

‘Yes,’ I admitted.

‘Come in. We have been expecting you,’ he invited kindly, ‘though not quite like that,’ he added with a grin, taking my bicycle and wheeling it along the drive.

Surreptitiously I examined the bungalow. It was a gem of story-book charm that so often rewards those who explore unpromising bye-ways in England. A garden, carelessly elegant, spread to the water’s edge where, in a small boat-house a motor-boat and a dinghy, promising idyllic summer evenings, were moored in the still waters of the lock. My hosts welcomed me warmly and quickly dispelled my qualms that they might resent their imposed guest. The Greenhills, though retired, took me to their home as naturally as though I were their own daughter. Now that peace has returned to that quiet glade on Hamble River may they have back the happiness they gave to me.

I spent a day exploring the tiny river and the garden and adding my own personality to the bedroom overlooking the river banks, before reporting for duty. By then some semblance of order had emerged from the packing cases and chaos at the aerodrome and we plunged into a heavy backlog of work. It was five days, every night spent in different though similarly dreary hotels, before I returned, dirty and exhausted, to Hamble and climbed out of the taxi aircraft.

‘Hi, Jackie,’ greeted the operations officer. ‘We had a phone call from a Mr Greenhill. He wanted to know if you were all right...’

Meanwhile Reg courted me with a clinical tenacity
that boded ill for my independence. Every day I received a letter until his agonizingly cramped writing became as familiar as my own characterless scrawl. I was paddling on the banks of a river that threatened to suck me reluctantly into midstream and on into the estuary of marriage. After meeting his parents in Taunton I left exhausted, following a week of nervous politeness and appraisal with the feeling that I was walking up a descending escalator. There seemed to be something peculiarly unexciting about Reg and me. As though we were following a path across a plain instead of exploring the foothills of a majestic mountain.

With the fulfilment of my job and the easy comradeship of war I was no longer blindly flattered by his attentions and met him in Taunton and Hamble with an equanimity impossible six months before. But he remained a yard-stick against which others were compared and found wanting.

Often, during the winter of 1941–42 when the night sky over the southern ports became a battlefield, I sat in the cosy oasis of Creek Cottage discussing with my proxy-mother, Mrs Greenhill, the prospect of marriage.

‘But I don’t want to get married.’

‘You will have to, some day.’

‘Why?’

‘Why!... You want children, a home...’

‘I want flying... I cannot have both.’

Interminably and inconclusively we discussed and probed. Reg, with a delicacy of perception that belied his more stolid qualities, waited patiently. It was a long wait.

I
n the spring of 1942 Reg telephoned me at Hamble soon
after completing an O.C.T.U. course at Aldershot. ‘It’s India,’ he confirmed casually. ‘Two weeks’ embarkation leave starting tomorrow. Can you get leave?’

‘I think so,’ I answered.

‘Right. Come down to Taunton as soon as you can get away.’

‘Did you get your commission?’

‘Yes, darling. It’s Lieutenant Moggridge now.’

I packed a toothbrush, ferried a Fleet Air Arm Albacore to Bristol and hitch-hiked on to Taunton. On the army lorry that carried me the last few miles to Taunton I itemized the reasons why we should not get married. I knew what I was in for. It seemed silly to answer simply: I don’t want to get married. A man departing for two years in the grim Far-Eastern theatre deserved more rational reasons for going un-wedded.

Nature partisaned his cause. The weather was idyllic, the days balmy, the nights mellow and making nonsense of my obstinacy. Reg was cunning. During the day when we played tennis or lounged in sweet-smelling fields listening to the put-put of distant tractors, he wore a martyred air. At tea each cup was punctuated with a sigh. It was during the evening calm that his campaign took a more tactical turn. In the garden under the insidious influence of the stars and with his arms around me as we sat in the swinging hammock I became equivocal. Perhaps, maybe. My resistance was at a perilous ebb by the tenth day. If I could last out one more day it would be too late to arrange the ceremony.

On the twelfth day he admitted defeat. ‘You have no objections to an engagement?’ he asked ironically during lunch.

‘None whatever,’ I replied. We kissed formally and then not so formally.

We bought the ring in the High Street. In the jewellery shop I wondered that assistants carried on business as usual, working from nine to five, with Thursday afternoons and Sundays off. It seemed grossly unfair that history should pass them by and leave them trailing in a wash of ration books and petty monotony. I felt guilty as the assistant glanced enviously at our uniforms and mechanically quoted prices as we pondered over the rings. I chose an inexpensive zircon that sat unobtrusively on my finger. It had to be small. I always wore gauntlets when flying.

We had tea in a quaint shoppe. I fidgeted with my left hand like an inexperienced actress. ‘Take your glove off,’ grinned Reg. I obeyed and stared at my hand as though it were a stranger’s.

Reg’s departure for India left me curiously un-distraught. There was a gap in my life but it was the gap of an extracted tooth. An emptiness without feeling or pain, noticed only when in idleness one feels for it.

Trying to evoke memories of war is like writing the
epitaph of a dead friend. As with the friend one remembers only the virtues. The epitaph becomes a eulogy and another generation is weaned on the glories of war.

There was John. I met him a year after Reg had left for India. Cadaverously good looking and frustrated he had, to him, the ignominious task of towing targets at an aerial gunnery school; a menial and unexciting job allotted usually to pilots who had misbehaved. He wanted to fly Spitfires in a fighter squadron and met me with sour malice when I landed at his aerodrome with a coveted Spitfire to refuel. He was duty pilot on that day, responsible for arriving and departing aircraft. The weather was bad and, after an introduction spiced with irony about my sex and phallic-symbolled Spitfires, he invited me to a dance to be held that evening in the officers’ mess. I accepted and telephoned Hamble that I was staying overnight.

He drank too much at the dance with a feverish boyish defiance. He later confided that he did not like whisky and beer made him sick. He became cheeky and I did not mind. He made the most outrageous suggestions and I did not mind that either. Then he became maudlin. His technique was admirable. I guided him to the porch like a tug nudging a transatlantic liner into harbour.

‘Where are you going?’ he asked.

‘To get you some coffee,’ I replied firmly.

‘Dowant coffee. Wanna fly Spits. Sit down.’

‘You’ll fly them. I’m sure you will.’

‘Huh. Whatdo-you-knowaboutit. Bloody...’

‘Stop swearing.’

‘Jesus... Spitfires and piety. Cocktails for two.’

I could not be angry with him. ‘Somebody has to train the pilots,’ I suggested soothingly.

‘Oh. Reasonable. I hate reasonable people.’

‘Why don’t you say something?’ he added, after a moment’s silence.

‘Because you want me to be unreasonable,’ I promptly replied.

‘Beautiful Spits,’ he observed irrelevantly. He was sitting down, head on knees, when I brought the coffee. He grimaced and drank it quickly.