Spitfire Girl (13 page)

‘Jackie!’

‘Yes?’

‘Ops want you right away.’

I dropped the racquet and ran.

‘Tempest to New Church,’ greeted the operations officer. ‘Priority, they are waiting for it. Pick it up at Aston Down. I’ll arrange for the taxi aircraft to pick you up later at New Church.’

‘Roger. I’ll go and change.’

‘Where?’

‘Creek Cottage.’

‘No time for that. Off you go.’

‘I can’t go like this,’ I protested, indicating my white tennis shorts, plimsolls and sweatshirt.

‘GO!’

I found another pilot, jumped into the stand-by Auster aircraft and took off hurriedly for Aston Down where the Tempest fighter, its deceptively simple lines cloaking with an air of innocence the most formidable fighter in the skies, stood parked near the Control Tower.

By the time I had completed the handing-over formalities a large crowd had gathered. A hundred hands helped me on with my parachute and there was a delighted roar of ‘Ride her cowboy’ as I thankfully hid my legs in the slim cockpit.

The roar subsided to a speculative hum as I got out the Tempest pilot’s notes and refreshed my memory before starting up. Heads shook disapprovingly at this cavalier treatment of the mighty Tempest. Enjoying the effect, I propped the book up against the windscreen and pretended to read whilst starting up and taxi-ing with important blips of the throttle to the take-off position. They were still standing in front of the hangar as I shot into the air like a startled faun and set course for New Church.

A few minutes later I glanced idly to the east where the English Channel glistened in the warm sunshine like a limpid lake and beyond, faintly visible in the heat haze, the French coast waited and challenged. To the north, balloon barrages swayed like drunken elephants at a carnival. Content with speed, power and solitude, it was some seconds before I appreciated the possible menace of the speck that detached itself from the enemy coast and headed towards me. I sat up and watched it warily. Must be one of ours, I reassured myself hopefully, waggling my wings in a timid gesture of friendship as it loomed closer. No answering waggle untied the tight knot in my stomach. It was too late to run for it. With a show of bravado I turned towards it but it ignored me and continued steadily on its course. I was mildly insulted before it shot past in front of me showing fully its hideous black silhouette. It was a Buzz-bomb. Impulsively I opened the throttle, turned steeply and, bobbing violently in its wake as it sped through the air with the soulless determination of a torpedo, chased after it. There was nothing I could do except perhaps topple it with a wing-tip. The Tempest’s guns were empty. Urging on the Tempest I stared fascinated and repelled as the macabre gaunt parody of an aircraft headed insolently for the distant haze that pin-pointed London. It was uncanny; my legs were clammy with goose-pimples.

Suddenly, shooting puffs of black smoke from the stovepipe exhaust, it slowed down, dropped a wing and began its menacing gliding turn to oblivion. It circled lazily like a scavenger picking its prey before plunging with inhuman robot hate into a tiny picturesque hamlet. Sickened I circled the stricken cottages, cut through the bitter pall of dust rising slowly in the peaceful afternoon sun and turned back on to course.

Unnerved by this sombre glimpse of the future I made a shaky landing at New Church. It was a relief to hear the warm wolf calls of welcome and see the startled scurry of naked airmen disturbed from their afternoon sun-bath as I pulled off my helmet and emerged from the cockpit.

Shortly afterwards a squadron of Typhoon fighter-bombers returning from an offensive sweep over the French Channel ports taxied in and switched off, their wings stained by cannon smoke. In a moment I was surrounded by nervously chattering pilots, clad in saffron-coloured Mae-Wests, describing the results of the sweep. One of their aircraft had failed to return. Shot down by ground fire. There was shock and fear and drunken excitement in their eyes. May God forgive me but I was almost glad that one of them had died. There was still some humanity in war when one risked life to kill. When the limitations of flesh and fear mar the scientists’ robot perfection.

The invasion, the steady creep of Allied forces towards
Berlin, Reg’s impending return from India and frequent flashes of irritation from my fellow pilots in the A.T.A.: ‘Oh grow up, Jackie,’ were a nagging reminder that the roundabout of flying, ingenuousness and
naiveté
on which I had ridden as contentedly and aimlessly as a butterfly since the early days of the war would soon grind to a halt.

My reaction was typically perverse. To genuine innocence and ignorance I defiantly added a breathtaking pious pseudo-saintliness that would have made a nun of Assisi a harlot by comparison. I met all casual references to sex and sensibility with a blank stare and determined misunderstanding, saw smut where there was none and ruined many a good joke by ostentatiously not seeing the point. Thus I determined to counter maturity and evil, which I misguidedly assumed to be the same thing, by being totally immature.

It was unfortunate that casual acquaintances found me quaint and refreshing thus encouraging the growth of this exotic off-shoot in my character (though, when flying, I always left St. Dolores Teresa in the crew-room with a secret, though unadmitted, sigh of relief).

Looking back it is difficult to understand how I survived the fury of my colleagues during this period of immaculate virtue. Even the priest, incognito on the other side of the confessional grille, implied that I was being very tiresome when my only admitted sin was the wish that the war would never end. To please him I confessed imaginary sins and smugly enjoyed fulfilling undeserved penances.

It was in this mood that Reg found me on his return from the Far East during the closing months of summer. It had been a full day with a touch of tension that lifted it out of routine. In the morning I ferried a replacement bomber uneventfully from Dunsfold to Kirkbride in Scotland. Over lunch in the mess I met the engineer who was to accompany me on the return ferry-flight in a dilapidated aircraft, a Mitchell, destined for the graveyard. The ferry-chit was endorsed in red ink with the curt statement:
ONE
LANDING
ONLY
, the laconic warning used in the A.T.A. when a machine was on its last legs.

We approached the Mitchell dubiously. It looked very sad and tired in the driving rain. Rows of bombs neatly painted on the nose under an exotic though faded Varga girl testified to its honourable career.

We climbed aboard, cleared the debris from the cockpit, started up and, with the rain alternately dripping and pouring in thin streams as the aircraft lurched heavily on each wheel, taxied to the take-off point.

‘Going to the dance tonight?’ shouted the engineer, referring to an invitation received at Hamble from the officers of a nearby American army camp. I nodded absently as a forbidding black squall threatened from the north turning, like a cloud of locusts, day into twilight. At that moment a red flare shot high into the sky from the Control Tower and hovered brightly in the darkening gloom. ‘The dance,’ urged the engineer as I hesitated whether to obey the order, implicit in the flare and the approaching squall, to cancel the flight and return to the hangars. A vision of couples dancing and the thought of spending another night away from the comforts of Creek Cottage guided my hands to the throttles.

Carefully looking away from the Control Tower we accelerated down the rain-thrashed runway and disappeared over the hills as another flare mottled the sky with an angry red glow. Grinning like truant schoolchildren we levelled out just beneath the clouds and headed out towards the sea where no hills lurked.

As we neared Dunsfold the starboard engine as though suddenly struck by the absurdity of contributing to its own demise coughed and began to vibrate alarmingly.

‘Feather it,’ I shouted, opening up the port engine to maximum power and adjusting the trim. The engineer reached up, pressed the large red feathering button and watched the starboard propeller slowly jerk to’ a halt, its blades knifing the slipstream. ‘O.K. She’s feathered.’ I checked the maps. We had ten minutes to go.

‘Is she holding?’ shouted the engineer, anxiously scanning the instruments. I nodded. The altimeter held steadily at 800, the air-speed indicator at 140.

‘What about alternating?’ shouted the engineer, wriggling and fidgeting in his seat.

‘No. Dunsfold is the nearest. We’ll be there in five minutes. Watch out for it.’

‘There it is,’ he shouted, pointing straight ahead at the runway shining like black glass in the rain. I nodded and circled warily. One engine meant that, once the undercarriage and flaps were down on the final approach, there was no room for error.

The engineer, his hand suspended over the undercarriage lever waited tensely as I lined up the Mitchell and began the final approach to the runway beckoning encouragingly through the misty curtain of rain. ‘Have you done a single-engined landing before?’ he shouted anxiously.

‘No...’ I replied. Without comment he tightened his safety straps.

‘Now?’ he anticipated, his hand fidgeting with the lever.

‘No! We’ll undershoot. Hold it,’ I shouted, kicking the rudders as the Mitchell drifted and crabbed sluggishly in the gusty cross-wind.

‘O.K.,’ I shouted about a mile from the end of the runway, ‘undercarriage down.’

With a gesture of relief he threw the lever forward. The nose dropped immediately as the undercarriage unfolded like the legs of a bird. I compensated for the increased drag with a touch of throttle and trim as the runway appeared to sway in the wind like the landing deck of an aircraft carrier. The engineer’s hand now hovered over the flap lever.

‘Half flap,’ I ordered.

‘Half flap down,’ he acknowledged, selecting the lever half-way.

‘Full flap.’

‘Full flaps down,’ he replied.

As the flaps came fully down we sank like a lift and waited, committed. We were a little high but the wheels touched, bounced and settled safely. The engineer grinned hugely and clenched his hands happily above his head as we rolled to the end of the runway. I switched off the gallant port engine, as the crash wagon clanged out to meet us, and looked at the maps clutched in my hand. They were shaking like an aspen tree.

‘You all right?’ shouted the crash crew as the engineer slid back the side panel and poked his head through.

‘Sure,’ he shouted, with a grin. ‘The pilot was a lady.’

I felt a childish glow of pleasure at the surprised and impressed glances. A single-engine landing occurred a dozen times a day in the air force. But it was my first and I had pulled it off in an unfamiliar aircraft.

The dance inevitably turned out to be an anti-climax and as our foursome returned to Creek Cottage for good-night coffee my thoughts still lingered on the Mitchell rather than the jitterbugging marathon of the last four hours. I was surprised to see a faint crack of light edging the blackout curtains. The Greenhills usually retired early. We got out of the car and crept quietly into the lounge. As I blinked the blackout from my eyes Reg, bronzed and thinner, rose from the easy-chair and the clutter of pipe cleaners and magazines that tokened a long wait. I remember little of what happened in the shy haze of welcome except that the others were curtly dismissed and I was firmly kissed.

The next few weeks as the leaves turned auburn and
the sun moved imperceptibly south were weeks of supreme illogicality. A sort of mad-hatter’s tea party during which I was transformed from an eminently Victorian product, prudish and priggish, into an impatient fiancée eager to be dominated by man and marriage. I have tried to avoid saying what must be and is the answer, for it is such a simpering banality. I fell in love. It is not a banality to do so but to write so.

There was little left from our past relationship. The past two impressionable years had changed us both. At first we searched for the things that had committed us to each other two years before. But we had discarded those unconscious mannerisms; forgotten also the conscious ones used to attract.

As his tan faded and his pipe became as familiar as my own hands, the shy curiosity of getting to know another who had the privilege of intimate friendship but who was as a stranger, was slowly transformed into feelings that gave an almost gross significance to perceptions and experience. Flying north was flying away from him. Like a horse returning to the stable I was discontent until the compass once again swung south. A flower, an ode, a falling leaf, everything had a link, however tenuous, with him.

It did not occur to me that my experience was commonplace. I thought I had made a unique discovery and walked and flew constantly astonished that I could achieve such an avalanche of happiness. The erstwhile embarrassed glimpses in the bathroom mirror became speculative and curious appraisals to find outward symptoms of the extraordinary things going on inside.

I shed the cloak of gross piety as easily and naturally as a snake sheds its skin, much, I suspect, to the relief of my comrades.

He listened patiently as the last lingering weeds still clung to the soil of the past. As I drifted between independence and the desire for domination, between fear of man and hope of mysterious pleasures. There were many buts. He ticked most of them off and placed the remainder in the pending tray. Only the years to come could solve those.

‘Well?’ he prompted one evening as we dozed by the fire at Creek Cottage.

‘Easter,’ I suggested.

‘No. Earlier. January.’

‘That’s very soon.’

‘We
did
meet in 1940.’

‘It doesn’t give us much time.’

‘For what?’

‘I have to make a wedding dress and...’

‘We can get married in a registry office.’

‘Oh no we won’t!’

‘I’ll marry you in church if you make it January.’

‘All right.’

We sat unmoving, moved by the enormity of the decision. I tried to sit up. ‘I stay in the A.T.A. of course?’