Spitfire Girl (14 page)

‘Of course. We can’t build a home until after the war.’

‘It will be just like it is now,’ I observed contentedly, ‘except that we will be married.’

‘Well,’ he leered, ‘not exactly.’

I blushed.

‘There’s just one thing.’

‘Yes?’

‘I want to see South Africa again before we get married.’

‘How?’

‘Hitch-hike.’

‘You’re crazy!’

‘Thank you.’

‘Sorry, but it is a bit far-fetched. Must be 10,000 miles to Pretoria and back.’

‘Twelve thousand,’ I corrected.

The following morning I cabled my mother the announcement of the marriage. She riposted with a cable that she was seriously ill. I had a shrewd suspicion that her cable was prompted by the impending nuptials but nevertheless, to Reg’s dismay, I arranged compassionate leave from the A.T.A., obtained an impressive ‘To whom it may concern’ letter from South Africa House, and ferried an aircraft to Lyneham, headquarters of Royal Air Force Transport Command.

After a mild brush with red-tape I was soon on my way to Malta as second-pilot of a squat Liberator bomber. Sitting at the controls as the landscape changed from England’s dull grey to the brilliance of the Mediterranean I enjoyed patronizing the top-brass and V.I.P.s who came up from the rear to have a look at the works. From Malta I worked my way as an ‘air-hostess’ to service-men as far as Cairo, where I was bogged down with an apparently insoluble problem. I had no Yellow Fever certificate and it took ten days before an inoculation became valid. Two precious days passed before I came to the reluctant conclusion that the medical services were incorruptible and forged the thing myself with an impressive flourish.

Eleven days after leaving England I arrived in Pretoria to find my mother moderately ill but indulgently so. Her tragic greetings of ‘My child’ were rebuffed with a crisp matronly approach that soon had her out of bed on to a less maudlin field of battle regarding my future. She was shocked by my pallid appearance and stuffed me with milk and fresh fruit as though I were the supposed invalid.

She had ten days to change my mind. Ten days in which she dangled lusty carrots: a car, a flat, even an aeroplane, in front of my nose. When these failed a thin stream of bachelors, con­siderably depleted since 1938, again paid court. But hers was a hopeless cause.

It was a bizarre experience to be so suddenly engulfed in a forgotten world of rich food, naked lights and untroubled skies. I felt an alien in my own land, a nun bewildered in a tempting garden. It was too much. My destiny was with an austere island still grappling with a mortal foe.

I returned to Taunton four days before the wedding.

Reg greeted me with almost comical relief, his mother with gentle resignation. She was too conscious of my domestic ignorance and the mortal danger threatening her eldest son to be serenely in favour of my return.

As we drove away from the church I felt numb and embarrassed. The swish of chiffon, the white ribbon fluttering from the car’s mascot and the sly grins of the passers-by made me feel like a harlot. Peering through a veil was a singular experience after a decade of peering through goggles. I took a quick look at Reg sitting beside me and felt a wave of encouragement that he too wore the stiff mask of shyness. We held hands and stared absently at the back of the imperturbable chauffeur’s head. I wondered whether he had had as many weddings as I had flying hours. I asked Reg but he was not very interested.

The lingerie, smuggled in from South Africa, was shameless. Whilst Reg waited downstairs and shepherded away the last lingering guests I slipped it on and stared at myself in the mirror. ‘Jezebel’, I muttered, shocked at the reflection. ‘Just like Mother to buy something like this.’ It had not yet occurred to me that the delicious anticipatory tremor of body and soul was legitimate. That the quaint ceremony in church had turned evil into good.

When deciding the date for our marriage I omitted to take a certain matter into consideration. Consequently our brief honeymoon was so in name only. He was convinced that I had contrived it so. I replied unkindly that I thought that that was why he married me. I thought the honeymoon delightful and returned from Brighton’s bracing breezes with a glow on my cheeks and at peace with the world. Reg bore the pangs of un­fulfilled desire with tolerable good humour though with a glint that boded ill for my future immaculate state of grace.

The circumstance of war smiled benevolently on our marriage and, by keeping us homeless, sheltered it from the series of calamities that might have been had I been wrenched from flying and pitchforked into domesticity.

It is difficult to be dull when uniforms meet; when first officer’s stripes rest fleetingly on captain’s pips. We knew little of each other’s work. I flew, he was in the Army. There was no overlapping here and that added to each other’s desirability. He tried to explain the difference between a regiment and a platoon. I, what made an aeroplane fly. Years later we are still trying. Our rendezvous were not the casual peck after a tiring day but the fruit of absence, cables and trunk-calls. We spent the few week-ends and leaves that were synchronized in Taunton or Creek Cottage where holes in his socks and a missing button were still his own problem and we retained the status of life’s guest. Thus our marriage was a continuation of courtship and not the plunge into physical familiarity and domestic responsibility that I had feared.

Few could have had so gentle an introduction to marriage. Few perhaps needed it as much as I.

The cool nip of dawn still lingered under an unblemished
sky as we sat waiting in the crew-room for the day’s ferrying programme. It was a small programme, but I had the plum. A Mosquito fighter-bomber to Aldergrove near Belfast, via Chester. Resisting the offer of swops, few aircraft could compete with the exhilarating Mosquito, I joined the other pilots in the taxi Anson that dropped me off a few minutes later at Odiham aerodrome.

Whilst waiting for the Mosquito to be finally checked over I drew a dog-leg to Aldershot on my maps, scribbled a note for Reg and tied it firmly to a stone. I had dispensed with the refinement of a handkerchief parachute since I had landed in a Hurricane under the eyes of a very senior A.T.A. officer with Reg’s note fluttering brazenly from the tail.

Over Aldershot I announced my arrival in the usual manner with a blip of throttles and a wild pass at nought feet across the barracks. No drill this morning I speculated, puzzled by a large mass of upturned faces, white against the well-groomed officers’ mess lawn. They waved encouragingly. Assuming they wanted a show I obliged. Reg I knew would be stubbornly inside. He had told me a score of times that it was useless to show off over the camp as he would not watch anyway. It was too dangerous. With a final pass that, according to Reg’s Colonel, blew the blasted chimney off the blasted cookhouse, I dropped the note on the lawn, blipped a rebellious farewell to Reg and headed for Chester to refuel.

At Hawarden aerodrome I was greeted with blissful faces. The propellers had barely twitched to a halt before a labourer jumped on the wing, pulled me out of the cockpit and danced a wild jig surrounded by his comrades. The smell of beer, intense in the sunshine, was overpowering. I was accustomed to an occasional riotous welcome but what was this?

‘What’s going on?’ I gasped giddily.

‘Do ye no ken?’ he grinned broadly.

‘Is it Peace?’

‘Aye, it is, lassie. It’s all o’er. Ye can go back to ye bairns noo,’ he shouted, kissing me with a rich smack firmly on the lips. I was still being kissed by weather-beaten faces, like whiskered beer bottles, when the aircrew pick-up van arrived. Not to be outdone, they kissed me too.

The officers’ mess where I drove for a quick lunch seethed like a football stadium. Sergeants, arm-in-arm with officers, swayed blissfully in a sea of spilling pewter tankards. They spotted me hovering in the entrance and with a roar seized me, hoisted me on to the mantelshelf, thrust a crescent of cheese and an enormous tankard of beer in my hands and on their knees, salaamed with drunken grace. In the corner a radio ineffectually blared the details of surrender. No one listened in the intoxicating miasma of victory.

Choosing a moment when a seething mass fell to the floor and had beer gaily poured over them I hopped down, scuttled through the French windows, already stripped of blackout, and walked quickly to the hangars where the Mosquito was being refuelled.

‘How long?’ I asked the refuelling crew.

‘Ten minutes,’ they answered cheerfully. ‘Got to check the oil and coolant yet, Miss.’

‘Please hurry,’ I urged.

They grinned easily. ‘What’s the matter, Miss? The war’s over...’

‘They may cancel the flight,’ I explained.

‘Keen type,’ they chorused. ‘They won’t want it now.’

The words echoed significantly as I headed out over the Irish Sea. They won’t want it now. It’s all over. No more Tempests and Spits and Lanes. No more Wings and stripes, excitement and fun. No more of not caring or knowing what day it is. No more of this, I continued miserably, glancing out at the oil-slicked Merlin engines. Glumly I checked the instruments. They were normal, like a cow placidly munching cud on the way to the abattoir. Perhaps, I comforted myself, they will let us ferry planes to the Far East. No they won’t, sneered better judgement, that and the Continent are men’s prerogative. Mechanically I carried on across the Irish Sea, noticing with a jaundiced eye that it had suddenly lost the sinister threat of no-man’s-land and was transformed into a placid highway where ferry-steamers would soon chug peacefully over the unmarked graves of gallant seamen. The sky, annoyingly impervious to my mood, wore a cloak of pale blue flecked with sun-bleached cumulus clouds like gentle cherubs as though nature, too, welcomed the return of peace.

The sky was lonely as the Mosquito gracefully consumed what might be its last flight. It was as though I were hitched to a suicide. A little drunk with self-pity I gave the rudder a violent kick to induce revolt in this inanimate thing. The Mosquito lurched, grunted and stabilized easily back to course.

The coastline beckoning from the horizon, usually a welcome sight after a sea-crossing, left me cold. It was like a signpost to genteel retirement. At Aldergrove aerodrome, a major base in Coastal Command’s contribution to the Battle of the Atlantic, I dived steeply and shot viciously over the runways. Pulling up in a vertical climb that left me trembling with fright I stall turned, dived back again far too low and shot between the hangars. For ten minutes I flew like a maniac until exhilaration purged the bitter taste of gall. Feeling much better I did a meretricious side-slipping landing and taxied to the ramp.

‘You want to be careful, Miss,’ observed the anxious-looking mechanic as he took my parachute. ‘You only just missed the hangars. The O.C. flying wants to see you. He’s hopping mad,’ he added warningly.

I did not care twopence for the O.C. flying or anyone else at that moment but acquiesced meekly as he delivered his thoroughly deserved reprimand.

Returning to Hamble the following day, to the anticipated decline and fall of the A.T.A. I was relieved to find my melancholy mood premature. No decision had yet been made. It was some weeks before the cracks that were to reduce it to dust first appeared. A few outlying ferry pools were closed down. Some of their pilots, replete with flying, were released. The remainder drifted and lingered like spectators loathe to leave the cricket field when rain stops play.

The indecision was ended after three months by the experiments at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and Japan’s acknowledgement of their success. It would be hollow mockery in 1957 to describe those events as Victory and Defeat.

A.T.A., with few mourners, died with the autumn, despite efforts to find a square hole for it in the paroxysm of peace. As the leaves curled and dropped from the trees, so familiar faces disappeared and ferry pools faded away. Hamble was one of the first to go. Evading a pressing invitation to return to civilian life I contrived a transfer to Prestwick pool and continued the lugubrious task of delivering aircraft to the disposal aerodromes where they waited silently like tombstones for the ignominious hammer. Old ones honoured with the trophies and scars of battle seemed content. New ones, stillborn from the factories, wore a resentful air like children arriving too late for a party.

It was during this period of decline that I discovered I was carrying an unauthorized passenger. A surreptitious visit in civilian clothes to a private doctor confirmed that I was a third of the way to motherhood.

The next few months developed into a race between the final demise of the A.T.A. and my waistline. Being one of the pioneers of the A.T.A. I was obstinately determined to be with it to the last flight. I developed an eagle eye for the insignia of a medical officer and on spotting one would hold in my stomach. My female colleagues, sworn to secrecy, were almost indiscreetly helpful and winced whenever I slung a heavy parachute over my shoulder and climbed in and out of fighters and bombers. Later, as I let out the first tucks in my skirts and slacks we swopped flights whenever I was scheduled for the more formidably massive aircraft, particularly the heavy, sluggish Walrus, apocryphally notorious for producing miscarriages. By such subterfuge I remained flying. Reg’s letters from Germany where he was stationed with the Occupation Forces were burdened with care about his embryonic child being subjected to the indignities of flying. I replied tartly that he or she would probably be a pilot anyway, and what better pre-natal environment.

In November I was posted to White Waltham, for demobilization. It was a poignant moment as the last pool closed down writing
finis
to a great war-spawned organization, but by fortuitous timing I was not sorry. The kicks and assertions going on inside me were becoming insistent. For the first time in my life I was glad to be on the ground.

Turning at the door and content to be Mrs Moggridge, I announced my condition. My last memory of A.T.A. is the look of startled incredulity on the faces of the men-folk as I drove away in a taxi.