Spitfire Girl (18 page)

On the day of the ground examinations, in the sepulchral silence of the examination room, I glanced at the other students, robustly healthy but biting nails and chewing pencils in agonized concentration. The invigilator looked at me sternly as I raised a hand.

‘Yes?’

‘Please, sir, I want to leave the room.’

There was a deafening guffaw as the invigilator perplexedly scratched his head, followed by an interested silence as he strove with the problem.

‘All right,’ he announced. ‘But you are on your honour not to cheat.’

I accepted thankfully, returned after five minutes and completed the test papers on Navigation, Meteorology, Signals, Airmanship and Armaments. The following day I took the Wings flying test on an Oxford aircraft with the Chief Flying Instructor. What I hoped, with my experience, would be a formality turned out to be one hour and forty minutes of relentless appraisal. I landed bathed in sweat and exhaustion, quite sure that I had failed. The following day the results were pinned up on the notice board. The entire course, including myself, had passed.

After the ceremonial graduation parade, during which the Wings were formally pinned on, cocktails were served in the officers’ mess.

‘What are you going to do now, Jackie?’ asked one with Wings as new as mine, in the hubbub of congratulations. He was a nice young man who had consistently refused to believe that I was a married woman of thirty-two, and had behaved accordingly during the course. It was a pertinent question and one for which I was unprepared in the momentary bliss of wearing Wings.

‘I don’t know,’ I answered. ‘Something will turn up.’

The following day in an end-of-term atmosphere that reminded me of Witney Flying College at the outbreak of war, I bade farewell enviously as the others left for Vulcans, Victors and Hunters, and drove home to a reproachful pile of washing-up and a martyred husband.

Nothing
turned up. With a new flood of optimism born of the quaint belief that if I were capable enough to win R.A.F. Wings in addition to civil licences I was equally capable of a civil flying job, I retraced the arid path of refusals. Drove from bleak aerodromes in Scotland to opulent offices in Mayfair. Begged, cajoled, pleaded and, in desperation, contrived an appearance in the B.B.C. programme ‘Down Your Way’, hoping that Richard Dimbleby’s avuncular unctuousness might provoke an interest in my plight. But it was hopeless. The answer was always a regretful shake of the head.

‘Why do you make so much fuss, Jackie?’ asked my mother-in-law. ‘If you can’t get a flying job, so what? There are other things in life.’

I tried to tell her it was true there were other things in life but, apart from my family, they came to nought. In those I was as others, indistinguishable from the herd. I am, as is evident from this book, a commonplace person destined to hold a common place in life unless, by flying, I could achieve that distinction, that difference from others that surely is the most urgent reason for inhabiting this earth.

The final piece in the mosaic of misery fitted in diabolically soon afterwards. Owing to the drastic economy cuts of that time the V.R. flying training schools were closed down and only those pilots who had recently completed service in the regular Royal Air Force would be given an opportunity of flying service aircraft. The Wings that normally prelude a career in military aviation had, in my case, proved to be its epilogue.

It was typical. One moment I was moderately content. The sky was a garden in which I could pluck flowers and wander with the clouds. The next it was like a private enclosure hedged with signs baldly stating ‘Trespassers will be Prosecuted’.

A few months later I landed at Prestwick aerodrome
after a charter flight from Weston-super-Mare and taxied along a tarmac bustling with the arrival and departure of international flights.

‘Jackie,’ shouted a voice as I climbed out of the cockpit. I looked across to the crew, disembarking from a Stratocruiser parked nearby, as one detached himself from the others and ran over to me. It was an old friend, a pilot in the A.T.A. during the early days of the war, now authoritative in the uniform of a B.O.A.C. Captain. A shadow of beard emphasized his tired but content eyes. He had just arrived from New York. We reminisced as we walked together to the Control Tower, lied to each other that we had not changed a bit and, as all pilots do who have not met for years, told each other who had been killed.

‘Bit of a come-down, Jackie,’ he observed sympathetically, looking back at my lilliputian Fairchild Argus parked in the shadow of his massive Stratocruiser. I followed his eyes and nodded wryly. ‘What happened about that Sound Barrier business?’ he asked. ‘I read about it in the
Express
.’

I told him.

‘You could still be the first British woman...’ he suggested.

I shook my head. ‘I need a job.’

‘Have you tried ferrying? There’s a lot of war surplus aircraft going overseas. I heard that Air Services have got a contract to ferry Spitfires out to Burma.’

‘To Burma? In Spits!’

‘Sounds improbable I know, but...’

I said good-bye hurriedly. I am always as reposed as a Chinese cracker when prospects loom, no matter how dim, and took off on the return flight to Weston-super-Mare. Turning on to a southerly course I sent my mind back twenty years, it was a shock when I realized it
was
twenty years, to the school atlas and the red blob in South-East Asia that denoted a far-flung outpost of Empire. It would be a different colour now. Teak, I remembered, and Tin and Temples. What else? Elephants and fabulous jewels and a faint memory of a picture of smiling flat-faced ‘natives’ in gay costume.

As the Bristol Channel glinted on the horizon like a symbol of foreign seas I wanted to go to Burma so badly I resorted to blatant bribery. ‘Please, God, I won’t eat meat or chocolates for three months if I get the job.’

Two days later I flew in a borrowed Proctor aircraft from Swansea to Air Services at Croydon. The secretary was kindly but not very encouraging. ‘I want to see the Manager or Chief Pilot,’ I insisted. Shrugging, she knocked on a door marked ‘private’ and edged it open.

‘There is a pilot here, Mr Stock. Wants a job.’

‘Christ! How many ferry-pilots are there in England? Must they all come here? Too busy; take his name.’

‘It’s a woman pilot, sir.’

‘Oh. That’s all I want.’

That voice. I knew it from somewhere. Emboldened I pushed the door open.

‘Jackie! Jackie Sorour. Come in, come in.’

Though the link was tenuous, a casual meeting when I delivered a bomber to an R.A.F. squadron ten years before, I soon convinced him that we were very dear friends.

‘Yes,’ he affirmed, ‘we have a contract with the Burmese Government to ferry Spitfires from Cyprus to Burma.’

He looked at my fingers and grinned. They were crossed.

‘We need another pilot,’ he admitted. ‘You’ve flown Spitfires of course. What have you been doing lately?’

I told him.

‘That seems to be all right,’ he said. ‘Insurance you know. Aviation is run by the insurance companies these days.’

I agreed. I would have agreed to anything he said. Make it six months without meat or chocolate.

He caressed the back of his neck thoughtfully. My face ached from its fixed smile. On the walls were neatly framed maps and charts. From the next office a typewriter tapped unconcernedly. ‘I’m not sure that the Burmese will accept you. You’ll have to fly right through the Middle East. For a woman it might be awkward... Purdah and all that, you know.’

‘There isn’t much Purdah on aerodromes,’ I argued with a cringing mixture of obsequiousness and firmness. ‘Even in the East.’

‘Yes. But don’t the Burmese take a poor view of... er... emancipation?’

‘Do you?’

‘Why me? No, I’m all for it.’

‘Well?’

‘O.K.,’ he grinned. ‘Leave your licence – it’s valid.’ I nodded, ‘And a resume of your past experience with my secretary. I’ll see what I can do. But’, he warned, ‘don’t bank on it.’

A ghastly week passed before the telephone rang.

‘Jackie?’

‘Yes.’

‘Bobbie Stock here. Can you leave for Cyprus in a week?’

‘I can leave tomorrow if you want me to...’

‘That won’t be necessary,’ he laughed. ‘Can you come up to London tomorrow? Visas and things.’

‘Of course.’

‘Fine. Meet me at the Royal Aero Club, at three o’clock. Robinson and Pearce, the other two pilots, will be there with me. I want you to meet them. You
have
flown Jets?’

‘Yes. Meteors and Vampires.’

‘Good. There are four new Vampires to go out to Cyprus for on-delivery to India. You people can take them – I’m taking one – out as far as Cyprus and then carry on with the Spitfires. Good-bye.’

‘How many flights to Burma?’ I interjected quickly.

‘I’m not sure yet. At least three. Maybe more. ‘Bye. Don’t forget your passport.’

‘How long will I be away?’

‘Oh... er... about six weeks.’

I
tried my best in the lounge of the Royal Aero Club,
against a background of trophies and signed portraits of illustrious names in aviation, to be as blasé as Stock and the others. As tea was served Robinson, who would be responsible for leading the ferry flights, scrutinized me over his cup with a faint hint of coldness in his eyes. Under his scrutiny I was as garrulous as a sparrow when I realized I had been too quiet and as taciturn as a tomb when I realized I had talked too much. I learned later that Robinson was relieved to discover that I was not the brash hermaphrodite he had anticipated but, on the contrary, a meekly obedient female.

I was too anxious to please to probe the evasive air of conspiracy that arose whenever anything other than immediate plans were discussed. Consequently I returned to Taunton that evening with only the haziest idea of the number of Spitfires to be delivered and how long I would be away. Two instructions only were definite: Report to London in three days packed and ready to leave. And bring my R.A.F.V.R. uniform.

Jill was home from boarding school for a few days and, with Reg, saw me off at the station. She was solemn, her face stiff from gainsaying tears as she clutched my hand. Reg wore the resigned look of one who sends others off to adventure and returns to an empty home. As they dwindled, waving furiously, on the platform and I settled in a corner seat I tried to be as conscience-free as a man leaving under similar circumstances. After all, it’s only for a few weeks.

Stock, the two other pilots and I spent two days obtaining visas and fuel carnets, renewing inoculations and familiarizing ourselves with the Vampires at Hatfield. It was a vastly different Hatfield. The prosperous new buildings and hangars and the reverberating shriek of Jet aircraft eloquently told the story of aviation’s progress since the piston-engined days of 1941. With a twinge of nostalgia I noticed that the wooden huts of A.T.A. had vanished under a new administrative building.

I looked at my Vampire, one of a neat row of four, in the same way one looks for oneself in a group photograph. The other three were unimportant. That one, number L.D.504 was mine. Mine. It looked wickedly sleek and low. The unfamiliar Indian Air Force markings gave it an exotic élan. Slipping away from the others standing on the tarmac I got into the cockpit and closed the hood. The instruments lay at rest but the pungent smell of jet-fuel and hydraulic oil were like the smell of the sea to a retired lonely mariner. This time tomorrow, I breathed, I’ll be in Malta.

We were. And we stayed overnight, after a trouble-free flight from Europe’s grey skies to the galaxy of blue and gold welcoming us to the fringes of the Middle East. Early the following morning we took off for El Adam where we had an early lunch and walked in the silent derelict North African desert. Its parched useless emptiness mocked the blood it had absorbed. In the afternoon, after changing into khaki, we continued in formation to Cyprus.

After clearing Customs and Immigrations formalities Pearce and I sipped tea in the restaurant. Robinson joined us later.

‘Stock will be back in a moment,’ he said as he sat down.

‘I didn’t see any Spitfires on the aerodrome,’ I remarked, ‘they are in the hangars, I suppose?’

‘They are not here,’ he said shortly.

I looked at him in astonishment.

‘You’ll have to know sometime,’ he said. ‘The Spitfires are in Israel.’

‘Israel!’

‘Shush!’ he motioned with a pained expression.

‘But why the secrecy?’ I whispered.

‘There’s a war on over there,’ he answered simply, ‘and the Arabs are blockading Israel. That’s why we are flying from Cyprus and not direct from Israel. As long as the Arabs believe that the Spits have nothing to do with Israel we can fly over Arab territory and use R.A.F. bases in Iraq for refuelling. Incidentally that’s why we are wearing R.A.F. uniforms.’

His eyes included us both as he summed up: ‘You realize now why there’s been so much secrecy. We have full clearance to fly over Lebanon, Syria and Iraq but if the Arabs find out these Spitfires originally came from Israel we’ll be up the creek without a paddle. So keep your mouths shut!’

‘What markings will the Spits have?’ asked Pearce.

‘Burmese Air Force.’

‘The Arabs can’t shoot down a Burmese plane just like that,’ I protested. ‘It’s... it’s piracy.’

‘In the last few years, in this area,’ Robinson explained with weary cynicism, ‘umpteen aircraft have been shot down and questions asked afterwards.’

‘When will the Spits get here,’ asked Pearce.

‘A couple of days. Israeli Air Force pilots are flying them over. They’ll be wearing civvies, of course.’

After Stock joined us we drove to our hotel in Kyrenia to await the arrival of the first three Spitfires. During the drive Bobbie Stock enlarged on Robinson’s brief outline.

The Israeli Government had sold thirty Spitfires including armaments and spares, to the Burmese Air Force. ‘That’s an odd thing to do when there’s a war on,’ I commented. He explained that, although there was a constant state of tension on the Israeli borders with resultant local scuffles, the war at the moment was more cold than hot and both sides were taking the opportunity of re-equipping with Jet fighters.