Spitfire Girls (40 page)

‘Find your mum, darling,' Mrs Bennell was saying, touching Hana's arm. The Polish girl's hair seemed incandescent despite the chilly edge to the damp Hertfordshire air, the yellow glowing against the dull background of the conservative boarding-house layout like fresh daffodils in a Poor-Law hospital ward.

‘I'm going to help her,' exclaimed Jo.

‘How you do this?' Hana asked, as Josef walked to a corner and pored through a sheaf of papers.

‘I'm going straight to the Air Ministry,' she replied.

‘London is in a pretty bad way, I hear,' Mrs Bennell shouted from the kitchen.

‘That won't stop me,' Jo said, smiling at Hana.

‘Why did this pilot friend of yours want a Ouija Board?' Josef piped, looking up from his papers.

Mrs Bennell emerged abruptly, her hands dripping.

‘She wants to contact a relative of one of our other girls,' she said, wiping her hands on a newly-pressed white apron. ‘This young woman has two brothers in Spain and she thinks they're dead, but if she can't reach them in a séance they must still be alive. It's a load of cobblers, but these two enjoy it. As I said, one's a ballerina – this other is an actress.'

‘They both fly?' Hana asked, her eyes widening and her hair seeming to glow even more against the fading light.

‘Both are aces,' Jo said, moving to the door. ‘Angelique Florian and Stella Teague. Now you can meet them. Come with me.'

As if following a senior officer's command, Hana and Josef fell in with her stride as she marched to the front door.

‘I want to see how Delia managed on that Hind,' she said. ‘If I pass at Upavon it could be mine next.'

Mrs Bennell stood in the doorway as the three pilots waved, like children on their way to school, and her hand moved to the elaborate Ouija Board sitting on the small coffee table. Soon it would be nightfall and London would be suffering. How glad she was that she had no close relations – only her ‘Spitfire Girls', as she called them, whose numbers were increasing all the time, and whom she now feared would soon be disappearing as profligately as the men. It was chill now, but she could not be warmed by tea or by the artificial heat of the tiny electric bar she used so sparingly. Jo had told her of the huge log cabins with raging fires and plentiful delicacies strewn across tables in her strange homeland. Mrs Bennell did not want the faces to disappear, and as she looked at the bizarre Ouija Board her chill was insurmountable.

‘What a bloody ordeal.' Delia Seifert threw her delivery paper on to the table and her Operations Officer smirked.

‘Just think what comes next,' hissed Barbara Newman. She adored her new position, now that Nora had graduated from Ops to being CO Hamble. ‘You get a small rest and then you have to go up with Amy to Silloth. From there you are into a Hart and on to Sealand. Lucky lady!'

‘Thank you.' Delia collapsed on to a chair. ‘Are you interested in hearing what happened? I had to get a man to crank up the engine, then all of a sudden the airspeed indicator was showing a hundred and fifty miles per hour and I was cruising at fifteen hundred feet. For this charming situation I picked zero boost for no special reason because, frankly, I had no idea what to do. Then I opened the mixture lever – the crank man said I must do it or terrible things would befall me – and the engine faltered. Somehow I got here. Am I dead? Is this heaven?'

‘You're here,' said an American voice. Jo clapped Delia on the shoulder, Josef and Hana in tow. ‘These are our Poles – here at last.'

Barbara shook hands with the pair and gestured towards the common room.

‘You'd better start learning how to play cards,' she said. ‘The routine here is simple. We are paid to be safe. You get a chit and do your job. There are no pilots' notes, so one has to be an instant learner. Our acting CO is a man,
Sean Vine. That's all you need to know, except perhaps that we are all in advanced stages of lunacy.'

‘Lunacy?' Josef asked, stonefaced.

‘Other women are safe as houses during this war,' said Delia.

‘Houses are not at all safe,' said Hana.

‘It depends where are you, my dear,' said Barbara, leading them into the smoky room where Alec and Marion, Jim, Amy and Hamilton Slade were talking quietly. ‘Later on you can meet the CO. Now I have to prepare for my upgrading.'

As soon as the Polish pilots had entered the common room, Jo grabbed Barbara's arm and pulled her back into the main operations area.

‘Listen, honey, that girl knows all about Valerie's guy,' Jo bubbled, hardly able to contain herself.

‘How do you know?'

‘She mentioned something about a fellow in Poland who visited the ghetto with his son, then today in the pub some weird man said he had turned in an alien who'd worked in aeroplanes. To me it all sounded like the same guy – that Pavel Wojtek from the newspapers. Maybe we could find him for Valerie.'

‘Would it not be more sensible if we made a concerted effort to find Valerie?' Barbara asked. ‘Everyone seems to be disappearing, and the Germans haven't even invaded.'

Jo responded:

‘I think this Bukova girl knows a lot about old Friedrich and his business. Maybe he is some sort of spy after all! Poor Val!' Now Jo was shouting and Sally Met had emerged from her tiny weather station.

‘Are we all ready to go at the crack of dawn?' Sally asked, her expression uncertain.

‘I've got lots more to do than you people realize,' Jo continued, still breathless. ‘First I have to find Hana's mother, then I have to track down Friedrich, and then I bet I can locate Valerie. For all we know they're in the war zone right now.'

‘Who's in the war zone?' Angelique Florian was standing in the centre of the room.

‘We were speculating on Val's whereabouts,' Barbara quipped. ‘Jo is planning a sojourn in London and we have cabled Hitler to suspend bombing until she has completed her business.'

‘I'll go with you,' Angelique said, smirking.

All eyes bored into her at once.

‘When you are back from Upavon we shall go. I need to see Harold.'

‘It's Harold now, is it?' Barbara crooned.

‘Captain Balfour and I have met once or twice socially, and I have given him a lift in an Oxford, narrowly missing the Warrington balloons in the process. That same Oxford was subsequently hijacked by one Edith Allam. End of story.' Angelique seemed exceptionally edgy on this early evening. The other girls knew she had cultivated Balfour, but none, least of all the childlike Jo, could determine if her motive was to gain social ranking or to climb in ATA. So far, the organization had shown no favouritism to any woman, each girl's achievements receiving individual consideration. They knew Angelique had captivated Balfour, but so had she also ensnared Oscar Toland.

As the noise from the common room suggested the day
was over and that death had happened elsewhere, Barbara turned and wiped from the blackboard the names of girls who had completed a staggering flying agenda that day, while Sally returned to her weather station. Delia had been taking in their conversation and buried herself in paperwork. Jo looked at Angelique and smiled:

‘When I'm back we'll go to London and solve everything before 1941, okay?'

‘Jo, Balfour is our key to everything, I promise you.' Angelique draped her arm around the girl's shoulder, pulling her in the direction of the smoke screen.

Now they were in the common room, and Jo pulled away. She wanted Alec to speak to her.

‘Has Cal done it yet?' demanded Jo, digging her fingernail into his shirt.

‘You would know that better than I, wee lassie,' burred Alec.

‘Please don't joke, Alec. I need to know before Upavon,' pleaded Marion.

Alec turned and took her small hand in his own large, rough palm. ‘When you're back, he'll be doing something very special. I can't say what, because it is sensitive.'

Marion glared at him.

‘Does the Ministry care about sensitive people?' asked Jo, tears on their way.

‘Spits are being churned out faster than we can deliver them,' he murmured. ‘Cal is on to something far more pressing. He deserves this special fortune.'

Jo could detect a slight resentment in Alec's voice – she remembered her father being bitter about young men getting into shiny new machines – his bitterness more fierce than
any he had felt about her mother's demise. She moved away from Alec and Marion, walking slowly to the fresh air at the rear doorway of the building. At the back, Delia's Hind was being serviced and with suddenness her mind moved to the imminent arrival of the Australians. She had heard a rumour that Edith Allam would bring more of these girls than Americans, and that she would also be bringing her coloured boyfriend in the payload. What would she and her father have been doing had the German economy flourished and a ranting Schicklgruber been ignored? Could Germany have passed him off as a madman during a different time in its history? She yearned for a salt-water taffy from Atlantic City, but now the Hind was almost ready and Delia was standing alongside her.

‘I take it up again tomorrow, or I should say, it takes me up,' she said, her voice weak with exhaustion. The Hind had been Delia's fourth ferry job that day, and she too yearned for something sweet.

‘Tomorrow I go to Upavon,' Jo murmured looking at the taller Delia, whose close-cropped hair and craggy features confused the American, raised in an environment of stars and Hollywood fantasies.

‘You'll pass,' Delia said, punching her good-naturedly. ‘Today I was terrified – more than I've ever been in my life, Jo. For a few moments I felt as if I were watching my own demise. It seemed as natural as eating.'

‘Eating can be fun.'

‘So can death.'

‘Not yet.' Jo peered at Delia, then looked out at the Hind, now fading in the near darkness of blackout. It seemed to be evaporating, and she craved at that moment some
transformation whereby she might awaken in Main Street and be in a land where night and the streetlights burned until dawn. She had been told that Schickelgruber had made a pact with Joe Kennedy and that the Nazis would take over America calmly.

‘Your boyfriend is being pushed into a special operation.'

Delia's voice shattered Jo's imaginings and the youth's heart pounded. ‘I should not be telling you this, but he has progressed with stunning rapidity and the Air Ministry is giving him a big assignment immediately he goes RAF.'

‘Everyone is disappearing,' Jo said, trying to hide her horror at the revelation. Why had Cal not told her himself? She wanted to change the subject. ‘Right after Upavon I'm going to London to find Valerie and Hana's mother, and when I get back I'll have to find Cal.'

Delia wished she could retrieve her words, which had pierced like darts into the American teenager's slender figure. Darkness had overtaken them, the stillness of cool Hertfordshire making the war seem an absurdity to a child aged not much older than the local farm's cat. She shook, and she was frightened.

Valerie Cobb was also frightened.

Men had been shouting at her all day and every time one of them made another pronouncement the projection room inside her head registered an imaginary aircraft being ferried from A to B. It was her best way of keeping stable during this exceptional ordeal. When an accusation was bellowed at her she thought of a Lysander or a Magister being flown lovingly along a familiar route by one of her choice pilots from the all-women Hatfield pool. Each vision gave her a sense of space and consecutive time, preventing her from exploding into the babble of the insane repetition of her name, address and date of birth over and over and over. She was no longer Commanding Officer Hatfield, nor was she Head of ATA. Men were shouting and she was forced to listen. There was nowhere else for her to go. She had no other work.

‘How is it you were not aware of these photographs being in the possession of ATA personnel?'

This one was enjoying himself, his passion spilling over to such an extent that Valerie wondered if he would have anything left for the rest of his life after her trauma.

‘If I never knew about the pictures, how could I have confiscated them?'

She knew he was trying to prove that leadership had ended with Sir Henry where the Cobb genes were concerned. Now the next one was bleating:

‘Are you aware that by allying yourself with Max Beaverbrook and his insatiable hunger for publicity, you
have connected lady pilots forever in the public's mind with Nazis like Fischtal and sympathizers like Allam?'

‘You speak as if they were brands of baking soda.'

None of the men laughed.

Where was Lady Londonderry?

‘Valerie, have you no shame about Kranz and the Fulmar?'

She pitied this particular inquisitor, who had allowed his twenty-four-hour-a-day infatuation for her to ally him with her tormentors. She wished the circumstances had been more heroic – she could have flown off course and crash-landed in occupied territory and experienced the same victimization from an aroused fascist. Her plight would have been flashed across the nation's newspapers and all the men present in this room might have volunteered for an airlift rescue mission. Now she was the enemy within, and they liked it very much.

‘Your association with Friedrich Kranz, which has become public knowledge and has brought some considerable disgrace upon your family name, and upon this Ministry, goes beyond a sordid immoral liaison and enters the realm of espionage.'

‘
Espionage!
I do love that word!' Valerie lit a cigarette and they watched, her image meshing into the same form of fantasy that could allow Spanish rapists to pin freshly peeled testicles next to a picture of a movie goddess.

‘It would be appreciated if you could refrain from your Rita Hayworth pose.' This admirer had been knighted for deeds done in the last war.