by Shirley Mann
‘You Roberta Hollis? Here are your chitties,’ an Operations Manager called through the open door. ‘You’d better get going. You have four today.’
The ATA pilots took turns to be Operations Managers, which was a nightmare job involving ridiculous logistics getting pilots and planes where they were supposed to be, and although she did not recognise the tall, dark girl behind the desk, Bobby gave her a sympathetic smile as she took the top sheet from the huge pile of chits the girl was holding.
Bobby scanned her list – a Swordfish to White Waltham, a Barracuda to Kemble and an Albacore to Woolsington, then a Hurricane back to Hamble. But no Spitfire.
‘Damn,’ she muttered. She was yet to fly a Spit, but she had gone through the instructions so many times in her head, she believed she could have flown one blindfold. She was just longing for the chance to pilot one. It was the aircraft all ATA pilots loved above all others.
‘Well, the plan is to get back to base tonight and my own bed,’ she called over her shoulder to Daphne as they struggled out onto the airfield, with their parachutes and tiny overnight bags. ‘But we’ll see how that works out. Remember what they told us in training – England doesn’t have a climate, it has . . .’
‘WEATHER!’ they both shouted together, laughing.
‘See you in the restroom if we get back in time, then,’ Daphne said, but Bobby was already checking through her notes to see how the Swordfish behaved in high winds.
Bobby stared up at the sky, threatening the clouds with fury if they got too thick or started to run too fast. She did not want to get stuck again tonight and pleaded with them to behave and then ran over to the Met Office to check the forecast.
‘I haven’t been back to base for three nights,’ she told the good-looking Met officer behind the desk. He had nice eyes, she thought. ‘Please tell me it’s going to be fine in Newcastle this afternoon.’
He glanced down at his charts, shifted a few papers and then his face cleared.
‘Yep, you should be ok. Just don’t go anywhere near the west coast.’
Bobby looked scornfully at him. He was not that good-looking, she decided. ‘I do know my east from west, you know.’
She strode quickly along the edge of the runway, narrowing her eyes to check the surface and then, satisfied that no new holes had appeared, went over to the Swordfish and walked round it, appraising it. An engineer was making final checks.
‘Ah, got a girl, have we? Well, I’ve just fixed this aircraft, don’t you go breaking it.’
‘You’re only saying that because I’m a girl!’
He paused for a moment before he walked clear of the wings. ‘Actually, do you know what? I’m not. It’s usually the men who get them damaged in the first place.’
Bobby laughed and mounted the aircraft, settling herself into the pilot’s seat. She took her helmet off, shook out her hair and prepared to concentrate fully.
She got her maps out, her compass, protractor, ruler and pencil. She had ten minutes to prepare, but she had done the route from Bicester to White Waltham before, and the one from there to Kemble, so it was just the third one up to RAF Woolsington on the north east coast that she was unfamiliar with. She drew straight black lines to give her the most direct routes she would need to follow with the four different aircraft, noting the landmarks en route, then she checked the handling notes. It was the fourth Swordfish she had flown that week, so she was quite familiar with its foibles and she settled into the seat happily and put her helmet back on.
Bobby carried out her pre-flight checks going through the HTTMPFGG – hydraulics, trim, tension, mixture, pitch, petrol, flaps, gills, gauges, otherwise remembered as ‘Hot Tempered MP Fancies Girls’ and gently eased the throttle to start taxiing. Her shoulders relaxed. It was just her and the aircraft and that was exactly how she liked it.
*
Mathilda Hollis shaded her eyes against the sun as she followed the path of a plane that was flying above Salhouse Farm on the outskirts of Norwich. It vaguely occurred to her that it could be her daughter at the controls, but she shrugged her shoulders and carried on wandering with her scissors amongst the early summer roses. She kept looking fearfully back at the red-bricked farmhouse she supposed was her home, nervous as always that she was doing something wrong.
There was little sign of the dimple-cheeked, dark-haired beauty who had pierced the sang-froid of the reserved Andrew Hollis just before the Great War broke out. This was a deflated woman whose clothes hung off her once nicely-rounded figure. In the privacy of the warm farmhouse kitchen, the cook, Mrs Hill, explained to any new staff that Mrs Hollis was ‘not well’, a term the family used to explain Mathilda Hollis’s distant stare, but everyone in the village knew that she had been like this since she had struggled to give birth to twins in 1915. One, the longed-for son, managed to take only enough breaths to be christened with the name John before he died in his mother’s arms, while the other, a lusty girl, had gone on to thrive, making enough noise for two. Mathilda’s elder sister, Agnes, had always thought that Roberta’s loud and relentless screams were simply to remind the family she was still there.
Dressed as always in a pale grey, threadbare dress, with a buttoned-up collar, Agnes stood by the latticed drawing room window, watching the diminutive figure of her younger sister in the garden. She felt the usual mix of gloom and concern, and frowned at the sight of her sister meandering amongst the roses, clipping an odd one randomly. Agnes bit her lip, hoping her fragile sibling would remember not to cut herself.
It was a bright June day and, seeing a couple of men walking slowly past the stone gate at the end of the drive, Agnes thought back to a similar day in 1919 when the village men came home from the Great War. So much had changed she thought, and yet not nearly enough.
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First published in Great Britain in 2019 by Zaffre
This ebook edition published in 2019 by
ZAFFRE
80-81 Wimpole St, London, W1G 9RE
Copyright © Shirley Mann, 2019
Cover design by Henry Steadman
The moral right of Shirley Mann to be identified as Author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright,
Designs and Patents Act, 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organisations, places and events are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN: 978–1–78576–938–2
Paperbook ISBN: 978–1–78576–937–5
This ebook was produced by IDSUK (Data Connection) Ltd
Zaffre is an imprint of Bonnier Books UK
www.bonnierbooks.co.uk
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