One, Margot Duhalde, came from Chile. Margot had never left the country until she squeezed into a car to drive over the Andes to Mendoza, bound for England and the war, in April 1941. She spoke no English and had no English relatives. What she did have was a commercial pilot’s licence – the first ever awarded to a Chilean woman – and a nineteen-year-old’s unshaken self-belief.
Duhalde was born in 1921 on a farm near Rio Bueno, 500 miles south of Santiago, the second of twelve children and the oldest of six sisters. She would later write of her difficulty in finding a flying instructor willing to spend time on someone so young who was a woman and ‘half-peasant’ into the bargain, but in truth the family farm – sitting directly beneath the airmail route from Temuco in the north to Puerto Montt – was prosperous and its owners middle class.
Now in her early eighties, Margot lives in Santiago’s diplomatic district. She greeted me at the door of her comfortable apartment in dark red lipstick, aviator sunglasses and a lime green trouser suit. We descended immediately to street level, where the doorman had brought round a shiny silver Peugeot with red seatbelts and racing trim. Weaving past cars that dared to brake in front of her, we drove first to the Air Force Officers’ Club for lunch (they knew her here as ‘Commandante’) and then to the Aeroclub de Santiago at the foot of the Andes. Here Margot found a table on a large, shaded terrace, ordered beer, and talked.
‘I dreamed of flying – I wanted to be up there with these dots in the sky,’ she said, recalling her childhood memory of the mail planes. Too much dreaming was one of the reasons she was thrown out of school in Rio Bueno and sent as a boarder to the Santiago Lyceo when she was twelve. From there, most days, she would escape to watch the flying at the Aeroclub de Chile.
At sixteen, Duhalde was given a flying lesson for her birthday. With her father’s blessing and money, she worked for a year towards her commercial licence and then smuggled herself into El Bosque, the country’s top military flying school and a citadel of elitist machismo. As a woman she could never have set foot there officially, so she went as a protégée of Cesar Copeto, the school’s maintenance chief. Copeto was something of a national treasure having been, in 1909, the first Chilean to fly. For two years Duhalde came and went as his accessory, learning mechanics and aerodynamics on the Gipsy Moths that he maintained. When the war in Europe came she wanted to be involved, but her only connection to it was her grandfather, who had grown up in the French Basque village of Louhossoa.
Logistically, at least, it was enough. When de Gaulle issued his call to the Free French in June 1940, Margot Duhalde presented herself at the French consulate in Santiago and volunteered. How could she get from there to Europe? ‘That was de Gaulle’s problem,’ she said.
Margot went home to pack and bid a tearful farewell to her mother, whom she tried to reassure with the white lie that she would probably only be sent to Québec or Montreal as a flight instructor. Her father, whose favourite she was, then travelled with her as far as Santiago.
I asked her how much she knew about the war for which she had volunteered. ‘Nothing. Just that it had been declared,’ she said. ‘And the Germans were winning.’ She told a little story about a friend and fellow woman pilot of German extraction who warned her just before she left that Britain would be overrun by the time she got there. ‘But it’s okay,’ the friend had said. ‘I’ll come and rescue you.’
In the end, Margot said, she had made her decision to volunteer for the Allied war effort on instinct – ‘an instinct to learn more about France and where I came from, and to find out why my blood wasn’t totally Chilean’. She knew what she was doing was unusual, but saw no mystery in it.
In April 1941, 139 Chileans left to join the French, divided into groups according to which force they hoped to join. There were thirteen in the air force group, including one other woman, a nurse. Some went by ship from Valparaiso via Panama. Duhalde, the nurse and two young Basque men were assigned a car to Argentina. They drove north from Santiago, then east up the Valle de Aconcagua beneath South America’s highest mountain, to Mendoza. From there they went by train across the Pampas to Buenos Aires, and from there by the Rangitata, a Norwegian-registered freighter, to Liverpool.
Duhalde’s first impressions of Britain were that it was ‘horrible’. Like the Americans who followed her, she was profoundly shocked by the effects of bombing on the fabric of the country, and of rationing on its pinched and pallid people. But there was an additional difficulty for Duhalde. Relations between Churchill and de Gaulle were less than cordial. Despite having ordered the destruction of the French fleet at Oran the previous year, the Prime Minister’s strategy towards Marshal Pétain and the collaborators was to keep talking; he could not risk an official state of war with Vichy. And this de Gaulle could not be seen to stomach. He had spent much of 1940 in Libreville, the capital of French Gabon, fuming at perfidious Albion. Churchill was also refusing to take at face value the bona fides of the polyglot volunteer army arriving at British ports under the auspices of the Free French. Who knew where their true allegiances lay? What better cover story for a dedicated Nazi agent than to have come from South America to the defence of France? The result for the thirteen Chileans disembarking from the Rangitata in May 1941 was that instead of being welcomed, they were arrested and interned.
‘Scotland Yard was waiting for us,’ Duhalde remembered. She was taken to London and spent five days in jail there while her story was checked. Only then was she handed over to the Free French, who, unsure what to do with her, put her up in the Morton Hotel on Russell Square.
As she killed time in London, it quickly became clear to Duhalde that in her place de Gaulle’s London-based staff had been expecting a man. There was no flying of any sort by women under French command in the war. Margot now believes that her name, in the chaos of setting up a government in exile and communicating with a consulate 8,000 miles away, had become abbreviated and confused with Marcel, or simply reduced to ‘M’.
She stayed at the hotel for three miserable months before being sent to Wellingborough in the smog-choked East Midlands to cook and clean for a French woman running a convalescent home for injured pilots. ‘I came to work in the war and found myself working as a maid,’ she recalled with dismay. In London, she had been scared and lonely. Now she was bored and lonely, and angry with herself for entrusting so much to hope and her imagination.
And then what she describes as ‘a miracle’ helped her escape Wellingborough. A French military chaplain attached to the Free French in London had noticed her at the hotel in Russell Square, and asked her story. He passed it on to a French pilot, Pierre Orlemans, who happened to have been in Chile three years earlier when Duhalde’s success in earning a commercial licence had briefly made the news. Orlemans wrote to her in Wellingborough, telling her about the ATA and offering to arrange an introduction. He spoke little English and no Spanish. Margot spoke neither French nor English. They met in London and continued, largely mute, to Hatfield, Duhalde clutching a letter that Orlemans had written for her and addressed to the only ATA name he knew. That name was Lettice Curtis.
On being presented with Orlemans’s letter, the magnificent Lettice, according to Duhalde, read it, said ‘not a word’ and waved in the direction of Pauline Gower’s office. She then disappeared.
Gower received them more warmly and found a French-speaking cadet to translate. Margot was soon airborne again for the first time since leaving Chile four months earlier, this time in a Tiger Moth, which was substantially more powerful than the Gipsy Moths she was used to. A Mrs Ebbage in the front seat issued instructions by means of hand signals.
‘I had never seen so many planes in the sky,’ Duhalde recalled. ‘There was a Dutch elementary flying school in the circuit in some early Mosquitoes and when I made a reasonable landing no-one was more surprised than me.’ Accepted in principle by the ATA, she was eventually released from her commitment to the Free French after the intervention of the Chilean ambassador. She rep
orted for duty at Hatfield on 1 September 1941.
Her comrades, Curtis apart, were mildly amused. They nicknamed her ‘Chile’. She still spoke virtually no English and knew the layout of England from the air no better than from the ground. On her first solo cross-country flight, not helped by snow covering most roads and railway lines, she became hopelessly lost among barrage balloons over North London. She eventually decided to force land in a field near Enfield. Duhalde described what happened next with an indulgent grin:
The field had seemed clean from 2,000 feet, but I was not wearing my spectacles. Close-up, it turned out to be full of wooden posts put there by the local anti-aircraft battalion, but I landed anyway. I had to come down under some power cables but over a low wall which took my wheels off and tipped me forward in the snow.
Onlookers who had watched her descent ran to find her conscious but with blood on her face, no papers, and no command of English. She was arrested. The bemused Enfield police allowed her a telephone call, but when she asked for the ATA she was put through to headquarters at White Waltham rather than the women’s pool at Hatfield. They sent a car for her but the driver neither recognised nor understood her and would not vouch for her. ‘No-one knew who I was or where Chile was,’ she said. ‘In the end I just said, “Pauline Gower”. And they phoned her and let me go.’
Gower was still acutely sensitive to bad publicity. At this point she seems to have begun to see ‘Chile’ more as a liability than a brave new pilot heaven-sent from the far end of the world. Duhalde was dispatched to Luton to complete her training. When Luton pointed out that it was hard to teach her anything when she spoke no English, a make-or-break meeting was arranged at White Waltham to decide her fate, to which Duhalde was invited.
‘Pauline Gower threw me out,’ she said. ‘“You can’t fly; it’s not possible,” she told me. But I insisted that I could.’ In the end, compromise won out. Captain A. R. O. MacMillan, the softhearted chief instructor who had agreed to give Diana Barnato a flight test with only ten hours under her belt, listened to Duhalde’s pleas in private and then suggested to Gower that she be allowed to spend three months in the hangars brushing up on Tiger Moth mechanics and, more especially, on her English. Gower agreed. ‘But it was MacMillan who gave me that chance,’ she said firmly. ‘I’d gone into his office and cried like the Magdalena, and no-one tried to stop me after that.’
They all remember the names of the ships that brought them – the Rangitata, the Avila Star, the Julius Caesar, the Beaver Hill – and they all kept the tickets of their voyages to England as souvenirs. The Rangitata brought Margot Duhalde: a month of zigzagging out of the River Plate and northward round the great bulge of Brazil, two weeks after the scuttling of the Graf Spee. The wolf packs had never been further from home, nor more vengeful.
The Avila Star had set sail only a few months earlier, in the winter of 1940/41, also from Buenos Aires. It carried only a few passengers bound for England (its captain joked that even the fish were swimming in the opposite direction), but among them were Maureen and Joan Dunlop, sisters travelling without chaperones, which had occasioned a good deal of adverse comment in polite Anglo-Argentine society. They had no idea when or if they would return home, but promised their parents they would write three times a week.
Maureen and Joan had started their journey nearly 1,000 miles south-west of Buenos Aires on a ranch not far from San Carlos de Bariloche, capital of Argentina’s Andean Lake District (and ironically a magnet for Nazi fugitives after the war). The ranch was not far, either, from Margot Duhalde’s mother and eleven siblings on their Rio Bueno farm in Chile; perhaps a day and a half through the mountains by horse and canoe. But it was an awfully long way from Australia, where Joan and Maureen’s father had been born.
Eric Chase Dunlop was ‘an amazing man, very tall, terrifically energetic’, Maureen recalled, and, like her, he hated being surrounded by people. He had travelled to Patagonia on spec after being wounded three times while serving with the Royal Field Artillery in the First World War. The vastness and the emptiness suited him and his new English wife, and the Merino sheep he’d imported from his native New South Wales. He worked for the Argentine Southern Land Company. His ‘office’ was a pair of highland estancias straddling the Maquinchao River and the mountains either side of it. When Maureen said she’d sooner stay there with him than follow her sister to Cheltenham Ladies’ College, he entirely understood. So Joan continued her education at boarding school alone, training afterwards to be a nurse. For young Maureen, meanwhile, a governess was hired who in due course was required to leave gaps in her timetables to enable her charge to disappear for flying lessons.
‘I always wanted to fly,’ she said simply. ‘I nearly broke my neck a couple of times jumping off a ledge at the top of the hill behind our house, until I was absolutely forbidden to do it when I was eight or nine years old.’
As a teenager she was shy, but comfortable with horses and with people who flew: people with whom she had a connection that had nothing to do with other people. ‘They were a marvellous bunch. They mostly belonged to the Aeroclub Argentino.’ They were mostly men, and mostly in oil, cattle or sheep. When she was fifteen, a local Shellmex manager got her into the Aeroclub, which entitled her to cheap tuition. She had her licence two years later.
Maureen now raises Arab horses in Norfolk, but still speaks wistfully of her Patagonian childhood. Once the war came, and soon afterwards an issue of Flight magazine with an article about the women of the ATA, there was little discussion about where the Dunlop daughters’ duty would take them. ‘My father said a war’s a war. It’s not something you hang about over.’
Six years after gaining her licence in the Argentine, Maureen Dunlop climbed out of a Fairey Barracuda at No. 15 Ferry Pool in her summer flying uniform and became almost famous. She was wearing a white shirt and dark tie with her sleeves rolled up above her elbows. It was hot, and she was relieved to be able to unclip her harness, sling a parachute over her shoulder and shake out her hair. Many of the pilots at the all-women’s pool at Hamble had chosen to cut their hair short for reasons of fashion and convenience, but Miss Dunlop had left hers long even though it could be a nuisance to gather up into a flying helmet. As her hair tumbled out, backlit by the afternoon sun, the waiting photographer from the Picture Post could hardly believe his luck. Maureen didn’t look at him, but she did smile and raise a hand to run through her newly liberated tresses, her long fingers looking as if they had just emerged from a manicure rather than a torpedo bomber’s cockpit. As she did so the sun glinted on a gold bracelet on her wrist, contrasting with the functional steel ring on the end of a loose harness strap. It was her cover-girl moment, literally. More than any other single image, the impromptu portrait of Maureen Dunlop that appeared on the front page of the Picture Post on 16 September 1944 cemented in the public mind the idea of the ATA as an all-women’s outfit, and an intensely enviable one at that.
Maureen became fast friends with ‘Chile’. They were posted together to Hamble and there they would talk in the fast, fluid Spanish of the world they’d left behind, a dialect that sounds as if it has been stripped of all consonants by the wind. At Hamble they both found a kindred spirit in a third exotic bird of passage, Jackie Sorour.
Sorour had arrived from Cape Town in 1938 aboard the Julius Caesar – ‘an overture of sparkling white and expectancy’ – making her the only ATA woman of any nationality to leave her native country for England before the war simply to fly. She was also the only ATA woman who confessed freely to wanting to be a celebrity, and was one of the few who had what it took. She had a baby-doll cuteness, an iron will, an ego of solid brass and a deeply conflicted attitude to men that, by her own account, infuriated every one of them who tried to make a pass at her. She took up flying at sixteen as a declaration of independence from two taunting stepbrothers, and of victory over fear – a simple fear of flying that had landed her breakfast in her lap on her first flight as a passenger the year
before.
Sorour’s need to prove herself brave could easily look like exhibitionism. Soon after her seventeenth birthday, with permission obtained in person from the South African Air Minister, she performed a parachute jump from 5,000 feet over the Swartkop military aerodrome outside Pretoria. She waited a few seconds too long before pulling her ripcord, landed hard, knocked herself out and broke her ankle. The stunt was watched by thousands who had been alerted to it by a radio announcement the night before.
It would be rash to nominate Sorour as the most obsessive woman flyer in the ATA, since obsession was practically a prerequisite for joining. Still, she was a contender. Already an instructor by the age of twenty, she competed fiercely for ‘types’, which meant jockeying to be the first to fly a new design of aircraft when it came onto the books in the Operations Room at Hamble. After the war she would be the first woman in Britain to fly faster than 600 mph, to captain an airliner and to admit she wanted to break the sound barrier – an admission that immediately disqualified her in the eyes of the RAF, who alone could have made it happen.
In September 1939, she was lodging with a family called Hirons in a farmhouse outside Oxford – digs chosen by her mother for its proximity to the Whitney aerodrome where Jackie was studying for a commercial licence. When the outbreak of war brought her studies to a halt, Sorour wept with envy as the men with whom she had enrolled at flying school went off to join the RAF. Then she turned her feelings of frustration on herself:
I despised my body, my breasts, all the things that pronounced me woman and left me behind as solitary and desolate as a discarded mistress … I looked malignantly at my breasts, symbols of weakness rooted firmly on my chest, and remembered Mr Hirons’ cut-throat razor in the bathroom.
Spitfire Women of World War II Page 13
