Boarding school was never quite like this. But in other respects, once the invasion threat receded and the Americans began arriving in the summer of 1942, boarding school is what Hamble came to resemble. It was cliquey, hierarchical and run to a strict timetable, but with rules that existed largely to be broken: being a civilian organisation, the ATA’s only serious sanction for bad behaviour was dismissal, and this was seldom used because pilots were needed and pilot training was expensive.
Hamble was smaller than its mainly male headquarters in White Waltham, but no less eccentric. It was home to one woman (Jackie Sorour) who insisted that she knew how to fly before she knew even the most basic facts of life; and to another (Barbara Wojtulanis), who knew how to fly before she could ride a bicycle. Sorour liked to perform headstands in the mess before taking to the air because she felt her blood was more urgently needed in her head than her feet. Others used the curling linoleum floor for more conventional exercises; they had figures to maintain, and flying taxed the mind more than the behind. Idle hours were passed with bridge games, letter-writing, The Times and the music from The Strawberry Blonde on the gramophone. Visiting males, if not too intimidated by the women, or so intimidated that they could think of nothing to say to them, would sometimes attempt a tour of the mess without touching its floor, using only window sills, chair backs and the chocolate-coloured dado rail. Visitors were also expected to sign the curtains.
Most of the women were billeted in bijou cottages along the river or on the edge of the green expanse from which they flew (and which remains undeveloped even now; a tussocky meadow reached via ‘Spitfire Way’). Lucky with their lodgings, many also remembered Hamble as a place of easy camaraderie. It was, but not for everyone. Most of the Americans gravitated in the evenings to the newsagent’s wife’s house on the outskirts of the village where at least two of them were always billeted. They mixed a little with the English, but much more with each other. Dorothy Bragg was an exception. She bridled at being asked to share a room with one of her compatriots and checked into South-ampton’s Polygon Hotel. And Margot Duhalde, released from her crash course in the English language with the White Waltham mechanics, became sucked into a feud with Anna Leska that could have killed them both.
It is not clear how the argument started. Duhalde herself cannot remember. She suggested that her connection to the Free French may have been resented by Leska, whose brief stay in France on a long journey from Poland had not been an entirely happy one. ‘In the end we just didn’t like each other,’ Duhalde said. ‘We fought over everything, in the ground and in the air. We would barge in front of each other when taxiing to take off or cut each other off when we were coming into land. It was crazy, and I suppose it was dangerous.’ Her boyfriend at the time, a Squadron Leader Gordon Scotter, certainly thought so. He flew into Hamble frequently, ‘and he saw us fighting in the air’, Duhalde remembered ruefully. Deciding betrayal would be the better part of valour, he had a quiet chat with Margot Gore. ‘Leska and I had to go and see her, and she said, “One of you will have to go, and that person is you Margot unless you say sorry.” So I said sorry in front of her, but outside I told Leska that after the war I’d knock her teeth out.’
Duhalde patched things up with Scotter, but never with ‘La Polacka’. As she explained: ‘The only time we exchanged more than courtesies after that was at a reunion in the presence of the Duke of Kent. We said hello to him, then started quarrelling again.’
Such discord does not feature in the placid photographs that survive of Spitfire women at leisure in their Hamble mess. And nor does sex. In fact, sex scarcely rears its unprofessional head in all the women pilots’ writings and reminiscences, whether intended for public or private consumption. But did human yearning and biology put itself on ice while humanity took care of Hitler? Not if countless thousands of war brides and babies are any indication, and not in Hamble.
‘We were called the lesbians’ pool, of course,’ said Rosemary Rees, presumably referring to RAF and other male banter. She didn’t know of any real lesbians there, and there may have been none. On the other hand, some of the surviving pilots suggest quite casually, in the old-fashioned way, that there may have been one or two among them who were ‘not the marrying sort’. There were certainly a good many who never married for whatever reason. Then there was Joy Ferguson, a pioneering transsexual who after the war announced that she had become a man and changed her name to Jonathan. (As a civil servant at the Ministry of Supply, this automatically entitled her to a pay rise.) And there was the woman who eventually became Dorothy Furey Bragg Beatty Hewitt.
By the time Dorothy Bragg arrived at Hamble, in the autumn of 1942, it was clear to her fellow pilots that she was the marrying sort. Lieutenant Richard Bragg, her successful suitor from the Beaver Hill, had been killed in action shortly after their wedding in March. She insisted later that she had never been in love with him, but she was clearly in the mood for it now. In the presence of men she had an eerie absence of inhibition by the standards of most of the rest of the ferry pool. She had shunned Hamble’s cosy après-fly existence by choosing to live in Southampton, and she understood better than anyone that if all was fair in love and war, then to be in both at once must be very fair indeed:
I lived in the hotel there in Southampton, and I used to go down and sit in the bar in the evenings. The boys there were in the Navy. I would sit down and have a drink with them, and one night I saw this older man, just staring and staring at me.
A couple of days later our commandant, Margot Gore, got an invitation from Lord Beatty, who said that he’d been at sea a long time and his men were tired and he was going to give them a ball, and he was inviting all the ladies to come. And he would arrange transport for us. So naturally I went. I didn’t have any idea who he was or what he was, and he danced with me all night …
‘Oh!,’ Dorothy sighed as she remembered Beatty – and the ‘oh’ seemed to float out of her and up towards the ceiling of her sunroom like a dandelion. ‘He was very romantic.’
Dancing all night with whomsoever he desired turned out to be this gentleman’s prerogative, for he was, by a long way, the most senior man in the room. He was Commander Lord Beatty, beetle-browed son of the more famous admiral who had fought the Kaiser’s fleet at Jutland in 1916. He, too, was already married – to another American Dorothy, as it happened – but unhappily. Beatty family legend had it that this other Dorothy had left twin boys in the States and told a friend: ‘I sold all my jewels and I’m going to England to catch me a Lord.’ She caught one, but having done so failed to provide an heir, and Beatty wanted one.
The younger Dorothy, in her Gone With The Wind red dress and black choker brought over in the Beaver Hill, learned soon enough that in David Beatty’s set even a happy marriage was no bar to serial adultery. ‘Marriage meant nothing,’ she found out. ‘People just slept around.’ But that night Beatty had reason to feel more than usually reckless. His men were tired and in need of entertainment because he had just led them on the worst British naval disaster of the war. With Stalin demanding a second European front to slow the German momentum towards Stalingrad, Churchill had reluctantly approved a hasty, half-baked plan to attack German forces in Dieppe. Beatty had been given command of a flotilla of transport and patrol boats, with orders to support the mainly Canadian troops going ashore. Over the course of the operation, on 19 August 1942, 555 sailors lost their lives. It could have been worse. German defences in this part of the Channel were all but impregnable, which was why Eisenhower left them well to port on D-Day. Beatty had simply drawn a short straw in an absurdly grand game of geopolitics.
He murmured the gist of the story into Dorothy Bragg’s enraptured ear that evening in the Polygon ballroom, unaware until she pressed him for more detail that this closeness to the real war thrilled her quite as much as his uniform or eyebrows, or his strangulated accent. ‘He swept me off my feet,’ she said.
Sixty-three years later Bobby Sandoz begged to diff
er. ‘I think the shoe was on the other foot,’ she told me with considerable feeling. ‘And that was only the beginning. Damn, I wish it hadn’t happened, for the impression of Americans in England. We came to do a job, we wanted to fit in. We didn’t want to make trouble.’
But was it really seen as trouble to allow a senior British naval officer to dance with you, I asked?
It was by me. Oh, she was just gorgeous-looking. We all had to have our hair off of our collar in uniform, and we got used to wearing it up. But I remember going to the ladies’ room with Dorothy that night and helping her let her hair down and widen the neck of the dress. She knew that I didn’t approve of her, but I helped her anyway. I felt unsophisticated, whereas she was glamorous and worldly.
I must have been a kind of pain in the ass, I guess. A lot of the gals were into having a good time, but I was so devastated by seeing young men, younger than I, lost every damned day … I didn’t have time for flirtation quite yet.
Only one of the English pilots could match Dorothy Bragg’s impact at a ball. This was Diana Barnato, a latecomer to the all-women’s pool at Hamble, who as far as she was aware had been sent there from White Waltham to keep her out of trouble.
Before joining the ATA, Barnato had grown used to a dual existence in London. By day she was, like Veronica Volkersz, a volunteer angel – an ambulance driver with the Red Cross. By night she was a party animal with a very full dance card. It was hardly sustainable, but then not much was about the war. It required a full ration of coffee and cigarettes, but it enabled her to squeeze the marrow out of a life that she knew could end at any moment. It was exhilarating, and what had proved exhilarating as an ambulance driver she was reluctant to abandon as a ferry pilot.
She never did abandon it, though the authorities at ATA headquarters did their best to make her. One senior official whom she will still not name – or forgive – thought he saw a chance to clip Barnato’s wings in the spring of 1942.
While based at White Waltham she lived in a house her father had given her on the Chelsea Embankment, within easy striking distance (by train or by Bentley) of her favourite clubs and restaurants. She was especially well known at the 400 Club on Leicester Square because her father was also a regular there. As a pre-war motor-racing hero to many of the fighter boys who showed up at the 400 after a hard day’s work over France or the Home Counties, Woolf Barnato helped set the tone. The dance floor was tiny, but it tended to be full because of the irresistible Fat Tim and his band. ‘And the maitre d’ was called Rossi,’ Diana remembered:
Tim and Rossi. It was all very skilfully done, with plenty of pillars so if you didn’t want to see someone you could always go round a corner. I’d come in, all tarted up in a long dress mostly, and Rossi would take me aside and say, ‘Your father is here, Miss Barnato,’ as if I shouldn’t know. He’d be there with one of his girlfriends, and of course I’d go over and give him an enormous hug.
There had been no flying for two weeks because of fog, but then the murk evaporated and Barnato was assigned a Spitfire delivery to Somerset. It was her one job for the day. To anyone with an ounce of wanderlust a chit for a Spit with a clear sky and a full tank of fuel constituted grave temptation. Even at the regulation ATA cruising speed of 250 mph, almost nowhere in England was more than an hour away.
Barnato gave herself a joyride down the Cornish coast and had lunch with a friend at RAF St Eval. She was spotted signing in there and was reported to her commanding officer. He demoted her for misuse of fuel, lectured her on the terrible risks run by tanker crews to get the precious 100 octane past the U-boats, and took the opportunity to move her to Hamble. She was led to believe it was, apart from anything, for her own good. ‘I flew all day and was out all night. I suppose they thought if I didn’t let up I’d break my neck.’
Instead of letting up, though, she befriended two obliging London cabbies whom she remembers as Bert and Ozzie. They joined what began to look like a broad-based conspiracy to save both her life and her lifestyle, as did Max Aitken, Billy Clyde and Tony Bartley. Aitken was Lord Beaverbrook’s bronzed and charismatic son, and a skiing companion of the Barnatos from before the war. Clyde had fought with him in 601 Squadron in the Battle of Britain. Bartley had originally introduced Barnato to her first love, Humphrey Gilbert (who had been killed taking off in his Spitfire, nine months earlier). All were still serving fighter pilots, and all of them joined Diana at the 400 Club on the evening of 19 January 1943. There they learnt for the first time that ATA ferry pilots were expected to fly with no wireless or instrument training. They were appalled: did this mean that Diana couldn’t fly blind? It did.
‘Max got out his fountain pen, and, to my horror, drew an instrument panel on the pink linen tablecloth,’ Diana said. ‘He gave me a lesson there and then on what to do on instruments, and I needed it the next day or I wouldn’t be here.’
Diana left the club at about 2.30 a.m. and went home to Chelsea to change. Bert – or Ozzie, they were brothers and she never knew which it would be – was waiting as usual. She shed her gown, pulled on her uniform and over it a large, furry Afghan coat that smelt rotten when wet but kept out the cold. Then she slipped out again into the night to curl up in the back of the cab. Ozzie – or Bert – drove across the river to Waterloo and Diana caught the 3.40 a.m. milk train to Eastleigh. That gave her a little over an hour’s sleep. She had left a secondhand Vauxhall her father had given her at Eastleigh station, and there would be another hour or two in bed in her little-used digs at Hamble before the 9 a.m. rush to the aerodrome.
The morning of 20 January started clear, and Diana was given a Mark IX Spitfire to deliver to Cosford. It should have been an easy half-hour hop in the RAF’s ultimate flying machine, with a top speed and rate of climb that left the Mark V wallowing in its slipstream and was, at last, more than a match for the Messerschmitt 109.
Barnato was high over the Cotswolds, enjoying the view, when a slight fall in the temperature outside filled the sky with an instant, impenetrable blanket of condensation. It had not been forecast because it was not a front, but it looked like one and presented exactly the same risk of sudden death for a pilot unsure how to use her instruments.
The night before, with the help of the pink tablecloth, Max Aitken had stressed two things: a pilot almost never flies head-first into cloud because of the instinct to look for a way around it, so first, he said, straighten up. And secondly, remember the last spot height on the map, add a safe margin, then turn through 180 degrees and descend as gradually as possible. Oh, he’d said, ‘and think’.
Barnato thought, feverishly. She also remembered a final piece of advice from Aitken: if there was still no visibility at her safe break-off height she was to climb fast and bale out. This presented a problem. She was in her regulation skirt rather than slacks. Under it she was wearing large knickers made from parachute silk and wartime stockings that ended just above the knee. She wasn’t bashful, but she did have a reputation to consider. She put the Spitfire into a shallow dive from 6,000 feet. At 800 feet, 50 feet above what she hoped against hope might be the Little Rissington aerodrome in Gloucestershire, she was still in thick cloud.
‘But we didn’t bale out, we came on down,’ she said, remembering the plane as half of a two-person team. She broke out of the cloud in driving rain at 200 mph and 600 feet, which in that part of the Cotswolds turned out to be treetop height. A glimpse of a parked aircraft on a waterlogged grassy airfield flashed by under her port wing and she threw the Spitfire into an immediate tight turn to get back to it. Another turn, and she was down, falling out of the sky into a series of enormous puddles. Through luck or instinct, she managed to keep her nose up despite the natural tendency of the huge engine inside it to tip the plane forward into the mud. She opened the canopy and felt her knees buckle as she climbed out of the cockpit. A startled RAF officer was already striding over with a cape. To disguise her jellied legs Barnato knelt on the wing, pretending to scrabble in the cockpit for stra
y maps. ‘I say, miss,’ the gallant officer remarked as he reached up with the cape, ‘you must be good on instruments.’
He led her back to a Nissen hut at RAF Windrush from which she telephoned ATA headquarters. The commanding officer there was relieved to hear from her. The instant cloud, caused by an unusually high dew point, had covered the whole of England. An entire training pool had had to force land and two pilots had been killed.
16
Heroines
‘No glamour’, the British women pilots would insist to reporters. No glamour, the men of No. 1 Ferry Pool ruefully agreed when they saw the first Americans. No glamour, Jackie Cochran must have thought so often in White Waltham that she wanted to scream.
Even in 2006, surviving ATA veterans in several countries warned me darkly against romanticising what they’d done in the war. But in the end it is impossible to oblige. There is a limit to how long one can soberly agree that there was nothing particularly special about criss-crossing Britain in Spitfires and Hurricanes as a young woman in the early 1940s. In the end one has little choice but to grant the women pilots their compulsive understatement, and then, respectfully, break their golden rule and see them as others did; as Flying Officer Henryk Jagowy of the Polish Air Force did, for instance.
Jagowy was posted to RAF Millom in remotest Cumberland in 1943. As he recalled at a Polish Air Force Association reunion after the war, glamour dropped in unannounced one lunchtime as his officers’ mess was filling up with hungry men:
The skies over the airfield were clear when out of the blue appeared an aircraft that started to perform lively aerobatics. Seeing this reprehensible flying, the Station Commander rushed out of the officers’ mess, jumped into his car and drove to the watch office, stopping on his way to pick up a guardsman to arrest the pilot when the plane landed. This sort of flying was strictly forbidden at all operational stations.
Spitfire Women of World War II Page 19
