After Mary’s death, Cochran wrote to her parents: ‘You may be proud of her. She was a real soldier, and she went West well.’ There were also letters of condolence from Pauline Gower (who had last written less than a month earlier to tell the Nicholsons how well their daughter was doing) and Sir Stafford Cripps, the Minister of Aircraft Production. Cripps signed thousands of similar letters. He knew this one was unique so far because the deceased was a woman and an American, but he had to assume there would be more like it in due course. So the wording was in the standard two-paragraph format. Mary had been doing ‘… work of the greatest importance to our war effort … She had proved herself a valuable officer and pilot’ and would be ‘greatly missed by all who knew her’. Cripps felt able to tell the parents of British pilots that their children had died in the service of their country – but not Mary’s, even though this was six months after Pearl Harbor and nearly as many months since Cochran’s exhilarating challenge to the airborne women of America: ‘EVERY FRONT NOW OUR FRONT.’
The telegram informing Mary’s parents of her death gave them three days to notify White Waltham if they did not want her to be cremated rather than buried. They did not request a burial, so five days later the cremation went ahead.
Gower failed to attend the funeral, even though Nicholson had been based at White Waltham. Sometimes, just when they most needed to be warm, the Brits could be breathtakingly chilly. Ann Wood wrote that evening:
no W.W. [White Waltham] officialdom was there – Mrs W. [Marion Wilberforce] was the first to arrive and was rather shocked to find that lacking anyone else she was the senior member so all procedure was left up to her … After some embarrassment and much delay a W.W. car arrived with Wendy [Audrey] Sale-Barker and three of Mary’s classmates from W.W. The service was simple and cold, with many quotes from Mary Baker Eddy about strengths, light and sunshine – none of which would have helped me much …
It must have been a disconsolate group of young Americans who made their way back to the Red Cross Club in London for improvised funeral meats that afternoon. Mr and Mrs Nicholson would doubtless have implored them to be jolly, just as Mrs Pitman had a few months earlier, but Mr and Mrs Nicholson were stuck in Greensboro.
Ann Wood peeled away from the wake and decided to go up to the roof terrace of the Red Cross Club to sunbathe. Later she went for a bike ride in the park. Bobby Sandoz, who knew Nicholson better, found it harder to let go. ‘I liked Mary,’ she told me, ‘and I cannot understand her crash.’ After reading the official accident report she travelled to the crash site and talked to an old man who had witnessed Mary’s final moments, and to the farmer whose barn had been destroyed. She became convinced that Mary had timeafter losing her propeller to straighten up and glide in for a relatively routine wheels-up landing next to the barn. ‘The loss of her propeller wouldn’t affect her ability to turn her aircraft to the side,’ she said. ‘It only needed fifteen degrees to avoid the barn. She was a good, cautious, thoughtful pilot, and she had plenty of time to avoid the barn and land on the field, but apparently the airplane did not change its course. And of course the whole thing burned.’
Sandoz could not stay long in Littleworth before returning to Hamble, but she knew the cockpit of a Miles Magister, and she knew Mary. She put one inside the other in the piece of sky she had studied above the burned-down barn and formed a theory that she could never quite shake – that it never occurred to Mary that she had time to save herself, so she simply closed her eyes and prepared to meet her maker. The theory was more of a judgement on Nicholson’s experience, or lack of it, than on her skill. It was also a reflection of Sandoz’s frustration, and of what she knew about her friend: ‘She was very religious. I just know that every night, she got on her knees beside her bed and said her prayers. And if she thought she was going to die … you know, you search for an explanation. Well, maybe she had her eyes shut.’
* * *
The idea that Mary might have shut her eyes and let the barn come to her in the last few seconds of her life instead of using those seconds to make one, perhaps two, lightning, life-preserving decisions still vexed Roberta Sandoz more than sixty years later. She never said she would have used those seconds differently herself; she didn’t need to. She did say, almost apologetically, that flying came easily to her. ‘I just felt it in the seat of my pants,’ she told me. And when the conversation moved on to Betty Keith-Jopp’s inadvertent descent through cloud to the Firth of Forth, she had firm views. Keith-Jopp had been turning back onto her reciprocal course. So far so good: exactly as per standing orders. But what happened next?
‘As you change your wing from normal flight [into a turn] the tendency of the aircraft is to slide down, so you must give left stick, left rudder and throttle at the same time. All it takes is more throttle so you can hold your nose on the horizon, and that’s the crucial thing. Hold your nose on the horizon. The moment your nose drops you’re losing altitude.’ Bobby thought about it. ‘I think she wasted an airplane.’
Having sat with Betty at the Indaba Hotel in Johannesburg and heard the story from the pilot’s point of view, the judgement seemed harsh. But it also seemed significant for being offered at all, with such crisp supporting detail, by such a self-evidently thoughtful person, so long after the event. Betty Keith-Jopp may have erred in letting her nose drop in the cloud but she had strained every nerve and sinew and pulmonary corpuscle to survive in the minutes that followed. That made her a survivor in the most literal sense, and in the end this was the most the women of the ATA could hope for.
Many of them stated openly that they wished they could have flown in combat. ‘I thought it was the only fair thing,’ Maureen Dunlop mused. ‘Why should only men be killed?’ But men denied them the ultimate proving ground. So all the women could do to prove themselves was get on with the task in hand – delivering aircraft, day in, day out – and stay alive in the process.
Lettice Curtis worked harder than anyone to leave nothing to chance. Her description of psyching up for a difficult flight in marginal weather is illuminating, if typically detached:
At times like this pilots become introverted and entirely wrapped up in themselves, unable to settle to anything, conversation becoming mechanical and trivial. One half of the mind would look desperately for some excuse – albeit a good one – for getting out of the trip; the other waiting to get on with it … On such occasions a pilot is completely and utterly alone.
On the ground, that solitude was something to be endured, but once airborne at last, especially on a clear day, it became a luxury:
I can think of few better ways of spending a couple of hours … two uncommitted hours in which to let one’s thoughts ramble on uninterrupted, as they did long ago during a dull sermon on a Sunday morning in church … yet such is the human subconscious that even with thoughts seemingly miles away, some finely-tuned monitor would sound an alert for the minutest change in background noise, be it from engine or airframe, to bring one back in a fraction of a second to the present world.
Others gave more flamboyant displays of pre-flight nerves. The two Audreys – Sale-Barker and Macmillan – specialized in what Mary de Bunsen called ‘feminine vapours’:
‘My Dear,’ one or the other would exclaim in the mess, ‘I’ve got my first Hudson (or Mitchell, or whatever it might be) and I know I shall crash and I’ve got a pain (cold, temperature, etc).’ And they would totter out, leaving a trail of handkerchiefs, lipsticks, handbags etc., which would be picked up by willing (male) hands. They would then fly whatever it was superbly to its destination, where they would be assisted out of the aeroplane and the same pantomime would take place.
(De Bunsen said she later read a description of Sale-Barker’s technique for preparing for ski races, and recognised it instantly.)
There is no question that the pilots who were most constantly alert and most willing to try anything in a fix were the most likely to survive. That said, some simply ran out of
luck. Margaret Fairweather, the first woman to fly a Spitfire, lost her second husband in April 1944. Captain Douglas ‘Poppa’ Fairweather, too large for a Spitfire and much larger than life, had been tried out as a commanding officer in Prestwick, but was found too disrespectful of rules: when the ATA tried to ban smoking in its aircraft he would start taxi flights by handing round a silver cigarette case offering ‘instant dismissals’. When no-one could be found to look after his pet goat, he flew it round the country with him. When White Waltham insisted that taxi pilots use maps, he used one of Roman Britain. He was also known to leave his pocket diary open at the map pages on his knee, but never to refer to it.
Douglas Fairweather was not tall, but he weighed in at 16 stone at the start of the war and somehow kept most of his paunch despite rationing. This kept him in Ansons rather than single-seaters when he was moved from Prestwick back to White Waltham, and it was in Ansons that he specialised in getting through atrocious weather when no-one else could. His method, when unable to see the ground, was to set a compass bearing and stick to it, chain-smoking at the rate of exactly seven minutes per cigarette.
Diana Barnato once flew with Captain Fairweather from Belfast to White Waltham over continuous low cloud cover. After twenty-three cigarettes he put the last, carefully counted butt back into his cigarette case, eased the stick forward and dropped out of the cloud with White Waltham dead ahead. By 1944, most of his flying was of injured pilots to the Royal Canadian Hospital at Cliveden. On 4 April an especially urgent case was phoned through from Prestwick on an especially unpleasant day. Fairweather volunteered. For familiarity’s sake he took an Anson, even though it had no radio and even though for such a special case he could have taken a Rapide with wireless navigation. In thick cloud he flew into the Irish Sea. He was mourned in the letters column of Aeroplane magazine for ‘the rich zeal and relish with which he baited officiousness and mocked men of petty vices’. The same correspondent mentioned Captain Fairweather’s wife, Margie: ‘If much has been said about him and little of her it is because he was an extrovert, and to discuss him is permissible; in fact, he would have liked it. By the same mark, to discuss her would be unpardonable.’
Douglas Fairweather once said he loved Margie ‘better than any dog I ever had … or even a pig or a cat’. It was a quietly requited love. She was heavily pregnant when he died and gave birth a few days later to a daughter. She was still mourning him four months later, when she took off in a Percival Proctor from Heston bound for Hawarden, near Liverpool. She was acting as air chauffeur for a male VIP and her own sister, the Hon. Mrs Kitty Farrer – Pauline Gower’s adjutant – who had a personnel problem to attend to in Scotland. Less than twenty miles from Hawarden the Proctor’s engine coughed and died. Fairweather tried to restart it by switching tanks, but accident investigators found the port tank’s vent pipe had been carelessly blocked by a skin-like membrane of weatherproof paint. If no air could enter the tank, no fuel could leave it.
Unflustered, Fairweather chose a field in the lower reaches of the Dee valley for a forced landing. It had been ploughed at right angles to her direction of approach, which would ordinarily have been bumpy but not deadly. The Proctor’s wheels stuck in a furrow and its nose tipped forward. Kitty was thrown clear and was injured, but not fatally. The VIP, a Mr Louis Kendrick of the Ministry of Aircraft Production, broke his thumb. Margie was slammed forward, shattering her spectacles, from which shards of glass went through her eyes into her brain. The Cold Front – the grown-up with a faraway look in her eye when the ATA girls met the press at Hatfield; the first woman to fly a Spitfire – died the following day at Chester Royal Infirmary. Her reserve meant she was not widely known, but she was remembered, not least by those she had taught to fly at Glasgow Flying Club before the war. Two of them had joined the RAF and fought in the Battle of Britain. When her brother-in-law visited the crash site, he found them there in tears.
Death was not much discussed in the ATA, but it was always round the corner, or liable to happen in a split second and right in front of you, leaving no time to look away. Around lunchtime on 17 January 1943, Lettice Curtis was on her final approach to Sherburn-in-Elmet, in East Yorkshire, in one of several Hurricanes flown up there from White Waltham en route to Scotland. Visibility was good, but the Sherburn aerodrome was a mess. It had started the war as a farm, with a massive stone farmhouse that could absorb and thaw out as many pilots as pitched up there, whether from the Shetlands or the Sussex coast. But it had nothing that remotely resembled a runway. Taxi flights began and ended among chickens in the farmyard.
In late 1942 the Air Ministry approved the building of a pair of full-length concrete runways, triggering an invasion of bulldozers that turned the fields into mud baths. Meanwhile, ferry pilots had to go on landing there.
The Hurricane immediately ahead of Curtis was being piloted by Flight Captain Alan Colman (of the Colman’s mustard family). His instructions from the White Waltham Maps and Signals Department were to land on the north side of the farmhouse. He did so, and ran into a broad sheet of standing water eighteen inches deep. The Hurricane cartwheeled onto its back and lay there in the water. By the time the crash crew got to Colman he had drowned in his straps. Curtis landed next to him and insisted, years later, that there was nothing anyone could do until enough people arrived to lift the tail and release the canopy. The official history of the ATA, written in 1945, stated that help arrived in ‘the shortest possible time’. This may be so, but as Ann Wood noted after hearing about the accident that night, Colman died ‘within sight of many a potential helping hand, so one never knows’. One never knew how death would come; nor could one ever count on others to keep it at bay.
As the war ground on it developed a terrifying momentum. Veronica Volkersz was collecting an Airspeed Oxford from Christchurch in Dorset soon after D-Day when she had to wait for an American squadron of P-47 Thunderbolts to take off for France. These were heavyweights at the best of times, even by single-engined standards. They had huge double radial Pratt & Whitney engines stuffed into their blunt noses, and semi-elliptical wings not unlike a Spitfire’s that were usually enough to get them airborne. For their mission on 29 June 1944, however, each carried two 1,000-lb bombs. There was no headwind, and the runway was short, ending in houses. The Thunderbolts took off in pairs, or that was the idea. The first pair cleared the houses by a few feet, but one of the second slammed into them and blew up. Volkersz watched in horror as the third pair accelerated towards the inferno and staggered through it into the air. Then came the fourth: one made it, the other never left the ground. It ploughed through the gap left by the first crash into the next row of houses; another shattering explosion. Twenty people were dead or injured before the squadron had even regrouped above the airfield.
‘What are you dicing with today?’ the Hamble women would enquire dryly of each other as they headed for their taxi planes with a new day’s chits. It was partly a type-check, to make sure no one else had been favoured with something new or exotic or especially fast. It was also a reference to a propaganda poem called ‘Dicing With Death Under Leaden Skies’ that they all felt applied not unflatteringly to them. It didn’t make death itself more palatable, though; not the sudden end of a person or her physical remains. Rosemary Rees was once called to a crash site, possibly Honor Salmon’s, and found that the ATA’s Inspector of Accidents had got there before her and was looking unwell.
‘He said, “the medics haven’t done their job very well.”
I said, “there’s a helmet.”
He said, “don’t touch it”.’
Death was a part of life even when names you knew weren’t being rubbed off the Hamble blackboard. Freydis Leaf told me how she lost seven cousins during the war and how her older brother, Derek, had taken her to one side before the storm arrived and foretold it all:
He always said, when war came I must be prepared that my dear cousin Richard, who was a fighter pilot, he’d be killed within about a fort
night of getting into action. And Ronnie, his brother, who was in the artillery, he’d be killed about a month or two later. And my brother said ‘I shall be killed too, you know, about a month or so after I get into action.’
At this Freydis sighed and looked away – away from the coffee table in her sitting room, and my tape recorder taking it all down. Her eyes filled and she fell silent for what seemed like a long time. ‘And it did work out like that,’ she said eventually.
And I remember his mother-in-law having a dream, and she said that in the dream she was in a big church and Richard and Ronald were there, standing by a bier, and they were waiting for the third crusader to come, which she felt she knew was Derek, and sure enough he did get killed then. But I’m sure they went on fighting evil, whatever it was, whatever it was.
21
Women of the World
To woo a woman more interested in aeroplanes than men took patience. No-one ever managed it with Joan Hughes or Margaret Frost. Three men thought they had succeeded with Margot Duhalde, but she tired of each of them soon after marrying them.
As for Jackie Sorour, the South African, a succession of eligible types tried their luck and their best lines on her because she was adorable to look at and maddeningly good on the dance floor. With loose black curls and a starlet’s bright face, she was vaguely aware of her attraction for men even though she was shy and inexperienced with them. She was fiercely impatient whenever she thought her femininity was holding her back, but not uninterested in learning to flirt with it. At the same time she was a natural and utterly determined pilot. All of which made her a ‘hot pertater’ – hotter than she knew. She did fall for one of her admirers in the end – Lieutenant Reg Moggridge – because she liked the look of him and fell in love with his deliberate way of doing things. But mainly because he was as patient as a statue.
Spitfire Women of World War II Page 23
