The free Belgians were also in party mood, and the Walkers completed their honeymoon among them. London may still have been blacked out and living on rations, but Brussels, fifteen miles from the German army, had sugar, wine, leather handbags, chocolate in its shops and lights on all night. Small wonder that ‘Mary’ Coningham had located his headquarters there. He had even moved his wife out to be with him. But after six days, Diana had to go home. The plan was for Derek to escort her. A thick fog had settled over much of northern Europe, but he knew the route intimately from years of combat sorties and had wireless navigation to fall back on should anything go wrong. Diana did not, but all she had to do was stay on his wing.
They took off. They had agreed that if the fog looked as bad once they were airborne as it did from the ground, they would turn back. Diana thought it looked worse, but Derek pressed on, leaving her no choice but to stay with him. He flew faster than she was used to (ATA cruising speeds were designed to save fuel) and she lost him within a few minutes.
When asked much later whether at any point on this flight she had felt completely lost, Diana said airily that if things had got that bad all she would have had to do was fly up the North Sea and turn left.
It did not seem so simple at the time. The first decision was easy enough: she could not turn back. The chances of overshooting Evere and ending up behind German lines were too great. Then there was the choice of continuing on a compass course that might or might not deliver her to RAF Northolt depending on wind and visibility over north London; or going as low as she dared and nosing around until she recognised something from her map. She chose to descend and eventually saw the hills of St Omer rising to meet her. Soon afterwards she crossed what she hoped was the French coast south of Gris Nez. If it was, seven and a half minutes on a course of 295 degrees should put her over Dungeness. She adjusted her course and began counting down. But the Channel was covered in sea fog thicker than anything so far, right down to the water. She climbed to 4,000 feet to get over it, and started finding distractions – another aircraft, which she dived to follow hoping it might be Derek’s, only to find it was a Dakota flying in the opposite direction; a change from white fog to yellow fog beneath her (did that mean land?); a gap in the yellow fog just where Dungeness should have been (if she had managed to get back on the right course and allow for the right number of lost seconds after chasing the Dakota).
She stood the Spitfire on its wingtip to peer through the gap. No land. Now her brain began rewinding involuntarily to what she thought had been the French coast. If that had been east of the Cap, not south – Belgium, not France – she might already be over the North Sea rather than the English Channel, with no hope of a landfall unless she turned west. But if it had been where she thought it was and she turned west too soon, she’d fly straight down the Channel and run out of fuel somewhere over Cornwall. With one half of her mind racing, the other half hammered out a practicable compromise. After twenty-two minutes flying northwest with no sight of land she reasoned that she must have crossed the French coast further south than she thought, putting her over the Channel now rather than the North Sea. She dived to 200 feet and turned right, skimming over the water on a bearing of ten degrees.
Suddenly there was a little sheen of light ahead, a line of white in the yellow. I peered at it anxiously; and yes, it was something. Land at last? The White Cliffs of Dover, perhaps? I flew on. It was not the White Cliffs of Dover, but an east to west line of lovely sandy beach. There, right behind it, looming up beside me with a rusty grin, was the huge gasometer at Bognor.
Diana was 100 miles west of where she’d meant to be, but no longer lost. Flooded with relief, she circled the huge gas cylinder like a cat thankful for another life. Then she picked her way up the Pagham Rife River to Chichester and the approach to RAF Tangmere. The runway lights were on and green and white flares were fizzing up into the murk. Diana hung back, assuming the flares meant an entire squadron was on its way in. When nothing joined her in the circuit above the airfield she abandoned etiquette and landed. Derek’s Spitfire was already parked outside the watch office. He ran out, pale, astonished and so thankful that he was almost angry. Where had she been? How the devil had she got here? The flares and lights had been for her, but it was a miracle that she’d seen them. Tangmere was the only airfield still open that afternoon in the whole of southern England.
It turned out there was no such thing as a free trip to Brussels. When the Mail ran a story two weeks later on ‘the beautiful daughter of the millionaire racing motorist’ and her belated European honeymoon, Derek had to forfeit three months’ pay. But Diana had shown that French and Flemish fog did not discriminate against women any more than British fog did, and her precedent proved irreversible. By early 1945 ATA women were flying regularly to the Continent.
Diana, naturally, was one of them. She regularly smuggled cocoa from Belgium in her parachute pack, and almost collided with a Lancaster while co-piloting an Anson full of oranges to RAF Buckeberg near Hanover. After VE Day a tall and ‘interestingly handsome’ pilot called Zita Irwin made it to Berlin and came back with a grainy picture of herself outside the wrecked Chancellery building in the company of half a dozen Red Army soldiers. Rosemary Rees went furthest east – to Prague, which she had last visited in her own plane in a blizzard in December 1938, laden with gifts for refugees. That year, the ghost of Good King Wenceslas would have looked out on snow that was deep and crisp and might even have held out some hope of appeasement. In 1945 Rees found the place sad, grey and depressing after six winters under the Gestapo.
‘But I was the first,’ Diana Barnato Walker noted crisply. ‘That was the point.’ And it was. Had she crashed or ditched or disappeared, even ‘Mary’ Coningham would have been hard put to make the case for women in Europe. As it was, her survival instinct prevailed and clung on for the rest of the war; a case study in the usefulness of quick thinking and adrenalin when in a frightful fix. Diana was already the only ATA woman pilot to have been shot at by the Luftwaffe. She had not been at the controls herself, but strapped into the co-pilot’s seat of a taxi Anson being flown by Jim Mollison, Amy Johnson’s ex-husband, when a Messerschmitt 110 popped out of low cloud over Reading and squeezed off a few tracer rounds as it flashed past in the opposite direction. According to ATA legend, Diana’s role in the encounter was to spot the swastika on the enemy tailplane and yell to Mollison, ‘Jimmy, it’s a Jerry!’ just in time for him to pull the Anson’s nose up into the cloud. In fact, from her own account, it seems that she kept quiet. If anyone did any yelling it was Jimmy.
Barnato Walker was similarly calm when it mattered in a Mitchell bomber over Cheshire, three days after Germany’s surrender. It was the type of plane in which Jackie Sorour had crabbed into Dunsfold on one engine shortly after D-Day. Though smaller than a Halifax or a Lancaster, it felt heavier to fly, with two hands needed on the control column for take-off and landing and a flight engineer essential to operate the far-flung fuel cocks and undercarriage levers.
Half-way up England, somewhere over Worcestershire in deteriorating visibility, there was a bang in the cockpit and every instrument except Diana’s compass died. She could steer a course for Hawarden, her destination, but no longer had any clear idea how fast or high she was flying. Her first approach to Hawarden was too fast and too high. She went round again and landed expertly, in the circumstances, but was surprised to find her engineer – whom she knew well but not intimately – fiddling urgently with the parachute release between her breasts the moment the Mitchell touched the ground. As soon as it came to a stop he threw her out of the plane, jumped after her and set off running, dragging her behind him. He did not stop until it was safe to turn and watch the Hawarden fire engine smother the Mitchell’s burning starboard engine in foam.
The millionaire racing motorist’s daughter had been concentrating so hard on compensating for her defunct instruments that she had failed to notice that one of the two engines was about to explode
. It was probably a good thing; had she throttled it back in a hurry the likelihood of engine failure, stall, spin and fiery death did not bear contemplating.
Diana Barnato Walker’s guardian angel had been busy. She always attributed her knack for getting out of scrapes to the constant presence in her mind’s eye of the melted face and clawlike hands of the dreadfully burned man who had appeared beside her Tiger Moth at Brooklands before her first solo at the start of the war, begging her not to try it. It was her way of deflecting the idea that she might have a skill, a sixth sense – or even an appetite for life – that others lacked. Yet she undoubtedly had something that she could call on when it suddenly looked as if her future might have to be measured in milliseconds. It was partly an all-or-nothing fixation; a dread of being maimed or disfigured. That was far more real than any fear of death. And it was partly a deep, unspoken conviction that in any case death ‘happened to other people’. Either way, panic never quite took over, and in the space it might have filled under her red woollen pixie hat, or her helmet if it hadn’t blown away, best-and worst-case scenarios would compare notes and offer up survival strategies, calmly recalibrating them as the world hurtled past beneath the cockpit. As long as she was two feet off the ground and in one piece there was always something left to try.
To wit, 30 April 1945, in Typhoon EK 347. ‘Now that was interesting,’ she said when reminded of it. ‘That was the nearest miss. You see, the whole thing fell apart.’
Typhoon EK 347 had had a tough life, though Barnato Walker didn’t know this until later. It had been used first by a detachment of New Zealand pilots and then by a Belgian squadron as an interim buzz-bomb chaser pending delivery of new Tempests. After Barnato Walker took it for a spin up the A4, it never flew again.
Like the early Tempests, Typhoons were powered by the temperamental Sabre engine and cooled by a scoop air intake below the propeller; the same scoop that had consigned Lettice Curtis to hospital the year before when it dug into a furrow in a field near Slough.
Barnato Walker was 2,000 feet over Wiltshire, en route from Lasham to RAF Kemble in Gloucestershire, when most of the underside of the plane peeled away, scoop first. Luckily the detached portion did not rip off the elevator flaps on the trailing edge of the tailplane as they flew past, leaving the Typhoon unstable but still viable.
The scoop had gone with a bang. At first, Diana had assumed engine failure and started mental preparations for a forced landing, but that was before she looked down to see nothing between her and the White Horse Hills apart from some fuel lines and electrical wiring. The next thing she noticed was the wind, a freezing, trouser-snapping tornado round her legs. At 300 mph there was not much she could do about the cold. The question was whether she could fly any slower without the Typhoon’s ragged new aerodynamic profile causing it to stall. She climbed to experiment, and worked out that her new stalling speed was 230 mph, nearly three times faster than the 88 mph indicated in her Ferry Pilot’s Notes. That was too fast to lower her flaps or attempt a wheels-up landing. With so much of the underside of the plane already missing, the rest of it might disintegrate. As she put it later, ‘I thought it might hurt.’
She needed an airport. Conscious that her teeth were chattering uncontrollably, she tightened her straps and flew on to Kemble. As she entered the circuit (still more than twice as fast as recommended in the Notes), her undercarriage failed to lock. For this situation the Notes advised:
U/c [Undercarriage] Operation: Emergency: Gravity, pneumatic assisted. Select DOWN. Press both emergency pedals forward firmly (below 200 mph). When wheels have fallen, press pneumatic assister: release to check green lights. If unsuccessful, yaw aircraft violently at 130–250 mph. Tail-wheel extends automatically.
Barnato Walker followed the instructions as best she could, but at over 230 mph. At that speed the yawing felt especially violent, but three green lights came on. She made several low passes over the airfield to alert the ground crew to a potential problem. They registered that she was flying too fast to land and switched on a red light on the watch office roof to indicate that she should go away and come back slower. Rosemary Rees was also there, waiting to take an Anson-load of pilots back to Hamble. Eventually someone suggested that a fire truck get ready. A few spectators gathered. Diana climbed again to check her stalling speed once more and give herself a moment to think clearly about landing with no floor at over 200 mph. There was no guarantee she would make it. In fact, she found out later, there was an overwhelming probability that she wouldn’t. Twenty-six Typhoons including hers were lost to structural failure in the course of the war. Twenty-five of their pilots died.
In the end she made survival look easy. She came in very low to make sure she didn’t waste a yard of runway. ‘I landed without flaps, keeping the speed just above 230, squeezed the brakes on for a second touchdown, then took them off again quickly so I wouldn’t turn over.’ At the far end of the runway she applied full brake, turned smartly and taxied to dispersal in search of a cup of tea. No-one offered. The duty airman came out and chided her gently for bringing only half an aeroplane. He gave her a snag sheet to fill out so that no-one else would try to fly it.
The Anson was ticking over. As Diana climbed in, Rees paid her the compliment of asking what the devil had taken her so long, and then rolled her eyes at the audacity of the line-shoot when she tried to explain. It was time to go home.
24
Better To Have Lived
‘I would say that every woman should learn to fly,’ Pauline Gower had told Woman’s Journal in 1942, when her own women flyers were proving themselves capable of anything. ‘Psychologically, it is the best antidote to the manifold neuroses which beset modern women.’
By ‘neuroses’ Gower seems to have meant whatever had been holding women back in the prewar world where men still thought they could assign women their roles and temper their ambitions. The brute imperatives of war had already taken a good swipe at these neuroses, she continued. ‘But with the return of peace my advice to all women will still be – “Learn to fly”… I feel confident that when this war is finally won, aviation will be considered as a normal and satisfying career for young girls leaving school as well as for older women.’
How right she was, and how wrong. Aviation would offer women a career – as air stewardesses. Some of the ATA women found work as pilots, but only those with still-untapped reserves of the bloody-minded tenacity that made them ATA women in the first place. Meanwhile, the swing back to patriarchy became unstoppable. So did the swing forward to the cult of the laconic ex-RAF, 110 per cent male airline captain. Gower, as a BOAC board member, saw it coming as clearly as anyone. In 1944, the brave new world of international air travel was carved up at a Chicago conference attended by fifty-four nations. Once Nazi Germany and Japan had been dealt with there would be dozens of new airlines and hundreds of new routes – but thousands upon thousands of military pilots angling for work and striding in and out of interviews with combat records almost as impressive as their sense of entitlement.
In March 1945, Gower was interviewed in London by the Daily Sketch. She received hundreds of letters every month, she said, from land girls, girl guides, secretaries and housewives, all asking how they could get jobs in flying come the peace. ‘Well,’ she told them, ‘my answer is a brutally frank one. You can’t!’
If that seemed unfair, it seemed much more so to those who had been through the wringer of six years’ continuous service flying more than a hundred aircraft types, many of which RAF recruits had been leery of trying until embarrassed into doing so by the sight of an ATA girl climbing out of one. Among the men who worked with that tight cadre of veterans, overt chauvinism had long since been ridiculous. ‘It came down to men and women becoming just people,’ Rosemary Rees would write. ‘All those pretty little barriers that are put up in peacetime melt away and life becomes a grim struggle of tired, grey people all doing whatever it is they can do.’
The war was supposed
to have gone a good way towards demolishing class and national barriers as well as gender ones, at least according to Pinewood. The Way Ahead was the way taken by David Niven and his men when they managed to forget they came into the war from parallel social worlds. The Way to the Stars was the way shown by British and American pilots when at last they stopped giving into mutual bafflement and started speaking the parts of the English language that they had in common.
The final measure of the barriers that Pauline Gower’s girls demolished came a month into the post-war era. It was thirty-two days, to be precise, after General MacArthur received Japan’s unconditional surrender on the foredeck of the USS Missouri, that Veronica Volkersz, the girl from Srinagar and Windsor, was handed a ferry chit by Flight Captain William Cuthbert of No. 2 Ferry Pool at Whitchurch to which she had been posted from Hamble. Throughout the war, Whitchurch had been an all-male pool. Its men tried to observe a ‘no fraternising’ rule for a few days when women were first foisted on them, but Volkersz and two others thawed them out by beating them at bridge.
Too late to help with any war except the Cold one to come, Whitchurch had started ferrying some of the RAF’s first jets. After a couple of weeks there, Volkersz asked if she could fly one. Cuthbert waited until his commanding officer and second-in-command were unavoidably elsewhere, then quietly instructed Flight Captain Volkersz – who held the same rank as he did, after all – to take Meteor III EE 386 from the Gloster Meteor plant at Morton Vallence to RAF 124 Squadron at Molesworth.
Spitfire Women of World War II Page 27
