She was offered no conversion course, no cockpit inspection, no helpful hints, no comment. Just a new four by five inch card to be inserted in her ringbound Ferry Pilot’s Notes in alphabetical order between Martinet and Oxford, to be glanced at on her way out to dispersal.
METEOR III
engine: 2 Derwent jet engines
FLYING PARTICULARS
Static Run-up: 16,500 r.p.m plus 100 or minus 200
Jet tube temperature: 690 degrees C max
Oil pressure: Normal 35 lbs. Minimum 30 lbs
Oil temperature: 80 degrees C max. O degrees C minimum
Take-Off:
Booster pumps: ON
R.P.M.: 16,500
Jet temp: 600 degrees C max
Elev. and Rud.: Neutral
Flaps: quarter
Safety speed: 130 mph
Note: Open throttles fully before releasing breaks. Unstick 120 mph.
It is worth pausing to digest what was happening. A pilot (who happened to be one of around twenty women still flying operationally outside Russia) was climbing into a brand-new jet fighter, the shape and high-pitched scream of the future, with orders to take off, fly across England and land in one piece after as much instruction as she might get nowadays renting a car from Avis.
Inside the cockpit, the main piece of evidence that aeroplanes were changing was the rev counter. Flight Captain Volkersz had to have her two Derwents spinning at 16,500 times a minute – compared with about 2,700 for a Spitfire – before she even released the brakes. There would be no pistons, plugs or propellers; just Frank Whittle’s invisible compressors, sheathed in smooth aluminium. Volkersz wound them up, took her feet off the brakes and ‘seemed to hurtle away like a shot from a gun’.
The Meteor drank 160 gallons of fuel per engine per hour, more than ten times as much as the Airspeed Oxford that jettisoned Amy Johnson when she ran out. (Was it any wonder that the post-war West developed a peculiar fixation with the Middle East?) The Notes said both tanks should be full before takeoff. Flight Captain Volkersz’s were not. She had just enough for a twenty-five-minute hop at 270 mph with a reserve for one overshoot on landing, but only one. So she kept things simple: took off to the west, turned at once, set course for Molesworth, streaked across England’s green and pleasant hips and was on the ground again by lunchtime. ‘It was really no different from any other delivery,’ she would tell people when asked about it. Except that she was the first British woman to fly a jet, and possibly only the second in the world after the German test pilot Hanna Reitsch. She would have liked to mark the occasion by bumping into a friend and shooting a line, but friends were already scarce a month after VJ Day, and anyway, the officers of RAF Molesworth were at lunch. She handed her chit to the watch officer, climbed into the waiting Anson and flew back to Whitchurch.
* * *
Volkersz had been assigned to Whitchurch not for special training but because Hamble had closed down. ‘For all the women, as far as they knew, it would mean going back to marriage and jobs, and paying for flying,’ Alison King wrote glumly. ‘It seemed a terrible waste of such hard-earned experience.’ But time, which had seemed to crawl through the lean and deadly years between Dunkirk and D-Day, was now racing. Peace was rearranging lives as jarringly as war had. Mussolini was shot by Italian Communists. Hitler dispatched himself and Eva Braun. (Reitsch, his favourite pilot, accepted a cyanide pill from her beloved Führer in the bunker, but didn’t use it – at least not at once. She lived until 1979, and there is evidence that she took it then.) Roosevelt was already gone. Churchill had been humiliated in the polls by Labour in July. And on 6 August Hiroshima was obliterated.
Compared with which, the memo from an assistant secretary at the Ministry of Aircraft Production to the Secretary of the Board of BOAC on 2 June 1945, on ‘methods which will permit the gradual contraction of [the ATA] and its ultimate winding up’ was less than momentous.
Still, winding up was hard to do. Lettice Curtis’s mother had died during the war, and her family home had ‘broken up’. She had not found love, not that she had looked particularly hard for it. Neither did she sense that finding work was going to be straightforward. In short, ‘to those of us who had nothing to go back to and nowhere particular to go … the end of the war was about as climacteric an experience as the outbreak’.
Ann Wood was just as driven as Curtis, but more adept as a mover and a shaker. In April 1945 she wrote to her mother in phlegmatic mood: ‘[I] will be really sorry when I have to stop flying the world’s loveliest aeroplanes … but all good things must end.’ By the time the end came she had resolved to stay in England if she could. The country of powdered eggs and puny moustaches had got under her freckled skin, and she pinned her hopes on landing a job as assistant to the air attaché at the US Embassy. His name was Tony Satterthwaite. He was a friend, and generally ‘pro-women’. Even better, he had his own Spitfire that often needed ferrying. There was only one problem, he told Ann apologetically as Washington writhed through the summer in the bureaucratic frenzy entailed by switching from warring behemoth to peacetime superpower: the State Department was dubious about the appointment, on account of her being a woman.
‘Winding up’ was effected in as gentlemanly and civilised a manner as possible. The ATA organisation simply shrank back to its original two pools at White Waltham and Whitchurch, and then to White Waltham alone. Pilots who wanted to stay on to the bitter end were accommodated if possible. Those who left received a note of thanks from Pop d’Erlanger and a Certificate of Service. They were also allowed to buy their uniform at a steep discount. Those who stayed felt the pace of work slacken steadily. Weekends were weekends; long, empty invitations to fret about the future. When the weather closed in there was no pressure to fly, and when it cleared most of the ferrying was to storage depots in Scotland or Wales – or breakers’ yards. Margaret Frost found these depressing. ‘This is a beautiful aeroplane and should not be broken up,’ she wrote on the fuselage of one Spitfire that she was assigned to deliver to its final, oily resting place.
On 29 September, 12,000 members of the public paid to attend a pageant at White Waltham organised to raise money for the families of the 170 dead ATA ferry pilots, and to show off the planes they flew. Lord Beaverbrook was guest of honour. He chipped in £5,000 of his own towards the new benevolent fund and thanked from his heart a group of aviators who ‘were soldiers fighting in the struggle just as completely as if they had been engaged on the battle front’. He concluded with a plea for generosity to ensure ‘now and in the years to come, the education and the upbringing of the orphans of the men who were too old to fly and fight, but not too old to fall’.
He made no mention of the women. Many of them were not there in any case. Jackie Moggridge, recently married to Reg, had broken a cardinal ATA rule in not telling Pauline Gower as soon as she became pregnant; but after seven months she could conceal it no longer and had quit to go and live in Taunton, near her in-laws. Ann Welch, Bobby Leveaux (née Sandoz) and Katie Hirsch (née Stanley Smith) were likewise spoken for. Jadwiga Pilsudska was at Liverpool University studying architecture. Betty Lussier was in Spain being romanced by Ricardo Sicre, her partner in espionage, through whom she would become friends with the movie star Ava Gardner and with whom she had four sons. Emily Chapin and Helen Richey were long gone. They had accepted Jackie Cochran’s standing offer of a place among the WASPs. Helen Harrison was home in Canada. Opal Anderson was back in Chicago with her boy, now six years old. Maureen Dunlop and her sister, Joan, who had spent the war as a nurse, had been reunited with their parents on the tarmac at Buenos Aires International Airport. Margot Duhalde was, at last, in France.
At least the weather rose to the occasion for the pageant at White Waltham. In glorious autumn sunshine, Alex Henshaw, the Castle Bromwich test pilot, who knew the ATA as well as any outsider, roared in over the Shottesbrooke church spire in an overpowered Seafire F4 and strained every neck on the ground with the kind of solo d
isplay not seen in these parts since 1940. Lettice Curtis was there, and remembered the occasion as ‘bittersweet’, the end of flying for many of the pilots present, the end of the best years of her life. But the organisers did her the honour of asking her to bring in the biggest plane on show that day, a Consolidated Liberator. A film crew caught her climbing out of it, and caught her smiling.
A month later, Lettice delivered her last plane for the ATA, a Tempest from Langley to Aston Down. The next day, she emptied her locker at White Waltham, said goodbye to friends, and left. ‘Already the days filled with flying were assuming a dreamlike quality,’ she wrote. ‘It was almost as if they had never been.’ Already, Pop d’Erlanger had relinquished command of his valiant invention to one W. D Kemp, Officer in Charge of Winding Up. Already, those who had left were finding the privations of peace harder to endure than those of war. Rationing was still in force, jobs were rarer than butter, and of those who were still single only the wealthiest could afford to ignore the question of how to make ends meet once their ATA pay stopped. Small wonder that a few clung on to the very end.
At around 4.30 on the afternoon of Friday, 30 November, six months after VE Day and six years after Pauline Gower started recruiting women flyers for the ATA, three of those women were in a tiny gaggle of spectators on the roof of the White Waltham watch office, looking west towards the darkening horizon. ‘The sun went down in a blaze of crimson and gold,’ one of those present wrote. As it did, a lone Anson appeared and circled the airfield once, and landed. A handful of men climbed out, walked across the dispersal area to the watch office and handed in their parachutes. They joined the spectators at the flagpole at the entrance to the aerodrome. Ann Wood, Diana Barnato Walker and Audrey Sale-Barker were among them. Audrey stepped forward and lowered the ATA flag in the fast-fading light.
The story could, in deference to the war, end there. But the Spitfire women were not known for their deference, nor for giving up flying when there was the slightest chance of carrying on. A fairer place to end would be Bandar Abbas, a desolate port-oasis on the north shore of the Persian Gulf.
Epilogue
It is 1953. The Iron Curtain has long since fallen across Europe. Eisenhower is in the White House, Queen Elizabeth II is on the throne, and in her honour Edmund Hillary and Sherpa Tensing have stood at last on top of the mountain that did for Trafford Leigh-Mallory’s brother. Britain has lost an empire, and her former colonies and mandates are fighting new wars of their own. For these, they are building new air forces. Israel has bought dozens of Spitfires from England and has extracted sterling service from them in the first Arab-Israeli war, but is upgrading to jets for the second. To help fund the upgrade it is selling thirty used Spitfires to Burma. The town of Bandar Abbas, in Iran, is on the air route there.
Seasonal rains have turned Bandar’s dirt streets into river beds. Between the town and the brilliant waters of the Strait of Hormuz there is a dun-coloured airstrip, thoroughly waterlogged. But the moisture is invisible from the air, held in salty suspension under a deceptively smooth layer of topsoil. When four Spitfire Mark IXs, newly painted in the blue, white and yellow livery of the republic of Burma, roar in off the Gulf in echelon formation at 200 feet, the lead plane sees no warning sign. While the others pull up to form a neat holding pattern, it lines up, lowers its wheels and floats in to land. The undercarriage skims the topsoil for a second, but as soon as the pilot feels the wheels touch they start to sink. Instead of rolling, the Spitfire digs in. When the pilot touches the brakes it pitches violently forward, burying its propeller in the mud. The second pilot sees the crash, fears the worst and dives for the airstrip, landing as an urgent shout comes over the headset: ‘Don’t use your brakes! Don’t taxi!’ The second aircraft lists heavily, but shudders to a halt undamaged. Out of it into the scalding Persian sun climbs Jackie Moggridge – née Sorour; former flying instructor and wartime ferry pilot.
Moggridge is four days’ flying time from her husband, Reg, and daughter, Joy, and now she is marooned on the airstrip with two Spitfires and an ex-fighter pilot called Gordon Levett. They have been thrown together by this strange flight back to the future for six months already, after a chance meeting in Prestwick. She had tried and failed to become the first woman through the sound barrier: the Air Ministry complimented her on her ‘spirit’ but then fobbed her off with regrets. At Prestwick she had been freelancing on a charter flight from Weston-super-Mare when she bumped into an old friend from the ATA, just in from Newfoundland on a Stratocruiser. He told her about a small ad he had seen for ferrying Spitfires to Burma.
By the autumn of 1953 Moggridge is on her fifth flight. Each one has been a major undertaking, with drop tanks, oxygen masks and detailed briefings on how to avoid the Syrian and Iraqi air forces, and what to do if forced down. (The answer was to say that you took off from Cyprus and hope for the best.) She has become a minor celebrity in the hotels and nightclubs of Nicosia, and the mechanics at Lydda airport outside Tel Aviv love her for her tight scarlet jeans. She knows the RAF bases from Karachi to Rangoon, and they know her and make exceptions to their men-only messing rules. She has been yanked out of housebound drudgery in Taunton and hurled back into the skies, and not just any skies but incandescent blue ones, with mauve dawns and pink sunsets; the land of the Bible beneath her and Gordon Levett on her wing.
Levett is miraculously unhurt after crash-landing at Bandar Abbas. Scrambling out of his Spitfire, he dashes across the mud to Jackie’s and uses her headset to tell the two others circling above to go on to Sharjah, and order him a new propeller. They make a low pass, whistling goodbye with their superchargers, then head south into the heat haze.
Moggridge and Levett spend six days in Bandar, pretending to be married in order to qualify for the only guest room in town. In the mornings they borrow a Jeep to drive out and inspect the runway. They bicker about logistics so as not to have to talk about each other. In the evenings they dine with the Iranian Oil Company representative, who has an Indian cook and beer. Sunsets are early. The evenings are long. They smoke on a balcony looking out towards the Gulf, and retire one at a time to their separate beds. On the seventh day Levett judges brusquely that the runway can be made safe enough for Moggridge to take off from, and she agrees. With the help of the Iranian Oil Company’s resident engineer he assembles a team of labourers to prepare a hard central strip by shovelling gravel onto it and rolling up and down it in a truck. There is still a risk that her Spitfire might stick in the mud and flip onto its back. The truck will therefore have to stay with her on take-off for a long as possible, carrying sand, shovels, ropes, axes and a makeshift fire crew. Levett selects volunteers and briefs them in more detail before leading a small convoy out to the waiting aircraft.
Jackie climbs in, tightens her straps and pulls on her helmet. Gordon steps onto the wing to remind her she will need maximum power before releasing her brakes, then full right rudder to counteract the swing. She nods, and looks up at him. He leans forward to kiss her, but it’s awkward – her helmet, his footing on the sloping wing.
‘Call me on the R/T after you take off,’ he says.
The Spitfire does seem to stick at first, shaking and accelerating sluggishly despite the bellow of its engine at full throttle. Out of the corner of her eye Jackie can see the truck keeping up for longer than it should, but then it slips behind her wing. She feels her tail come up and kicks the rudder pedal to stay on course. Momentarily her nose dips, then it rears up again as the wheels spring clear of the gravel and the shaking stops and the wings and engine are unleashed to hurl their tiny, blinking cargo into the clear blue sky.
Jackie Moggridge never did kiss Gordon Levett. She flew six Spitfires to Burma, then went home to Somerset to be with Reg and Joy. In 1957 she became Britain’s first woman airline captain, though more often than not she was mistaken for a stewardess as she boarded her aircraft. In 1994 she flew a Spitfire again. It was a machine she had delivered from Castle Bromwich to Selsey on the Sussex coa
st half a century earlier, and when she died in 2003 her ashes were scattered over the English countryside from the wings of the same plane.
Freydis Leaf and Veronica Volkersz also flew fighters to Asia; Tempests to Pakistan in 1948, by which time Volkersz’s brief marriage to a Dutch airman had failed. She was the first Englishwoman to have flown a jet, but was still barred from the officers’ mess at RAF Langley where that 5,000-mile delivery flight began, and at Karachi, where it ended. ‘We thought we had proved ourselves in the war,’ she wrote, ‘but some people have conveniently short memories.’ Freydis bore no grudges, except against Hitler for the early deaths of so many in her family. She became a champion air racer, married and moved to Africa to run a farm, then took up micro-lighting on her return to England.
The race to be the first woman through the sound barrier came down to a contest between Jackie Cochran and the daughter of the President of France. Cochran won. She did it over Rogers Dry Lake in California in 1953 in a Canadian Air Force F-86 Sabre jet, with clearances secured from the Department of Defense by her good friend General Charles ‘Chuck’ Yeager. Her grand vision of a women’s air force for the United States was snuffed out by Congress in 1944, but she never dwelt on setbacks. She covered the end of the war in the Pacific as a magazine reporter, attended the Nuremberg trials and claimed some of the credit for persuading Eisenhower to run for President.
The first supersonic British woman was – who else? – Diana Barnato Walker. In 1963 she persuaded the Air Ministry to let her loose over the North Sea in an English Electric Lightning which made her, for a while, the fastest woman in the world. In the same week she was diagnosed with cancer, but she had no-one close with whom to celebrate her record or talk to about her illness. Her husband, Derek Walker, had crashed and died in a Mustang on his way to a job interview eighteen months after their wedding. She had a son and a long relationship with Whitney Strait, the businessman and aviator, but never married again.
Spitfire Women of World War II Page 28
