Firebirds Soaring

by Sharyn November

  Then they put her in the pilot seat of a Tiger Moth biplane.

  There were no brakes. She and her veteran instructor waited, with the control stick held back to dig the tail skid into the ground, while another brave soul swung the propeller and got rid of the wheel chocks. Her instructor sat in front of her—Theo as pilot behind her passenger, but fortunately the controls were all in duplicate—and began to work Theo through the checklist. Theo became absorbed. Even her stomach calmed down. There was no room in her mind for fear, either of discovery or of what she was about to do; there were only her hands and her eyes and the instrument panel, and Flight Sergeant Wethered’s distorted voice shouting through the speaking tube and reminding her to set the altimeter.

  “Want to take off?” the disembodied voice offered casually.

  “Isn’t this an observation flight?”

  “I’ll talk you through it. Taxiing this old lady is harder work than flying her,” said the instructor. “She’ll do anything you tell her, in the air.”

  Theo stuck out her lower jaw. “Sure.”

  Theo fought the “old lady” across the airfield, legs working the rudder pedals in a battle of will to keep the aircraft straight against the backwash of its own propeller. And then suddenly the fight was over, and they were in the air, now, five hundred feet above the trees according to the altimeter, and climbing, and how did you get yourself back down?

  Theo laughed aloud.

  “That was a nice takeoff,” came Wethered’s voice.

  “Beginner’s luck!”

  “Think you can find your way to Oxford?”

  Theo looked down, frowning in concentration. She was in an entirely different England from the one she thought she had left behind; she felt like Alice finding herself in Looking-Glass land. The landscape below bore no resemblance to the tidy outlines of a map. Theo could not tell the difference between a hedgerow and a tree-lined road. She could not see the undulation of the plain below her. She could not even tell the surrounding meadows from the grass airfield she had lifted off from, minutes earlier.

  “Is that the Thames?”

  “Spot on.”

  Then it all came together: Theo’s perspective changed. She could picture it whole, suddenly, all the great heartland from above, with the Chiltern Hills to her right and the Cotswolds hiding in the haze far to her eleven o’clock, and the Thames Valley spread before her.

  “Well, if that’s the river, I reckon I could find my way to Oxford.”

  “Try it. Give me a heading. I’ll fly, you navigate.”

  They were in the air for three quarters of an hour. Theo did not touch the controls again after the takeoff, yet by the time she successfully relocated the airfield she was as worn out as if she had been riding all day.

  “Want to do a loop?” asked the casual, distorted voice of the instructor.

  “Go on, then.”

  He plunged straight into a dive that made Theo’s teeth go bare and cold. It was better than skiing full tilt down the slopes above Zermatt; better than any helter-skelter she had ever known; but like it, like the first swoop of a fairground ride, when you top the crest of the rails and your heart rises into your throat. The little biplane roared through the dive and started to climb, up, up, and up until finally there was no view of anything but sky. Then suddenly the horizon came back, only it was upside down. The engine cut and they fell in silence, the wind etching Theo’s face.

  “How did you like that?” Flight Sergeant Wethered shouted, looking back over his shoulder with a wide grin as he studied his student’s reaction.

  Theo could not speak. She gave him a thumbs-up, flourishing both gauntleted hands for emphasis.

  She had never wanted anything as badly as she wanted to learn to do that herself.

  Theo fell into routine. She did not pay much attention to the terrible things that were going on in Europe, as the Allied forces were beaten back to the beaches of France and evacuated. It never occurred to her that she might be sent there herself, one day, or be called upon to defend Britain from invasion if she scraped through her training; the possibility of lasting that long without being discovered seemed laughable. She concentrated on learning to fly. She kept her place in formation. She dropped paper parcels filled with chalk dust over a target mown in the grass beside the airfield. Theo was a good shot; her father had indulged her along with her brother, and her wasted girlhood of clay pigeon shooting and stumping after pheasants through wet woods and fields seemed suddenly worthwhile, even a natural and obvious means to an end. How could she have carried on the illusion otherwise?

  She took occasional telling insults. In an impromptu soccer game on a Sunday afternoon:

  “Jesus, Lyons, you kick like a girl!”

  “Never bothered playing,” she muttered. “Wet vicar’s offspring. More interested in horses.” She could not actually bring herself, aloud, to say that she was someone’s “son.”

  But fortunately, not being able to kick straight did not matter, because she flew better than anyone on her course. The little Tiger Moth seemed to her as alive and responsive as a horse. She could feel it tugging at the control column the way a horse might tug at its reins, telling her which way the wind was blowing and how hard, and it gave Theo untold satisfaction to feel the machine fighting her less and less, then not at all, as she settled it into trim. She liked the hairline precision of being at the edge of her abilities and the aircraft’s limits: turning so tightly the horizon seemed vertical, so that her own slipstream knocked the wings about when she met it again; the wires screaming and her body pressed into its seat in the high speed dive you made when you pretended your engine was aflame and you were alone in the sky with only the wind and your wits to put it out. Before long she got in the habit of closing her eyes when she kicked the plane into a spin. It was bliss.

  She struggled through the ground school exams, and was sent to Bristol for two weeks of officer training, which was not bliss. It would have been her downfall if they had not billeted everyone in private rooms in a boarding house at the last minute. Sheer determination got her through the endless drills, and Theo came back to Little Cherwell to put her infant pilot’s skills to work in something more advanced than Tiger Moths, namely Harvards, American-built single-engined training aircraft, monoplanes with wing flaps and retractable landing gear. It became Theo’s role to play the terrible Luftwaffe gunner on everyone else’s tail. She could not run as fast as they did on the ground, but she could chase them out of the sky.

  She scarcely spoke to anyone. She governed her body like a prison warden, forcing its functions into a strict and secret routine. She could not allow herself more than one cup of tea a day; she had a deep fear of being caught behind one of the mechanics sheds with her pants down. The toilet cubicles were private, at least, but she could not spend too much time there. She washed her underthings in the dark. There was an airing cupboard where she was able to dry out linens quickly, draped hidden over the back of the water boiler.

  Her navigation was first-rate, her knowledge of engines and aerodynamics average. She won the right to wear the coveted wings of a pilot.

  “Well done, Kim,” she whispered to herself as she followed the other successes, young and sharp and proud in their smart blue uniforms, to the formal dinner congratulating them.

  So passed June and July, and on came the end of August. Beyond Theo’s lonely, solitary world of sky and study, the Battle of Britain raged. Desperate and alone at the edge of Europe, British forces and civilians beat off invasion as Hitler’s preparations for Operation Sea Lion rained fire from the air on them in the effort to break their strength and will. The wireless crackled daily with the evil news, and with the prime minister’s gravelly voice repeating the defiance he had made in the aftermath of May’s retreat:

  “We shall defend our island whatever the cost may be. . . . We shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender.”

  During the
last week of August Theo was transferred to an operational squadron of Spitfire pilots, at Maidsend, inland from Hastings. It was so unexpected Theo thought it must be a mistake; could the RAF really be so desperate for fresh pilots? She stood before her new commanding officer, Leland North, as he turned the pages of Kim’s log book. There lay the record of all the flying Theo had done in her brother’s name.

  The CO finally shut the book and tossed it across his desk toward Theo. He cast his head into his hands and muttered, “Seventy-seven hours in the air! Dear God, please tell me this is a bad dream and I’m going to wake up in a minute.”

  This outburst did not seem to require an answer. Theo waited. After a minute North raised his head. He was probably ten years older than she was, but looked haggard and ancient, eyes red with lack of sleep and sandy hair thinning.

  “I’ve lost two or three pilots every day this week,” he told her. “And two or three planes with them. Where am I supposed to come up with a training plan for you?” He sighed and flourished a piece of paper at Theo. “Your last CO gives you a very good recommendation, anyway. Says you’re a daredevil in the air, without being a troublemaker or suicidal. Attentive with your checklists, and a good navigator. Go talk to the ground crew. Here, I’ll write you a pass. They’ll get you into a plane. You’ve got a week to figure out how to fly it.”

  “Can you spare an instructor?” Theo ventured.

  Leland North gave her a withering look of pure disgust. “The Spitfires are single pilot,” he said. “Surely you know.”

  She could have kicked herself for saying something so unutterably stupid.

  There was instruction, after all, a great deal of it; the planes were too precious to be trifled with. Theo took it all in carefully, but she did feel like a lamb to slaughter as the fitters trussed her into the cockpit for the first time, and showed her how the oxygen mask worked. The gun sight made her stomach turn over. This is real.

  It was a pig to taxi. Theo hardly dared use her brakes for fear she would tip herself over; the long, slender nose was so high off the ground you could not see a thing ahead of you, and you had to weave all over the place to get an idea of where you were going. There was the trick to remember about switching hands on the throttle once you were in the air, so you could raise the wheels. But taking off was, as ever, so easy, easy as falling over, easy as jumping off a cliff, only in the opposite direction. The sheer strength of the fighter took Theo by surprise. It was staggering that a single human being could master so much power at once. She had, previously, thrilled to be in the air; now she thrilled to be in control of this tremendous Merlin engine.

  God, this is all worth it.

  The little airplane was beautiful. It was so neat and clean and shapely, with its slender fuselage and smoothly curving wings; Theo had never imagined such a marriage of force and grace could be possible. She hauled up the landing gear and felt the drag cut away. The Spitfire seemed as eager to be in the air as she did.

  She flew a neat circuit, once she got the engine to behave obediently, carefully curving her flightpath on the approach as they had advised her, so she could see the runway past that great pointed nose. She landed sweetly, with scarcely a bump on touchdown.

  Two of the ground crew came racing out to her, both clearly in seven fits of fury.

  “Do you know how close you came to clipping the dispersal hut?” one of them shouted. “Do you know how close? By God, I thought you were going to take the roof off. You bloody well ought to be grounded!”

  “Sorry—sorry—” Theo cringed, chagrined and deflated.

  “Half-trained cocksure young blood fresh out of flying school!”

  Nobody grounded her. They sent her straight back up. They meant to send her into battle next week.

  Theo walked into the mess hall that night in a turmoil of exhaustion and frustration. She took a deep breath and introduced herself to her new fellow pilots. They were more welcoming than anyone else had been that day, until she came face-to-face with a pale, fair-haired young man with a wispy mustache and big ears. He went gray as skimmed milk when he saw her, and almost instinctively drew back his offered hand for a moment.

  “Who are you?” he whispered. In her memory, Theo peeled away the mustache, and saw behind it the face of Graham Honeywell, one of Kim’s three best friends from the Canterbury Grammar. Graham had been a year ahead of Kim.

  “Kim Lyons,” Theo said in a low voice.

  “But—” Graham said weakly, and of course he knew who she was. He gave Theo a long, searching once-over, taking in her wings, her smooth face, her challenging gaze. He had been shooting down German bombers earlier that day, and Theo suddenly felt like such a charlatan, such a time-wasting fake, that she wanted to turn and run.

  Graham rubbed his eyes, then held out his hand again. Theo took it. Graham’s palm was damp, but his handshake was firm and determined. He shook his head. “Could have sworn you were knocked down by a van last spring,” Graham laughed.

  He had always been a wisecracker, behind the milque-toast, which was why Kim had liked him.

  “I haven’t been knocked down by anything yet,” said Theo. “Though I expect you could do it very quickly, if you wanted to.”

  “Damned if I’d try.” He grinned at Theo conspiratorially. “That’s the Hun’s job.” He clapped his arm over her shoulder. He was shorter than her. “Have they let you go flying yet?”

  “I’ve been up all afternoon.”

  “Unbelievable, isn’t it?”

  “Unbelievable,” Theo agreed with fervor. She did not know if he meant the war, or flying a Spitfire, or the fact that she had turned up as his messmate, or that she had only a week to train in, but it was all, unquestionably, unbelievable.

  For a moment she wished Graham would give her secret away, make it easy for her, take the responsibility out of her hands.

  I could leave, Theo thought, as she lay in bed in a twin bunkroom whose other occupant had been killed two days earlier. I could just tell them who I am and they’d kick me out. I could join the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force, like I said I was going to. They might take me, now that I can decipher Morse code in my sleep. Maybe I could be a fitter. Some of the fitters here are girls.

  Don’t be an idiot, Theo, she told herself. If you tell them who you are, you’ll be so blackballed no one will ever let you near another airplane.

  Well then, Kim could leave. Kim could walk away from here and disappear, and I could turn up at home as Theo, and go back to doing whatever Theo was going to do with her other life, her real life.

  Theo threw off the covers and sat up, pounding the mattress with her fist, enraged with herself. Oh, good plan, Lyons, fine plan. That would really be the perfect ending to all your efforts to honor your dead brother’s memory. T. Kimball Lyons, who walked away and disappeared in the darkest hour his nation has ever known, and went down in the annals of the Royal Air Force as a deadbeat and a quitter! Not just a slacker, this time, not just a slacker, but also a coward! A deserter! That’s how you’re going to immortalize your brother?

  You get sucked into things. You go with your idea, or someone else’s, or the movement of the crowd, until you find there is no turning back. The pull of events, of your companions, of duty or excitement, sweeps you over hurdles that your heart and brain would never venture. Guilt and shame are stronger than fear.

  Theo would sooner have cut her own throat than failed to follow her squadron leader into the air and up to twenty thousand feet, high over the white cliffs and blue waves and into a swarm of Messerschmitt 109s, escorting a band of bombers, dense as a cloud of midges.

  They were twelve against a hundred. That was a guess; there were too many to count. The only shots Theo had ever fired from her loaded wings had been at stationary targets on the ground. Clay pigeons, she thought, clay pigeons. Stay high, keep the sun at your back, blind your enemy. They’re just a mess of clay pigeons—nothing to it.

  She fixed one of them in her sight and pressed the
gun button. Clay pigeons did not go spiralling out of the sky in flame. Nor did they shoot back—Theo did not have a second to focus on either elation or regret, and for the next ten minutes did not fire a single shot, only because it was all she could do to keep her own plane from being hit.

  Gosh, throwing yourself around like this burns an astonishing lot of fuel, she thought.

  The Spitfires were joined by a squadron of Hurricanes. They harried their enemies back from the cliffs through sheer persistence, it seemed, or more likely the German planes were running low on fuel as well. The Messerschmitts started retreating first, and the bombers had to go with their escort or be blasted out of the sky. The entire battle lasted twenty minutes.

  A parting shot from one of the German fighters landed dead on the nose of a Spitfire a thousand feet below Theo, and the aircraft bucked and dipped, trailing black smoke. She watched in horror, anticipating the inevitable dive toward the bright sea.

  The voice of Theo’s squadron leader burst over the radio in a blue shower of obscenities. It was impossible to tell if it was he who had been hit or if he was cursing on behalf of the stricken aircraft.

  All of a sudden the sky was practically empty. Half the squadron, Theo’s flight, had headed back. As far as Theo could tell she was alone above the crippled plane, which still glided gently toward the cliffs. Come on—get out, get out, get out, Theo willed the pilot, watching for a parachute. Get out! she urged him in her mind, and then woke to sensibility and screamed into the radio, “Get out! Open the hood! Roll!”