Izzy's War

by Isla Dewar

  Jacob shook his head – he didn’t think so. But then, what did he care? He had no intention of getting to know her.

  It was after four, and the day was turning velvet. Gathering darkness in the trees behind the airfield was thick, granular. Jacob stood watching the end-of-the-day bustle. A plane skimmed in, wheels squealing as it hit the runway. Above a Spitfire joined the remaining circuiting plane. The whole world was throbbing noise. The van returned from the end of the runway, stopped at the door of the main building and a small crowd of women clambered out. They were all in flying suits and jackets, carrying helmets, map bags, parachutes and small overnight bags. There was a gaggle of female voices.

  Brian noticed Jacob noticing the women, and said, ‘Out of bounds, old chap.’

  Jacob smiled. ‘I expect they are.’

  ‘All double-barrelled names. Not interested in the likes of you and me. You’ve got to be a squadron leader, letters after your name. You’ve got to be rich. Like them.’

  Jacob nodded. That was probably true. He shook Brian’s hand and said he’d see him tomorrow. He had to get back to the village to find out exactly where tomorrow’s passengers’ houses were. He’d ask William, who was bound to know.

  On his way to the gate, he saw Izzy. The girl from this morning, he remembered. She turned, spotted him and smiled. Ah, he thought, a small-town girl. City people stared awhile, then perhaps nodded – a brief acknowledgement that they recognised you. Small-town people smiled first, then worked out who you were. It was considered rude in tight communities not to say hello to everybody you met.

  He guessed she wasn’t as wealthy as the other two she shared the cottage with. She most likely had learned to fly because, like so many young women before the war started, she’d been in thrall with the feats of Amy Johnson.

  When she saw him looking at her, Izzy’s face had bloomed – the full smile. Jacob could read her every thought. There’s someone familiar, smile. Who is it, though? Oh yes, it’s him. Bigger smile and little friendly wave.

  The other two had cut-glass accents. Izzy’s voice was lower, lilting. He could hardly take his eyes off her. He was drawn to her mix of warmth, determination and vulnerability. Turning the stolen sixpence in his pocket over and over in his fingers, he thought that there were many good things about Izzy. But the best thing was that she was nothing like Anna.

  Chapter Four

  Custard Days

  MORNING, TEN PAST nine in the canteen, which was through the ever-open door at the far end of the mess, Cook made a mental list of her chores for the day. She had a name, but everybody called her Cook. Prepare veg for soup, top up tea urn, scones. Scones first, she thought, if the solid thing produced by mixing National flour, margarine and powdered eggs could be called a scone. Fluffy and light it was not. Still, what could you do? There was a war on.

  It was always noisy this time of day, sounds of the mess – chat, laughter, heavy crockery chinking, the flick and shuffle of cards. But there was an undertow to that noise, a tension as the pilots waited for Edith’s call: ‘The chits are up.’ Then they’d scramble.

  ‘Them pilots are a noisy lot,’ said Mabel, Cook’s assistant.

  ‘It’s all show,’ said Cook. ‘They do it so they won’t hear what they’re thinking.’

  ‘And what are they thinking?’

  ‘They’re thinking today might be the day they crash into a mountain.’

  ‘You think they’re scared?’ asked Mabel.

  Cook said that these days everybody was scared. ‘You never know what’s comin’ next. A bomb on your house, a telegram telling you someone’s dead. Never mind, you have to keep cheery when death’s about, that’s what I always say.’

  She heaved out a baking tray and began, hefty arm working furiously, to grease it with lard. ‘Of course, they’re scared, every single one of them.’ Then, pointing to the bucket containing leftovers, scrapings from yesterday’s plates, she said, ‘Take the pigs’ swill out. The farmer’ll be by to pick it up soon enough.’

  The pilots were in the mess drinking tea or hot orangeade, smoking, knitting, playing cards or backgammon, telling tall stories about their adventures in the air, embroidering mishaps to startle their audience, ‘line shooting’ they called it. In one corner a space had been cleared and several women were exercising – lying on their backs air-cycling, doing sit-ups, press-ups or just swinging their torsos about, bending, stretching. This job, they said, made you fat. All the sitting in planes, or sitting waiting for planes, all the tea and scones.

  Five of the male pilots sat watching, their faces expressionless. They smoked steadily and swigged tea. Julia often remarked that she couldn’t believe these men had no interest in women at all. But then they were probably hungover. ‘They spend every single night in the pub.’

  Izzy put her feet up on the chair next to the one she was sitting on, folded her arms and dozed. She was renowned for her sleeping abilities. ‘It’s a gift,’ she claimed, revelling in the envy it brought her. She drifted, conversations bubbled round her.

  Claire was playing backgammon with Dick Wills, one of the older pilots, who’d lost his right eye in the First World War. He had a startling growth of hair on his upper lip. Too old for the RAF, he’d joined the ATA because he couldn’t resist the opportunity to get into the air and fly some damned crate again. He claimed, with pride, to be a flirt and a bit of a bounder. He thought it rather jolly to have women pilots as colleagues, even if they were annoyingly prone to obeying the rules. ‘They are made to be broken.’

  ‘I don’t like the way this game is going. I’m losing,’ said Claire, throwing the dice.

  ‘Claire, you always lose. You never take risks.’

  Drifting and dozing, Izzy thought this a good thing. She never took risks, either. She thought Dick Wills awfully ancient. He was forty-nine.

  Across the room, Dolores, one of three American pilots, was watching a game of bridge, and telling nobody in particular that poker was her game. ‘Takes real balls to win at poker. Nerves of steel.’

  Izzy yawned. She didn’t know Dolores terribly well. But then, apart from Julia and Claire, she didn’t know any of the other pilots. They rarely mixed socially. Flying was a solitary job.

  Izzy was used to this, loneliness didn’t bother her. She’d been the daughter at the manse and had spent most of her time at home alone. None of her friends would come to play at her house. This, Izzy knew, was all down to her father’s eyebrows. They were fiercesome things – agile, too. Her father had many variations on the movement of eyebrows and could express endless opinions just by moving them up, down or across the way, when they met in the middle of his brow. Disapproval was his forte. Izzy wished her father were here now; he could do his eyebrow dance, left eyebrow up, right eyebrow down, a look both quizzical and mocking that would definitely have silenced Dolores.

  ‘Played poker all the way here on the boat. Six goddam days. Jeepers, that was a trip. Awful. Below the decks most of the time. We were in a convoy and any time I did go on deck I’d see there was one more boat missing. Nobody would say if it had been called away or sunk. I hated being on that boat. Still, I won a hundred dollars.’

  This was why, when America joined the war, she hadn’t accepted the invitation to go back there. It wasn’t that she didn’t want to go back, she didn’t fancy the journey.

  Izzy turned her head so that one ear was wedged against the back of her chair, blocking it so Dolores didn’t sound quite so loud. The floor shook. The exercisers were jumping up and down, waving their arms.

  Julia, sitting next to Izzy, said, ‘I wish they’d stop doing that.’

  Diane on the other side of the table agreed. ‘Bloody annoying.’

  The rhythmic clicking of Diane’s knitting needles kept Izzy in a quiet state of near sleep. It reminded her of home. Her mother in a chair on one side of the fire, knitting. Her father sitting opposite reading an Agatha Christie, and the wireless on – The Brains Trust was a favourite.

&
nbsp; Diane was Izzy’s favourite pilot. At thirty-eight, she was the oldest among the women. She’d married at eighteen and produced a daughter a year later. That daughter had also married at eighteen and had recently given birth to a son. Diane was known as the Flying Grandmother.

  Across the table Julia muttered that she was sorry, but she did not like Dolores.

  ‘She’s just loud,’ said Diane. Click, click, click, knit, knit. Needles a blur.

  ‘She’s after Alfie’s money.’

  Dolores was billeted with Lord Alfred Myers, in a flat above the stables. But she ate in the house, and in the evening sat by the fire, drinking his wine. ‘Though I’m a beer gal, really.’ She and the Lord had formed a lusty friendship based on a mutual love of cards, alcohol and going very fast in anything that moved – horses, motorbikes, cars and, in her case, planes.

  ‘More fool her,’ said Diane. ‘Alfie’s as poor as a church mouse.’

  Julia snorted. ‘Gold-digger.’

  Glasses propped on the top of her head as she studied the pattern on the table in front of her, Diane said, ‘It’s none of your business, and you know it. How’s your own love life, by the way?’

  ‘Haven’t heard from Jeffrey. Charles has gone orff to officers’ training. Then he’s orff to Burma. We’ll have a couple of days in London before he goes. I’ll take a couple of days orff.’

  Three ‘orffs’ in a row, Izzy thought. That could be a record.

  ‘Jolly good,’ said Diane. Click, click, in, over, through and off. She was making a blue matinee jacket.

  Last night, when Izzy got home from work, there had been a letter from Elspeth waiting for her. Elspeth had told her it was time she faced up to her father, told him about her job, her grown-up love life and that she no longer believed in God. ‘You can’t keep on living a lie,’ she’d written. Izzy knew that to be true. But then Elspeth had never had to deal with those eyebrows, the thunderous looks, the awful thick silences that could go on for days and days. Izzy’s father was a wonderful man, kindly, hearty and fun, as long as everyone round him realised that he was right about everything.

  Elspeth had also told her that she’d discovered the most terrible thing: ‘I can’t leave this job. I’m signed up till this damn war is over. I’m stuck.’ Izzy decided to write back and tell Elspeth that she was due four days’ leave. She would go north to see her, she’d cheer up her old friend.

  She closed her eyes, invited sleep, and was drifting to that pleasant dreamy place she went to just before oblivion – voices, knitting, dice rattling, cards shuffling, exercisers grunting, sounds were distant, somewhere far away at the end of a tunnel – when Edith Conway, the ops officer, swung in shouting, ‘Chits are up!’ Scrape of chairs on polished lino, people jumping to their feet, cigarettes being stubbed out, games abandoned – everyone scrambled.

  There was the usual squash of people, a seething mass of blue serge, shoving and milling about the table in the corridor where the chits were placed. Every day, Edith tried to get some order into this. Why couldn’t these people just queue up, file past and pick up their chit? ‘We’re British,’ she said. ‘We’re natural queuers. It’s something we’re good at.’ Nobody paid any attention. She beetled off, elbows going, to phone the engineer-in-chief and tell him to get the planes started. In weather this cold, the engines needed ten minutes warm-up time. ‘We’re off,’ she’d say.

  Izzy read her chit: ‘Pilot, I. Macleod. Date, 5/11/1943, Spitfire. Castle Bromwich to Ternhill.’

  Julia, Diane and Dolores had the same delivery. Moving Spitfires from factory to storage unit. Claire would fly them back and forth in the taxi plane.

  Stuffing the chit into her pocket, Izzy went to the locker room and changed into her flying suit. She checked her pockets – handling notes, comb, lipstick and lucky stone. She picked up her map bag, helmet and wondered about taking her overnight bag, then decided against it. She was sure she’d get home tonight.

  ‘This outfit does nothing for me,’ she said to Julia. However, she rather liked it. She could hide inside it. Once she’d climbed into it and fastened it up, she felt safe. There were times when, apart from her size and her mass of dark hair, nobody could tell she was a woman. Not that it really mattered any more, there weren’t so many men who disapproved of women pilots as there had been when she’d started doing this. Now everyone was too caught up with the war to care.

  She enjoyed the anonymity of the suit. From a distance, all pilots looked the same.

  ‘You look gorgeous, darling,’ said Julia. She linked Izzy’s arm and together they collected their parachutes and went to the mapping room.

  It was one of the rules that the pilots went there every morning to check that there were no new barrage balloons on their flight path. After that, there was the signals room then the met room.

  ‘Izzy,’ said Julia, ‘I worry about you. You need to have fun.’

  Izzy said she did have fun. This job was all the fun she needed.

  ‘You should grab at life while you have it,’ said Julia. ‘You might get bumped orff tomorrow.’

  ‘A comforting thought,’ said Izzy. She glanced down at Julia’s arm entwining hers. Another wish – she would have liked to be able to link arms with people in the easy friendly way Julia did. But she couldn’t. She wasn’t relaxed enough with these women to slip into easy friendships with them.

  ‘You need to be swept orff your feet by a dark handsome man,’ said Julia. ‘Everyone loves to be swept orff their feet. You need a distraction.’

  But Izzy shook her head. ‘Never.’ She didn’t want anything to take the edge off the joy she felt when she was flying. And, right now, the tingle of anticipation was growing.

  Julia checked today’s flight path. ‘There, no new balloons, no target practice, we’re fine.’ She grinned, scarlet lips. Sometimes Izzy thought Julia only had two emotions – enthusiastic and very enthusiastic.

  After that, arms still linked, they went to check on the weather with Nigel the Met.

  ‘Lovely day, girls,’ he said. ‘Clear and perfect.’

  The weather maps hung round the walls and were marked with reports taken from around the country. Izzy accepted that, since there was no communication with ships, information was limited. But it annoyed her that Nigel was often wrong. And when found out, he giggled.

  As they left, Izzy said that she didn’t trust Nigel at all. She thought that it would be better to ask Mrs Brent how her knees were doing. ‘They give her gyp when the bad weather’s coming. Far more reliable than anything he does.’

  Julia thought she had a point.

  ‘I mean,’ said Izzy, ‘the weather is so changeable. There’s so much of it. The air shifts and brings in smells and tastes. Nigel should go outside and take a sip of air and never mind his actuals from around the country and three-hourly advance forecasts.’

  ‘You think Nigel should taste the air?’

  ‘Absolutely,’ said Izzy. ‘You breathe it in, let it run over the tip of your tongue, you get the flavour of the weather.’

  ‘And what’s the flavour today?’ asked Julia.

  ‘Crispy and cold,’ said Izzy.

  By now they’d walked along the corridor and were outside and heading for the van that would take them to the end of the runway. Jacob was driving. He smiled to Izzy, who gave him a slight upward flicker of the lips back. It wasn’t a time to be friendly.

  On the drive, everyone slipped into silence, a tense almost fearful thing. Izzy had once tried to explain this to Mrs Brent. It was a little bit like the tension you felt before sitting an exam, she’d said. ‘But not quite, because you are about to do something you love doing. But it also scares you.’

  Mrs Brent hadn’t paused in her furious scrubbing of the kitchen table. ‘You’ll all be making friends with your fear, that’s what your doing.’ Izzy had been struck at how simple and true this was. Now, sitting in the van, she put the tremors she felt in her stomach down to her making friends with her fear. This was bet
ter than thinking she was scared.

  She reached into her pocket, turned her lucky stone over and over with her fingers. Julia was running her lucky pearl along the chain round her neck. Claire was plucking at the fur on her flying suit. Hating how the full suit restricted her movements, she’d taken out the lining and wore only that. She looked like a teddy bear. Diane was folding and refolding her headscarf; she hated wearing a helmet. Dolores was fiddling with her lipstick. Yes, thought Izzy, they were all making friends with their fear.

  At the end of the runway, they clambered out of the van, and into the noise – thirty planes with their engines roaring – and bustle. A crosswind battered round them, whipping their voices away and pushing the windsock so it was at a right angle with the pole.

  The first planes for take-off were being taxied forwards, ground engineers straddled across their tails, steadying them in the wind. It always worried Izzy that one day she’d forget someone was riding the back of her plane and she’d leave the ground with an outdoor passenger white-faced and screaming in terror. The first pilots were in their planes waiting for the green light from the tower.

  Seven pilots climbed into the Anson, dumped their parachutes in the tail and settled into the canvas seats. Several of the men took out newspapers. Julia fished a manicure set from her pocket and started filing her nails. Diane knitted. This settling down to small amusements to occupy a journey always reminded Izzy of a bus trip, the things commuters did on their way to work.

  They landed at the factory airfield. Izzy, Diane, Julia and Dolores jumped out, steadied themselves against the gusts of wind from the propellers and made their way, running, to the administrative block. Claire took off with the rest of her passengers. She’d meet up with the girls at Ternhill.

  By one o’clock, the pilots had made two trips to Ternhill storage unit and, on the second flight back, ate their chocolate bars. They rarely bothered with lunch.

  Dolores had wanted to eat at Ternhill, but the others had refused. They were uncomfortable there. The CO there still hadn’t accepted the notion of women flying planes and it was only recently that they’d been allowed into the mess.