Spitfire Women of World War II (19 page)

But for once, spring meant sunshine. Ann had rolled up her trousers and sprawled on the grass, waiting for another taxi plane to pick her up. As she wrote, pressing on her parachute, perhaps, or an overnight bag slim enough to fit in the four-inch gap to the left of a Spitfire pilot's seat and behind the throttle, the momentous death was analysed and put aside. Within a page it had
been dealt with, and a twenty-seven-year-old daughter, fulfilled, appreciated and warmed by an unusually generous English sun, felt bound to tell her mother, ‘this is really a most heavenly day'.

After Rudolf Hess visited Ann Welch at the Rossfeld ski hut above Berchtesgaden, he made a more famous trip, to Scotland. His purpose was the same – to gauge Britain's appetite for war and argue for an armistice. This time he flew in secret and apparently without the Führer's knowledge or permission up the North Sea to visit a man he had once seen across a crowded room, but never spoken to – the Duke of Hamilton. Douglas Douglas-Hamilton was at once ogre and Adonis: huge, fierce, handsome and immensely strong. He was also fair. Hess must have thought of him as a Teuton under the skin. He was the first man to fly over Everest, then went to the Berlin Olympics as a former boxing champion and guest of the hosts. His brothers included David, hero of the Battle of Malta, and Malcolm, the man Audrey Sale-Barker would marry. He sent Hess packing, and at last the Nazis got the message.

They could equally have got the message by visiting the East End of London, of course – or Hamble, in Hampshire. In peace Hamble was timeless and bucolic. In war it was suddenly busy, brave and bristling with defences. It was also enlivened by the antics of its visitors.

Mary de Bunsen was a Hamble stalwart. Until she became embarrassed at having damaged one too many Spitfires and asked to be reassigned to the ‘salt mines' of Kirkbride, she enhanced the place with a crackpot recreational style that appeared to be inherited. Her first act on arriving was to rent a collapsible canoe
with blue canvas decks from her landlady, because she loved water and Hamble was hemmed in by it on three sides. Her weak heart never deterred her. One dark, sleeting November afternoon in 1943 she put her seventy-three-year-old mother in the canoe and paddled her towards Southampton as far as the port's submarine barrage, surfing across the open water on the wakes of steamships and horrifying the rest of the ferry pool as they watched from the Yacht Club, trying to work out whether they were witnessing matricide or suicide. ‘Though apparently mad it was, of course, the perfect antidote to the tension of flying,' de Bunsen wrote, and one can only believe her. The de Bunsens, after all, had watched the worst night of the Blitz from a Mayfair rooftop and loved every minute of it.

Hamble's position on a neck between the Solent and the Hamble River, and its aerodrome, made it the obvious jumping-off point for the 8,000 Spitfires built at the Vickers Supermarine works in Southampton during the war. The business of flying them to camouflaged country airfields like the nearby Chattis Hill and High Post on the edge of Salisbury Plain, where they were test-flown and armed, could be monotonous, but it was never straightforward: for long periods Southampton was constantly under attack, and when the sirens sounded barrage balloons had precedence over aircraft movements – even of brand-new Spitfires lined up like ducks on the grass at Hamble. When the balloons went up, they left only a narrow corridor for friendly incoming aircraft, and the corridor's alignment changed from day to day. Unlike test pilot Alex Henshaw at Castle Bromwich, the women ATA pilots were not trained in aerobatics. For most of them, a perky half loop to get out of balloon danger was not an option. But there were compensations. Day in, day out, they were flying the perfect lady's aeroplane, and it seems that an enlightened Pop d'Erlanger chose Hamble for his first all-women's pool precisely so that they would be flying the aircraft that suited them best.

D'Erlanger had been forced to begin moving his women pilots away from Hatfield by mid-1941, when the De Havilland plant
there began re-tooling to build twin-engined Mosquitoes – which none of the women was yet cleared to fly – instead of Moths. In due course a second all-women's pool was established at Cosford, near Wolverhampton, and women were posted on an ad-hoc basis to Ratcliffe, Kirkbride, Prestwick, White Waltham and elsewhere. But full integration was never an option. Sir Francis Shelmerdine, Director of Civil Aviation, had written to his director of finance in September 1939: ‘It will be necessary for obvious reasons to keep the women's section separate from the men's section of the ATA, and to have a woman in administrative charge of it.' Sir Francis did not trouble to set out what those ‘obvious reasons' were, and in truth the idea that most of her pilots should be lumped together geographically by gender was one that Pauline Gower never resisted. This was partly because those posted to Hamble were almost always pleased to be there.

For all the stinking refineries and sawtooth factory roofs spreading towards it from Southampton, Hamble was still, in 1941, an Anglo-Saxon seaside gem. When Margot Gore, the new commanding officer of No. 15 Ferry Pool, and Alison King, its operations officer, first set out from the airfield to explore it, they felt drawn into a timewarp. ‘A quiet hard drizzle had set in with a cold, eating wind,' King remembered. ‘Suddenly we turned from a wide windy road round the corner and down the sloping lane into something that had been in a world of its own since the fourteenth century.' The High Street led past ancient trellised porches on one side and Hookers the baker and Spakes the grocer on the other, and dead-ended in the water. The signs of half a dozen hostelries beckoned from the gloom, catering in peacetime to armchair sea dogs and now, in wartime, to nightly refugees from the air raids. It had its pubs, of course – the Ye Olde White Hart, the Victory, the King & Queen and, facing the water next to the yacht club, the Bugle, famous for lobster. ‘We stood in the rain to get our first full view of the river,' Ops Officer King wrote, ‘and listened to the greedy, querulous sound of the gulls as they whirred, and to the ripple and lapping of the grey-green leaden
water, opaque as the earth and empty now of its small bright boats. The far bank of the river hung still with blue mist, mysterious and silent,'

It was idyllic – and still in danger of being overrun by Germans. This was the official line, at any rate. The Battle of Britain might have been won, but if as a consequence Hitler had called off his invasion plans the news had yet to filter down to the mouth of the Hamble River. Here, in a large, sealed envelope marked ‘Invasion Orders', were detailed instructions to Commanding Officer Gore on how to save her planes and pilots and regroup for the fightback when the sky filled with parachutes and the Solent with swastikas. The envelope was not to be opened until an attack was imminent. However, Gore knew the broad outlines of its contents already, having diligently organised a field trip to her ferry pool's first inland mustering point. It was forty miles away: a former racetrack north-west of Salisbury. When she and Alison King arrived there one washed-out winter's afternoon in their official Humber, they were shown a potting shed containing four large tents, four crates of tinned food and a hatchet. After being served a cup of tea, they signed for the shed keys and drove glumly back to Hamble. ‘There we were then,' King wrote afterwards. ‘Ready for invasion.' The next day Gore ordered everyone in her command to pack an invasion bag containing pyjamas, jersey, chocolate, toothbrush, mug, knife and a plate if desired, to be ready at a moment's notice at all times.

Boarding school was never quite like this. But in other respects, once the invasion threat receded and the Americans began arriving in the summer of 1942, boarding school is what Hamble came to resemble. It was cliquey, hierarchical and run to a strict timetable, but with rules that existed largely to be broken: being a civilian organisation, the ATA's only serious sanction for bad behaviour was dismissal, and this was seldom used because pilots were needed and pilot training was expensive.

Hamble was smaller than its mainly male headquarters in White Waltham, but no less eccentric. It was home to one woman
(Jackie Sorour) who insisted that she knew how to fly before she knew even the most basic facts of life; and to another (Barbara Wojtulanis), who knew how to fly before she could ride a bicycle. Sorour liked to perform headstands in the mess before taking to the air because she felt her blood was more urgently needed in her head than her feet. Others used the curling linoleum floor for more conventional exercises; they had figures to maintain, and flying taxed the mind more than the behind. Idle hours were passed with bridge games, letter-writing,
The Times
and the music from
The Strawberry Blonde
on the gramophone. Visiting males, if not too intimidated by the women, or so intimidated that they could think of nothing to say to them, would sometimes attempt a tour of the mess without touching its floor, using only window sills, chair backs and the chocolate-coloured dado rail. Visitors were also expected to sign the curtains.

Most of the women were billeted in bijou cottages along the river or on the edge of the green expanse from which they flew (and which remains undeveloped even now; a tussocky meadow reached via ‘Spitfire Way'). Lucky with their lodgings, many also remembered Hamble as a place of easy camaraderie. It was, but not for everyone. Most of the Americans gravitated in the evenings to the newsagent's wife's house on the outskirts of the village where at least two of them were always billeted. They mixed a little with the English, but much more with each other. Dorothy Bragg was an exception. She bridled at being asked to share a room with one of her compatriots and checked into South-ampton's Polygon Hotel. And Margot Duhalde, released from her crash course in the English language with the White Waltham mechanics, became sucked into a feud with Anna Leska that could have killed them both.

It is not clear how the argument started. Duhalde herself cannot remember. She suggested that her connection to the Free French may have been resented by Leska, whose brief stay in France on a long journey from Poland had not been an entirely happy one. ‘In the end we just didn't like each other,' Duhalde
said. ‘We fought over everything, in the ground and in the air. We would barge in front of each other when taxiing to take off or cut each other off when we were coming into land. It was crazy, and I suppose it was dangerous.' Her boyfriend at the time, a Squadron Leader Gordon Scotter, certainly thought so. He flew into Hamble frequently, ‘and he saw us fighting in the air', Duhalde remembered ruefully. Deciding betrayal would be the better part of valour, he had a quiet chat with Margot Gore. ‘Leska and I had to go and see her, and she said, “One of you will have to go, and that person is you Margot unless you say sorry.” So I said sorry in front of her, but outside I told Leska that after the war I'd knock her teeth out.'

Duhalde patched things up with Scotter, but never with ‘La Polacka'. As she explained: ‘The only time we exchanged more than courtesies after that was at a reunion in the presence of the Duke of Kent. We said hello to him, then started quarrelling again.'

Such discord does not feature in the placid photographs that survive of Spitfire women at leisure in their Hamble mess. And nor does sex. In fact, sex scarcely rears its unprofessional head in all the women pilots' writings and reminiscences, whether intended for public or private consumption. But did human yearning and biology put itself on ice while humanity took care of Hitler? Not if countless thousands of war brides and babies are any indication, and not in Hamble.

‘We were called the lesbians' pool, of course,' said Rosemary Rees, presumably referring to RAF and other male banter. She didn't know of any real lesbians there, and there may have been none. On the other hand, some of the surviving pilots suggest quite casually, in the old-fashioned way, that there may have been one or two among them who were ‘not the marrying sort'. There were certainly a good many who never married for whatever reason. Then there was Joy Ferguson, a pioneering transsexual who after the war announced that she had become a man and changed her name to Jonathan. (As a civil servant at the Ministry of Supply, this automatically entitled her to a pay rise.) And there was
the woman who eventually became Dorothy Furey Bragg Beatty Hewitt.

By the time Dorothy Bragg arrived at Hamble, in the autumn of 1942, it was clear to her fellow pilots that she
was
the marrying sort. Lieutenant Richard Bragg, her successful suitor from the
Beaver Hill
, had been killed in action shortly after their wedding in March. She insisted later that she had never been in love with him, but she was clearly in the mood for it now. In the presence of men she had an eerie absence of inhibition by the standards of most of the rest of the ferry pool. She had shunned Hamble's cosy après-fly existence by choosing to live in Southampton, and she understood better than anyone that if all was fair in love and war, then to be in both at once must be very fair indeed:

‘Oh!,' Dorothy sighed as she remembered Beatty – and the ‘oh' seemed to float out of her and up towards the ceiling of her sunroom like a dandelion. ‘He was
very
romantic.'

Dancing all night with whomsoever he desired turned out to be this gentleman's prerogative, for he was, by a long way, the most senior man in the room. He was Commander Lord Beatty, beetle-browed son of the more famous admiral who had fought the Kaiser's fleet at Jutland in 1916. He, too, was already married – to another American Dorothy, as it happened – but unhappily.
Beatty family legend had it that this other Dorothy had left twin boys in the States and told a friend: ‘I sold all my jewels and I'm going to England to catch me a Lord.' She caught one, but having done so failed to provide an heir, and Beatty wanted one.