Spitfire Women of World War II (29 page)

Ordinarily she would have been expected to appear in person before the Accidents Committee. No-one invited her to do so and to this day she does not know for certain why. But she suspects her Uncle Stewart, minus arm, eye and sundry other body parts, took it upon himself to represent her. If so, his intentions may have been noble but he made little attempt to fight her corner. When she left the ATA in August 1945, she was sent her personal file and with it the official Accident Report. ‘Pilot to blame', it said. Remembering this as we wait for lunch to arrive at the Indaba, she looks momentarily helpless; more embarrassed than angry. ‘I was shattered,' she says. ‘I so wanted to be
useful
.'

My thanks are due, first, to the Spitfire women themselves, and in particular to Diana Barnato Walker, Freydis Sharland, Lettice Curtis, Margaret Frost and Maureen du Popp in England; Ann Wood-Kelly, Dorothy Hewitt, Roberta Leveaux, Kay Hirsch and Betty Lussier in the United States; Betty Keith-Jopp in South Africa; Margot Duhalde in Chile; and Jadwiga Pilsudska in Poland. Ann was not only a mine of anecdote but also, before her death, tireless in putting me in touch with her fellow American pilots. Eric Viles, Ed Heering and Sir Peter Mursell were, likewise, generous with their recollections and collections. For their help providing access to scrapbooks, logbooks, letters and photographs I am also indebted to Paul Jarvis, Ted Stirgwolt and many of the pilots' relatives, including Lord James Douglas-Hamilton, Michael Fahie, Jan Welch, Sharon Hirsch, Ann Shukman, Caroline Roos, Joanna Pitman, Frances Guthrie and Mary Walton, niece and namesake of Mary Nicholson.

Christopher Kelly was a constant source of encouragement and alerted me to the existence of Gerard d'Erlanger's magnificent photo album. Minnie Churchill kindly showed it to me. Walter Kahn, Jennifer Gordon, Roy Fisher, Jo Loosemore, Lady Mary Teviot, John Austin and Mike Rowland all offered valuable leads or hunted them down, or both. Xavier Rey went far beyond the call of duty in matters of translation and diplomacy. Richard Poad put the Maidenhead Heritage Trust's fine collection of ATA documents at my disposal and was unfailingly generous with both his time and advice. In Denton, Texas, Dawn Letson made available a treasure trove of papers, painstakingly assembled.

My colleagues at
The Times
tolerated my absences with alarmingly good grace but I am grateful nonetheless, and especially to Tim Hames, Anne Spackman and Robert Thomson. This book would not have been started but for the enthusiasm of Bill Hamilton at AM
Heath and Richard Johnson at HarperCollins. It would not be comprehensible but for the genius of Katie Johnson. It would not have had any pictures but for Melanie Haselden. There would have been nowhere to write it without the shed built for the purpose by Jim Whittell, and it would never have been finished but for the extraordinary and undeserved patience shown me by Bruno, Louis and Karen.

My interviews with many of the pilots in this book yielded more detail and anecdote, more vividly recalled, than I dared hope. That said, no account of this kind would be possible without drawing extensively on the pilots' own writings. Lettice Curtis rightly regards her magnum opus,
The Forgotten Pilots
(Foulis, 1971), as the closest thing there is to a full-length official history of the ATA. It supersedes the livelier but slight
Brief Glory
(ATA Association, reprinted 2001), written immediately after the war by E. C. Cheeseman, and I have relied on it for detail on the decision to recruit women, their training and their progress to operational aircraft. Curtis is reluctant to acknowledge that different women had very different experiences of wartime flying, but proof of this is provided by Diana Barnato Walker's superbly racy
Spreading My Wings
(Patrick Stephens, 1994), Jackie Moggridge's
Woman Pilot
(Pan, 1959) and
The Sky and I
(W. H. Allen, 1956), by Veronica Volkersz. Pauline Gower's
Women With
Wings
(John Long, 1938) and ATA Girl (Frederick Muller, 1983), by Rosemary du Cros (née Rees) show what fun could be had in pre-war Europe with an aeroplane and a reasonable allowance, while Ann Welch's
Happy to Fly
(John Murray, 1983) chronicles the adventures of someone who would surely have commanded the SAS had she been born male.
Mount Up With Wings
(Hutchinson, 1960), by Mary de Bunsen, stands apart as a thoughtful, moving and often hilarious autobiography by an extraordinarily courageous woman who happened also to be an obsessive flyer and natural writer.
Golden Wings
(Pearson, 1956), by former Operations Officer Alison King, is a fond and sometimes wistful ‘view from the ground'.

In 1953 Jackie Cochran published her remarkable rags-to-riches story as
The Stars at Noon
(Little, Brown). In 1987 she left the writing to Maryann Bucknum Brinley, whose updated version is titled, with suitable caution,
Jackie Cochran: The Greatest Woman Pilot in Aviation
History
(Bantam). Ann Wood Kelly would not have disagreed, though her wonderful unpublished diaries cut through the hyperbole to which Cochran was prone.
Sisters in Arms
(Pen & Sword, 2006), by Helena Page Schrader, is tough on Cochran but a meticulous and useful study of the differences between the ATA and the WASP.

Midge Gillies's
Queen of the Skies
(Phoenix, 2004) is now the definitive biography of Amy Johnson, though Constance Babington Smith's earlier
Amy Johnson
(Collins, 1967) still complements it. I used Jonathan Glancey's
Spitfire – the Biography
(Atlantic, 2006) and
Spitfire, Flying Legend
(Osprey Aviation, 1996) by John Dibbs and Tony Holmes as substitutes for the costly alternative of flying the real thing. Audrey Sale-Barker's papers, archived by her nephew, James Douglas-Hamilton, include in her lipstick and Fleet Street's breathless prose the story of her ill-fated trip to South Africa, while Douglas-Hamilton's own history of
The Air Battle for Malta
(Wrens Park, 2000) describes in taut detail the background to the ATA's finest hour, loading Spitfires onto the USS Wasp. The theory that the war was won by damming the Columbia River is set out in Marc Reisner's
Cadillac Desert
(Penguin, 1987); the more complete theory that it took prodigious quantities of aluminium but also pilots, blood, toil, tears and sweat is all there in Winston Churchill's essential
The Second World War
(Cassell, 1949).

The best newspaper cuttings collections on the ATA are held by the Maidenhead Heritage Association, the ATA Association and Texas Women's University. The Imperial War Museum's archives and
The Times
' electronic archive also proved invaluable.

Each of the 139 women ATA pilots who survived the war could have written their memoirs. This account inevitably relies on those who did and those I was able to interview. As a result, some may still not have received the recognition they deserve, but I hope they would agree that their collective story is worth retelling, however imperfectly, for those who thought Spitfires were only ever flown by men.

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