Spitfire Girls Read online

  ‘You been overeating, chum?’ Marion touched her abdomen playfully.

  Shirley smiled. ‘Every time I think about Valerie I eat – which is often.’

  ‘There isn’t that much to go around these days.’

  ‘Marion, listen to me. You have no idea how much I miss our caravan. For eight years we lived, ate and slept under the same roof, in horrible conditions but with such laughter that we never cared about Tim Haydon snooping, or Val’s Dad carping. We were a perfect partnership. Flying was our life’s blood.’

  ‘Flying is life’s blood to a lot of women, Shirl, but it doesn’t mean you have to hate men.’

  ‘What are you suggesting?’

  ‘Perhaps you have an illness.’

  ‘Unthinkable.’

  ‘You asked for an audience, and I have listened.’

  ‘If you imagine I have some mortal illness you had better not be in the same room with me, or you might catch it, Marion.’

  ‘One doesn’t catch being fond of someone.’ Marion was feeling better, and the room seemed to take on a warmth despite the moist breeze struggling through the inch-open window.

  ‘Marion, I have this horrible feeling Kranz is still alive, and that’s what’s driving me mad.’

  ‘Nonsense! No-one could have survived a crash like that. The Fulmar was demolished and nobody has found parachute remnants.’

  ‘Precisely!’ Shirley was standing close by Marion, her intensity almost amusing in its childishness. ‘Kranz got away by bailing out, and as we know, it was a clear night. He’s probably tramping the roads even now, looking for Valerie. Honestly, Marion, if a criminal were lurking I couldn’t feel more threatened.’

  ‘Threatened? For whom?’

  ‘For Valerie!’

  Marion went to the window and shut it forcefully, her energy restored alongside her equilibrium.

  ‘Shirl, you must put any unusual thoughts about Valerie out of your mind. She is a Commanding Officer, and after tomorrow she may be our CO – if we get in. Some months ago she was lucky enough – or unfortunate enough, in your eyes – to meet and fall madly in love with a rich industrialist.’

  ‘Ever heard of a poor industrialist?’ sniffed Shirley.

  ‘Let me finish. He happened to be married, and it also transpires that you have become too fond of Valerie. Forget her.’

  Mrs Bryce was shouting and when they opened the door the glorious smells wafted up with her sing-song dinner call.

  In silence the two women, one still wearing her modest bridal attire, and one in dirty flying gear, went down to the waiting feast.

  ‘What’s all this?’ Marion marvelled, as she took in the challah and the candles.

  ‘It’s a custom in this house to observe the Sabbath on Friday night and Saturday.’

  ‘Surely the Sabbath Day is Sunday,’ protested Marion.

  Shirley grinned, motioning for her to sit down. ‘If the Jews should ever take over the world, watch out!’ she warned. ‘You and Alec will have to work on Sundays.’

  ‘Shame on you, Shirley,’ tutted Mrs Bryce, dishing out the chicken soup with kneidlach.

  Before spoons reached any mouths Shirley’s mother chanted a prayer in Hebrew, and then waved her hands over the candles, lighting them with another sung verse, followed by ‘Amen’.

  ‘Valerie and I never did any of these things – she never prayed to Jesus,’ grumbled Shirley.

  Both Mrs Bryce and Marion glared at Shirley, who had already embarked on the soup.

  ‘What about the prayer over the bread?’

  ‘Oh, Mum!’

  ‘Could you do it? I’m intrigued,’ murmured Marion.

  Over the challah another chant was performed and Marion tore into the plaited bread with the eagerness of a starving vagrant.

  ‘This is a celebration of a nice girl’s wedding, in not-nice times,’ Mrs Bryce remarked.

  They attacked the food, forgetting war and rationing and the ATA test looming. Shirley’s mother watched the young people devouring her Sabbath fare and sighed with a mixture of pride and contentment.

  ‘Has everyone seen the newspapers tonight?’ she asked, folding her arms along the edge of the table.

  ‘I haven’t read a paper in weeks, Mum – we lady pilot candidates are too busy being part of the war they’re reporting.’

  ‘I must confess I’ve not caught up with the news,’ said Marion. ‘Has Hitler arrived?’

  ‘You shouldn’t joke,’ Mrs Bryce said, realizing that neither girl knew what had happened. Both faces rose from their soup bowls and stared.

  ‘Oh, it’s nothing, girls, nothing – just some gossip.’

  ‘We love gossip, Mum.’

  Mrs Bryce took a mouthful of soup and chewed forlornly on a dumpling.

  ‘You’ve got a secret, Mrs B!’

  ‘Someone called Pavel Wojtek has been arrested and is claiming he visited you and Valerie at Hunstanton. Some mad butler at a country house says the man bathed in their scullery and was circumcized. I thought it might be that Friedrich chap who ate at this table, please God.’

  ‘Kranz is dead,’ said Marion, her soup bowl empty.

  ‘Why please God, Mum?’

  ‘He was a wonderful man, Shirley.’

  ‘He was married and I hope he’s dead.’

  ‘Don’t say such things on Shabbos!’ Mrs Bryce gave her daughter a rough push, knocking her arm off the table.

  ‘I’m sure it is nothing to do with Friedrich,’ Marion murmured, stacking the empty soup bowls. ‘He would have contacted Valerie, not the press.’ But as she rose to help her ample hostess, Marion felt nearly overcome by a strange and terrifying roaring in her ears. Weakly she sank back on her seat.

  Mrs Bryce, having arranged the spread of Sabbath fare on the table, drew a newspaper from the spacious pocket in her apron.

  ‘God, that is Friedrich,’ murmured Marion, sitting upright and peering at the press photograph.

  ‘Why is he calling himself by a false name?’ Mrs Bryce inquired, patting her brow with a large cloth.

  ‘Everything about that man is false,’ chimed Shirley. ‘He never told Valerie he was married, and I expect he knows nothing about aircraft manufacturing.’

  Marion pushed the newspaper away.

  All three women sat, the fluttering candlelight creating a kind of warmth that made the damp little house seem a cosy refuge.

  Mrs Bryce cast a fleeting glance at Marion. Did these other girls suspect anything unnatural about her daughter?

  ‘Let’s just eat, then if you’re too tired to get into your flight manuals you had better sleep,’ she said, wanting them to fail because deep down inside she yearned for her daughter to be a girl.

  Later that evening Marion and Shirley retired to their rooms where they battled fiercely against tiredness, while the fine print of the rulebooks hammered its way into their aching heads. Fishballs, kneidlach, cholent and kugel lay heavily on their stomachs, an overwhelming malaise overtaking both pilots. Near midnight, Shirley’s mind wandered to Valerie and Friedrich …

  Not long before they had packed up Hunstanton and the joyride service, Valerie had told her about the glorious perfection she and the Austrian had shared in his tiny bedsit. Over eight years of partnership the two aviation geniuses had demolished any barriers that might have existed between friends of the same sex. On that night in 1939, when the worried circus performers had chattered away into the small hours in their impossible, restless language, Shirley had listened to the voice of the woman she loved most in the world with stony detachment, staring at the ceiling like a blood donor at the moment of the needle’s prick.

  ‘When I came to his lodgings there was a well-dressed man leaving the building,’ Valerie had recounted. ‘What an awful place, Shirley! Friedrich was standing at the top of three flights of stairs and I was terrified that someone I knew might suddenly jump out from one of the closed doors. It was an absurd thought, out of a nightmare. Inside his tiny room he had a battered old ke
ttle like ours, and a little Belling cooker. He offered me tea, but as soon as we realized we were actually alone in the same room, and that no-one would interrupt us, everything happened. Do you mind my telling you this?’

  ‘Go on.’ Shirley had drawn her blankets up tightly around her ears. ‘That woman will be Prime Minister one day,’ she muttered to herself, creeping down into the bedclothes.

  Valerie talked and the night wore on, Shirley drifting in and out of sleep in rhythm with descriptions she half-heard … Friedrich being so clean, and so gentle … if only Val would shut UP …

  She knew Shirley was not listening, but she would continue remembering anyway … she had been terrified of undressing, but his hands, which smelled of soap and were so meticulously manicured, seemed to drift from one garment to another and soon he had carried her to his bed. How ridiculously small it was, and yet when he had settled gently on to her, space seemed as unimportant as time, his kisses deliberate and full of the affection that everyone had warned her would be lust. Valerie had never before been touched like this, nor had she wanted so much to touch, each meeting of their flesh bringing her to the edge of a gravity that convulsed her and made him weep. Through that night he held her, and every inch of her he stroked with a fascination that amazed her. When he did not hold her she clung to his delicate frame, but then he would come into her and she would forget fear and the aeroplanes and duty and the men of the Hunt …

  Friedrich had teased her about the boyish figure and small breasts that were dwarfed by her broad shoulders, but she kept silent, only wanting to feel his presence inside her again and again and to taste every inch of his trembling carnality. Had any woman of her mother’s genteel county circles ever known the passion that could travel from the tip of her being through him and back through the eager, waiting womb that had opened for his firestorm? She had heard the grotesque village fiction about Jewish men. This man could only be called beautiful, and Valerie marvelled at his sinewy arms, perfectly proportioned torso and soft, sparse hair that made her tingle and laugh.

  Her experience of men had been a virtual abyss and Friedrich knew this. Though his raging desire for this woman was tempered, minute by minute, by waves of guilt, he knew his love was a bottomless pit and urged her quiet Englishness to burst forth with identical desperation. Now he took every part of her, and when the power of her own passion began to fight its way out of her polite, hesitant sexual self he felt a sense of achievement that shamed him to the core of his being. Never had he been able to release the pent-up frenzy that he suspected dwelt within his own wife, but now as he gripped Valerie and tried to control their rapture and prolong their moment on the brink of climax, he wanted to turn this English girl into a wild creature who would rage within his grasp for all eternity …

  ‘How much do you want to wager Amy Johnson gets in and we don’t?’

  Marion was hovering over Shirley’s bed, the ground engineer perspiring and pale.

  ‘What? What are you talking about?’

  ‘Those Air Ministry people are publicity-hunting at the moment, or so Alec says.’ She sat on the bed, her hand outlining the pattern on the knitted quilt Mrs Bryce had made for her only daughter.

  ‘Valerie would never fail us, unless we made a colossal error.’

  ‘Perhaps someone else should test us.’

  ‘Do you think she is too close to her girls?’

  ‘Perhaps.’ Marion moved closer to Shirley. ‘You’re all in a lather – it must be nerves.’

  ‘I was deep in thought about the futility of it all, and the fact that we are going through all this aggravation just to ferry Tiger Moths. It must be so humiliating for Amy!’

  ‘Would you rather be working in a factory? At least here we’re alongside the RAF and we’re up in the air. No girl I know who has got the flying disease can bear the idea of being earthbound in peacetime, let alone in war. Maybe if Valerie can keep her mind away from all this Kranz business, she’ll fight to get us on to bigger things.’

  ‘I remember her saying something about us being Spitworthy!’ joked Shirley, grinning at Marion and propping herself up in bed.

  ‘Spits are starting to come out of the factories and if this country isn’t careful the beauties won’t go anywhere – Valerie will have to put up a good battle.’

  ‘I’m worried about this Friedrich affair.’

  ‘I’m worried about Amy Johnson.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Shirley, she has such unhappiness with Jim – she might find ATA unbearable – the last straw.’

  Shirley burrowed under the covers.

  ‘Marion, go to bed. Happy wedding night. Don’t sleep in here or my mother will think I’ve stolen you from Alec. Just remember one thing: HTTMPFGG.’

  ‘Hot-tempered MP fancies girls,’ Marion mumbled mechanically.

  Both girls looked at each other solemnly, and as the residue of the erotic narrative Marion had interrupted still made Shirley sweat, the bride retreated to her bedroom and spent the rest of the night awake and on fire with visions of what might have been. Alec had been out of her grasp for only a few hours but her body ached and she wondered, with a degree of shame, whether her own mother had ever lain awake like this, craving Daddy. Tomorrow’s test did not loom like an important, dark cloud – it took a remote place in a throbbing tapestry that kept her hunger in the forefront and her man’s offerings a delicacy that had suddenly escaped her grasp.

  ‘Think about the test – think about the test!’ she told herself as she forced her mind to Moths and Hydraulics, Trim, Tension, Mixture, Pitch, Patrol, Flaps, Gills, Gauges and MPs who fancied girls …

  38

  ‘You’re a no-good bitch and there’s nothing so boring as you in the bed department.’

  Amy wanted a good night’s sleep before she was tested, but Jim had chosen this evening for an analysis of her abilities. Lately he had turned it into a game which he called ‘Department Store’, and when he was rampantly drunk the game got rough.

  ‘Why aren’t you pleased we are near to being in a flying group together, Jim?’ she asked, her eyes half shut from concentrated studying.

  ‘That is not the issue here, my dear – you should not be allowed anywhere near a ferry pool. As I say, one of these days you will be among lost and found – you lost, baggage found. Or I should say, baggage lost, valuables found.’

  Amy’s head was now swelling inside. It was a sensation that, thankfully, only Jim induced – had her monumental headaches intruded when she was airborne her career would have had to be jettisoned. As it was, the crucial nature of tomorrow’s events made her heart pound and the thumping between her temples intensify.

  ‘I’ve changed my mind, Amy. You’re not worth defending.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  She watched as Jim undressed, his youthful body still undeniably enticing, and his smart uniform an enhancement to his rough masculinity. In the low light of one lamp, Amy admired the élan with which he removed his wristwatch.

  ‘Do me a favour and answer a question,’ he rasped, standing over the bed and staring at her.

  ‘What question?’

  ‘How many times have you held Hamilton Slade in your little hands?’

  Amy felt a rush of blood to her pounding head. For a moment she felt she would go blind. Jim’s acrid breath stung her to clarity. He crouched next to her like a lion about to pounce.

  ‘Hamilton has a woman, and it isn’t me. I’m sorry to disappoint you.’

  Jim gripped her shoulder as on so many previous occasions but tonight the pain was worse and she was frightened.

  ‘Just tell me where he’s fucked you – here?’ He was hurting her now, his knuckles bruising her with the force she had so wanted from his manhood, but which he had rarely been able to give.

  ‘Jim – stop, please,’ but his cruelty worsened and she had to submit. Amazingly, he was erect and though his only outlet was loveless, Amy chuckled bitterly to herself. The possibility of her having further
success in the outside world had enraged him to a degree so unprecedented as to make him potent.

  Some hours later, when he had disappeared downstairs to commune with his dwindling wartime supply of Forfar malt whisky bought from newlywed Alec Harborne’s personal still, Jim had lost interest in Amy and was talking to himself in the study. She ached in every crevice of her body, and knew she had to seek sleep as soon as possible for the crucial event of tomorrow. If she lingered over her discomfort he would become enraged, and her rest would never come.

  By the time she had drifted off to sleep, feeling dirty and diminished, light was coming up and the birds were singing. In two hours Amy Johnson would have to report to Hatfield, where the newly appointed Commanding Officer, Valerie Cobb, would treat her as nobody special and take her on a gruelling expedition to certain failure. As sleep overtook her, Amy’s last thought was of those other girls who would also test tomorrow. Shirley Bryce and Marion Wickham led normal lives and were unknown but would take the same expedition with Valerie Cobb to certain triumph. Marion had just got married, Amy recalled with inexplicable unease, and as she fell into dreams she saw Hamilton before her, his glorious face attached to a female form that Jim fondled tenderly, as he had never fondled her. Amy’s weird dream went on and when she had watched her husband take her lover she awoke, so keeping her terrified confusion at bay. She wanted to get to Hatfield as soon as possible to be near Hamilton, because he was the only man she had ever known who could be as gentle as a woman.

  Newsmen had gathered before first light and were impressed when Amy Johnson arrived at dawn. They put her eagerness down to her legendary enthusiasm but as she drove past their prying trench coats her mind still recalled Jim’s rancour. Indeed, her grip on sanity had come to depend upon the encounters with Hamilton, and now she wanted the test to transpire and disappear so she might be enslaved. Dreams were evil. Her mind was caressing Hamilton and she was driving much too fast around Hatfield when Valerie appeared in her line of vision and she screeched to a halt.