Spitfire Girls (20 page)

‘Beauty', Kranz continued, ‘has gone out of the lives of Germans because a disease of the mind is becoming a compulsory state of being. Joseph Goebbels is perpetrating it – news of Jews taking over the world and robbing good Christian folk like yourselves of your homes, your children's sweat and blood, and your code of moral honour. Even here in England you've had your blood libel massacres.'

‘Implying?' glowered Selfridge.

‘It's the reason why we may have a war, Gordon.' Valerie's resonant tones broke in. ‘You may not comprehend it over ice cream in Manhattan, but the rest of the world is sinking fast into the Dark Ages.'

‘Can we please talk about something else?' urged Shirley.

‘I have something to tell everyone.' Valerie pulled a letter from her purse. ‘From the Air Council, a message to us all:

‘“We do not want a flying section in the WAAF – I still have to be convinced that the Civil Air Guard as a class, will be competent to ferry RAF aircraft … If any women CAGs are competent to ferry Moths, they should be employed on this, but as civilians … Otherwise they should undertake some alternative form of useful work.”' Valerie folded the paper and lit a cigarette.

All present watched her as if she were performing a rare conjuring act.

‘Undertake useful work,' she echoed to herself.

‘We should all train to be undertakers,' groaned Shirley.

‘There was no doubt in my mind at that last meeting,' Valerie said, her bitterness brimming over. ‘I'd been so sure, as had my father, for God's sake. No one dreamed the committee would change its mind.'

‘Britain is backward,' Kranz asserted. ‘Does Chamberlain really think Hitler is just going to tip his hat to that valuable outpost across the Channel?'

‘Keep your criticisms to your own country.' Jim had spoken for the first time, after wolfing his meal. ‘Is there no official drink in this household?'

‘My husband kept wine.' Mrs Bryce seemed frightened of Mollison.

‘Then kindly get some,' he snarled.

Amy looked at Valerie as if help could be secured from a female quarter. Hamilton had kept his mouth shut throughout the meal, and he knew if he spoke now Mollison would destroy the peace of this good lady's table. He watched as Mrs Bryce, not greatly different from the Jews depicted on the footage coming in from Germany, moved under Jim's verbal boot and headed submissively for her cellar.

‘Do you have to disrupt a dry house?' Amy whispered to Jim.

‘That is not the issue here – I have tolerated a foreign cuisine in my own country this afternoon, and now I demand the very least – native alcohol.'

Overhearing him, in the cellar, Mrs Bryce turned ashen.

‘My mother's people have been cooking like this for two thousand years, by necessity,' said Shirley.

‘Here goes – another history lesson,' moaned Jim.

Mrs Bryce emerged from the cellar breathless, holding a dusty bottle of Kiddush wine.

‘This is all we keep,' she said weakly.

‘Hand it over!' burbled Jim, an alcoholic smile breaking through his troubled features. He examined the bottle like a fascinated child and removed the seal, covered in Hebrew script.

Mrs Bryce thrust a large glass under his hand.

Mollison drank, then spat. ‘What is this?' he asked, grimacing at the unfamiliar taste of Kiddush wine.

‘What you might call sacramental wine,' Shirley said in a monotone which masked her fury.

‘Rat's piss,' sputtered Jim, slamming the glass down and rising from his chair. ‘I suggest we retire to the friendly local for a real pint,' he announced.

Amy rose, and pushed Jim away from the table. At times like this she had an astonishing power over him, and her small figure seemed suddenly like a bulldozer as he moved sideways from the little dining room, now cloudy with Valerie's cigarette smoke. Mrs Bryce sat in Jim's vacated place and heaved a sigh of great relief. When Amy returned,
Valerie stubbed out her cigarette and held up the offending letter.

‘I intend fighting this Air Council decision, chums,' she asserted.

‘Anything I can do – please,' Amy pleaded, lowering herself as if exhausted into her chair.

‘Oddly enough,' Valerie continued, ‘My father was overjoyed when the Committee said yes, and now he'll fight with us.'

Conversation burgeoned from all corners, but Shirley's mother seemed in another world. She retired to her kitchen and began to think about her life and her adopted country's future. Piling the plates and bowls alongside her basin, made immaculate for the impending Sabbath, she wondered how her daughter could embrace the values and customs of her partner so quickly; abandoning tradition, to eat sausage in a hut. People like Jim terrified one – could he not become a thug, like the Polish gentlemen who got drunk on Passover and threw bricks into her grandparents' home, and on Monday morning were back at their offices administering municipal law?

Her heart leapt at the sound of her guests, and before filling the basin she wiped her hands, reached forward and increased the volume on the wireless, which had been playing softly during the restless lunch. She noticed the music had stopped. From the other room Valerie's voice stood out from all the rest.

‘Wouldn't you men be insulted if you were relegated to ferrying Moths and forced to be classified as civilians?' she asked.

‘Surely you told the committee about all the qualified
squadron leaders floating around in skirts?' queried Hamilton.

‘They've had it stuffed down their throats,' Valerie replied, lighting up yet again. ‘Navigator's licences, A and B licences, and two thousand hours in the air – all fallen on deaf ears.'

‘Balfour wants a separate corps of women pilots,' Alec remarked.

‘Balfour wants Angelique, full stop,' said Valerie, grinning, and puffing.

‘Really?!' Marion and Shirley exulted in unison.

Voices overlapped and a great deal of laughter stopped abruptly because Mrs Bryce stood ashen-faced at the kitchen door. Over their silence the grave BBC voice continued …

Germany had invaded Poland.

‘Trust Adolf to ruin everything,' mumbled Shirley.

‘It's a kind of good news,' Amy said. ‘Of course, we'll now be at war, and the Air Ministry will see how desperately they'll need every pilot who is still breathing.'

‘Foreigners again – always the source of England's troubles,' Marion muttered, looking sidelong at Kranz.

‘To foreigners!' toasted Alec, holding up the bottle of kosher wine.

In the background was the restless voice on the wireless, a faceless man trying to keep his aplomb as paper harbingers of death were passed in front of him in a radio studio built for the light entertainment of peacetime.

The ethnic luncheon at Mrs Bryce's was over. The guests dispersed, and outside, in Valerie's car, Freidrich grasped her arm.

‘There will be a declaration of war, and sooner than anyone would expect, Valerie. It means I have to disappear. Perhaps tomorrow.'

Her thoughts were of odd things at that moment – of her dead mother and of the squires on the Hunt who had tried to rape her. Who was this man?

‘What do you want from me, Friedrich?'

‘Can you get me an aircraft? I need to get out.' He was distraught, and felt sexless.

‘Has Tim Haydon frightened you into this? Has he threatened you with deportation again?' She wanted him now, but he could only tremble like a child.

‘I'd rather die than face internment, Val.'

Was he about to cry as well? Valerie turned away, frightened by her own desire and by his impotence. Was this the Jew in him? It disgusted her.

‘Why do you people always jump to conclusions?' she snapped. ‘War hasn't even been declared. Tea and scones are still being served at Claridge's.'

‘And I'm not yet good enough to join a Gentleman's Club,' Kranz countered, more composed. ‘One has been jumping to conclusions for generations. That's how we have survived.' His trembling had ceased and his manhood was returning. Family duty urged him to return to Hell but Austria seemed another planet as Valerie's irresistible figure, provocative even through tweeds, stirred his loins. She knew, and could feel them coming together at some future moment. Near future? She throbbed inside and as Friedrich's hand came to rest on her own she gripped the cold machinery and the car's ignition exploded into power. At once she felt shame and ecstasy, with the eyes of her
friends boring into her as they stood on the pavement in the still-bright afternoon light of the first of September 1939, but more potent than her shame was her urgency to envelop this man in her own country. And never let him get away.

They drove off.

Shirley and Amy, having seen and heard all, stood by the side of the road.

‘That Austrian will be my chum's downfall,' Shirley said quietly, kicking the pebbles gently under her heavy-duty shoes.

Amy looked on and kept silent for a moment. ‘I know what Valerie is going through, Shirley,' she remarked flatly, before walking off, leaving the ground engineer alone in miserable descending fog.

Shirley watched Amy Johnson, celebrated aviatrix, wander hesitantly down the street, heading for the local which would spew out its malingering patron for her to take home. Somehow, she thought, Jim and Amy had managed to stay together. Had sex endured, she wondered? They had a terrible, relentless energy about them which suggested as much – did she put up with even more in bed than at the feet of his drinking chair?

Why does Mum think I am a lesbian?

Hamilton Slade said they were ancient witches who came from Lesbos and inhabited this dim little island by flying in on their own aeroplanes. She had cheered herself up, and as Amy disappeared into the fog Shirley felt an urge to attend to her loved one.

Back in the house, Mrs Bryce initiated her ritual: after every party, she became infuriatingly inquisitive about
all the guests. This time, however, Shirley was un -cooperative.

‘Is Hamilton Amy's lover?' asked her mother.

‘Does it matter, Mum?' she raged, now storming about the kitchen.

‘I wouldn't blame her. Jim is destroying her, and she must have been pathetic even before he came along,' Mrs Bryce observed, ignoring her daughter's rage. ‘Will Gordon take Nora to America?'

‘Mum, I am fiendishly worried about Valerie – the others don't matter.'

‘You can't ever get her off your mind, can you?'

‘She might go off with that Jew.'

Mrs Bryce had stopped her work and stood to her full height.

‘May I remind you of your own heritage?' she murmured, her matronly figure dwarfing the girl. ‘It might be worthwhile finding a man for yourself who will take your thoughts away from Valerie Cobb. I'm going to bed.'

Shirley did not give or take a goodnight kiss, and she stood in the empty kitchen in the dark, staring intently at the freshly polished carving knives her mother had kept so proudly since her wedding day. She did not want a wedding day, nor did she want knives or tablecloths or the excruciating birthing of a lust-engendered babe. Through years of distorted thoughts in a fatherless existence, Shirley had come to think of marriage as a form of rape, and if that was her future she might consider walking down the road into the fog, with one of those wedding knives in her pocket.

Would her absence mean anything to Valerie Cobb?

Upstairs, her troubled mother could not sleep.

Hatfield in Hertfordshire had a main airfield which was being converted for use as a ferry training pool. War would happen now, and men were everywhere. The older ones were to be tested for Air Transport Auxiliary and the younger ones eagerly awaited cadet training.

In the cockpit of a Tiger Moth trainer, Nora Flint reviewed procedure with a jovial American too old for the Air Force but still a crack pilot. Bill Howes had been one of the first to sail over through U-Boat Alley to do what he could while the American Congress dithered in isolationist folly. Grey-haired but sturdily built, he brought an endless fund of mirth into Nora's otherwise routine job of familiarization: each plane had its own characteristics and the new ATA pilots had to be quick learners.

‘Ever meet an Idaho potato?' he bubbled, as Nora held her manual open.

Nora looked up. ‘What?' she asked, nonplussed.

Manically he continued:

‘Ever hear the story of the lady whose favourite cat turned into a handsome prince?'

She shut the manual and glared at the American, his neatly combed silver mane glistening in the sun. ‘No,' she said coldly, ‘but I have a feeling you're about to tell me.'

‘The Prince stood over her bed and said, “
Now
aren't you sorry you had me altered?”'

‘Altered? What on earth does that mean?'

‘Shit – goddam, miss, you missed the whole joke.' Now Bill looked depressed, and it was Nora's turn to laugh:

‘You're not really interested in winning this war, are you, Bill?'

‘To tell you the truth,' he said, suddenly sober, ‘I haven't yet gotten over the shock of passing through the U-Boats alive.'

‘You're not married?' she asked, not particularly moved by his story.

‘I was. She died – a haemorrhage nine days after giving birth to my daughter,' he explained, his voice quiet. ‘People said I deserved it for not marrying a Polish girl. Goddam Polish Catholics are so superstitious, you know?'

‘Catholicism isn't so popular here,' she said, lost.

‘That girl was brilliant – half Italian, half Negro. Thank God our baby is blonde – the family accepts her, just about.' He reached over and took the manual from Nora's lap. ‘Lets go on.'

‘What happened to her Negro blood?' Nora asked, now fascinated by the colourful mental scenario.

‘It got diluted.' He buried himself in the book.