Spitfire Girls (33 page)

‘Does your husband?' asked the old lady.

‘My husband? Yes, he does.'

‘When?'

‘When he comes back from your ghetto.'

‘My husband could never get airborne,' murmured Vera, ‘so he hates, and therefore he drinks.' Then she noticed the permanent pout on the face of the younger Kranz daughter. ‘Do you miss your father?' she asked the girl.

‘He didn't have to leave,' she replied lifelessly.

‘I'm not quite sure why he did,' Vera said, pleased to be as relaxed as a passenger in this aircraft.

‘England had an attraction for my handsome man,' said the younger Frau Kranz. ‘He thought the British might want his aeroplanes, but I suspect it has turned out to be a wasteland for him.'

‘All I know is that his money has reached me and I have been able to bribe half of Poland to get this aircraft. You are aware of what contortions I have had to endure to smuggle you out of bondage and into the air.'

‘Our life was not bondage,' snapped Friedrich's wife.

‘Are you suggesting it will be so in England?'

‘Inside her head is bondage,' Benno whispered, his face darting a swift look at Vera and then returning its intent gaze towards the heavens.

‘You have an old man's head,' she whispered back, her hand reaching sideways and taking his. It was icy cold. Did he fear his own bondage in the hours to come? Was every country another potential prison to these Jews, these
people who rejected Christ and worshipped the dismal solitude of scholarship?

‘Fires ahead!'

Vera's heart jumped. The boy was shouting in Polish and she understood.

‘Don't worry,' she said, astonished that the flames had come up on the horizon so quickly and that the smoke could so completely block her vision. She took an immediate course away from the conflagration but at once realized the nightmare was everywhere. In the back of the aeroplane the four women – Kranz's wife, his daughters … his mother – had gone strangely silent, and as the smoke began to seep into the massively insulated fuselage of the most advanced aircraft in Europe, Vera pondered the absurdity that after thirty years of perilous flights she might suffer the indignity of being asphyxiated. Why had she not brought masks for her cargo? She remembered the huge book that accompanied the Heinkel had mentioned something about it being equipped with its own ultra-modern oxygen goggles that were supposed to drop from the ceiling. She reached behind her, straining to touch the fuselage above, but there were only gaping crevices.

‘Please see if there are masks anywhere above you – hanging from the ceiling!' she shouted, all the while trying to steer out of the hellish blackness. Any moment she knew she would strike another aircraft or career into the hard, life-ending ground. She had lost her bearings and the sheer power of the enormous Heinkel Transport seemed to be driving her, its propellers still healthy as if defying the smoke like an infant defying exhaustion and crying long into the night. One of the women was crying, but now Vera
could only hold on to every second, stiffly contemplating the inevitable impact and feeling gratified she had not had time to acquire an affection for her cargo. Everywhere was blackness and now the engines were spluttering. Unbelievably, in a few short moments both had cut out. She was gliding, and the immense grace of the aircraft enabled Vera to guide it through its last moments without noise or tremors or terrible somersaults. There was no noise: she turned to the boy in the seat alongside, and he was looking at sepia-toned photographs. He handed one to her, and as they spun faster towards earth, she saw in the corner of one the celebrated signature:

Fischtal
.

Suddenly the engines came back to life, and they were climbing, but when the blackness cleared Vera's heart sank and the horror of what lay ahead made her spine harden and her thoughts of Hana and of picture albums stop with this vision of calamity. This was not Switzerland, nor was it Scandinavia or any other gateway to Vera's own special brand of treason …

Friedrich Kranz's wife gasped as the aircraft landed on a beautiful stretch of green, its wheels skidding and Vera praying that she could pull the machine back under control and be airborne again. Her cargo of women gathered up their belongings as if they knew they were not meant to leave the earth again and as Vera struggled to steer the giant transport into a takeoff position a loud banging made the boy cry out, and he reached for the pilot whom at this moment he saw only as a soft, round woman. Banging was reverberating within and Vera could no longer think, the awful sounds from every angle outside now penetrating
their stifling cabin. Benno stood up. He imagined he could see the tops of helmets. There had been banging in the Ghetto, and he remembered the tops of helmets that had tumbled from pickup trucks and herded old ladies out of houses. Now Vera was working the engines to fever pitch, but there was an even louder, more terrible bang and the aircraft lurched, only to sink down into the mire.

One element of Noel Slater's personality had caught Sam Hardwick's attention, so much so that he had begun to suffer sleepless nights in its wake. He had never before encountered an aggressive young man whose background had been as deprived as his own, defying the rules of lower-class obedience. Lying alongside the woman who had borne him three neutral characters of the male sex, Sam had speculated that Slater awoke aggressive, ate his first meal with aggression, lived out each day as the total aggressor, and did not ever love. That was the aspect which fascinated Sam the most – had Noel sacrificed his heart for an ambition that by the end of every twenty-four-hour period was replete? In the mornings Noel would most certainly be an empty shell needing replenishment, other humans being the bollards he had to knock over to achieve it.

Neither Sam Hardwick, nor his sons, nor any man he had met in his limited life, had resembled this mere boy, who had taken an adult twice his age under his tutelage and begun to mould him into a fresh creation. Had Sam taken a mistress, the patchwork symmetry of his home could not have gone more askew.

War meant that men of his age would be allowed to learn to fly for a few shillings an hour and to ferry simple craft; when the RAF needed every pilot in the country, men like Sam would be allowed to fly more dangerous machines into the war zone and across the Atlantic. Noel wanted Sam to learn everything. They had lived through
31 August 1939, the last day on which civil aircraft had been allowed to fly, a day on which Maylands had been full of youngsters eager to join Air Cadets. But Noel took no notice of the Cal Marches of this world when he could have malleable antiquity in the person of Sam Hardwick, and be father to the man.

For many months Sam had been accumulating skills that would enable him to become a taxi pilot, and with dramatic intonations Noel had explained that on his shoulders would rest the outcome of war. On any given day, a taxi pilot would set out in the morning with a list of the aerodromes he had to visit, against which would be written the names of pilots to be collected or delivered. In hushed tones Noel explained to Sam that when an RAF squadron moved, Ferry Control would ring up, ordering ten new fighters to be delivered that day; priority telephone calls would stop everything and a pilot would find himself being taxied to a factory that manufactured one very special fighter.

Noel trained Sam well and soon he was flying Fairchilds, but as country after country fell to Schicklgruber he graduated to Ansons, the first low-wing monoplane to be taken into RAF service.

‘One of the most beautiful aeroplanes ever built,' Sam wrote in the diary he had begun to keep ever since he had outlived his usefulness at the meat market.

‘When all this is finished I think I will buy myself an Anson and spend the peace flying around in it,' he wrote another time, having marvelled all day at the magic machine's ease of maintenance and supreme economy, its unbelievable reliability and the spectacular loads it could carry.

Dawn was arriving on this summer's day, and Sam was waiting for Noel to join the group who ate breakfast every morning in the makeshift Mess that had once been a club dining room. For weeks everyone had been waiting for a massive invasion but the Germans had remained quiet. Nonetheless, in the darkness of the bedroom he shared with a quietly breathing woman who once had been his lover, Sam had experienced a giddiness as he had dressed for another new day at Maylands. Something extraordinary was about to happen.

‘Lot of money to be made from it,' his wife would scold, in a voice suggesting his livelihood paled next to her special soothsaying talents. Now that he had given up meat for aeroplanes, she had stopped predicting the future and had developed a penchant for collecting: newspaper cuttings, magazine pictures and empty cigarette packets filled an old knitting bag to overflowing. She never allowed Sam to look inside, but he conjectured she had lost her mind when he left Smithfield and that newspapers took her mind off a future that could hold nothing now but death. All his life he had been surrounded by carcasses and she had never cared. Now he was transporting men who could be downed by one balloon while his wife cut, cut, cut like the workers who had once inhabited the gory corridors of the market.

Here in the canteen men gathered and joked, a corner of the room occupied by a tiny handful of women on a stopover. They had no lavatory or mess of their own, but these rare visitors, whose numbers occasionally included Amy Johnson, seemed cheerful amid the men's tension. On this day every male available had been assembled, including Jim and Hamilton Slade, and the boy Cal. Gordon
Selfridge had received a cable as he prepared to sail to the United States and they had heard he was on his way from Liverpool. His ship was to have left twenty-four hours before, and Gordon was lucky because it had been attacked as he had stood, bags in hand, reading the telegram. Everyone missed him when he was away, his Anglicized American charm as attractive as the voluptuous victuals he poached from the store on Oxford Street for the benefit of this privileged ferry mob. He would be here presently, with Sam and Noel and Alec and the Yank Bill, to be taxied to a place where their collective dreams would be realized and their boyhood passions renewed, because they were to spend this entire working day, from now until dusk, doing something they had never done before. They were to be moved to a permanent home at White Waltham. It was time to prepare for the Spitfires.

Rumours had been circulating that there were to be twenty-three different versions of Spitfires. Everyone knew that a full-scale battle for the survival of Britain was just months away, and though the women had to accept their exclusion from fighter deliveries, their instincts told them Spits would soon be within their grasp.

Now Delia Seifert and Angelique Florian were munching on toast and groaning at the sight of Sam and Noel, dressed in flying boots, fur-lined leather trousers and jackets, huge scarves, helmets and goggles, their ration bags hanging around their necks and jotting pads strapped to each knee. They were talking, Noel's gravelly voice carrying as far as the girls' table where they could detect words about drift angles. Here were two men whose odd coupling had
alienated them from the rest of the pools and towards whom Hamilton had a particular animosity. Delia had told him she thought the men were friends, but Hamilton detested Noel and now loathed the older figure he called ‘the bedfellow'.

‘But he's married!' Angelique shouted at Hamilton, who was sharing his breakfast with the slender females.

‘I'm sorry to keep dwelling on the subject, but that March boy ought to be sent elsewhere,' he hissed, as Delia removed a sliver of Selfridge's smuggled bacon from his plate. ‘Lads are being moved to White Waltham and I think he should go.'

‘Sam has three sons,' Angelique said, smiling at Delia. ‘He's strong and normal. Not that one could say the same of Noel.'

‘Cal March needs to get away from rotters,' Hamilton muttered, his fingers tapping restlessly against the empty coffee cup.

‘Alec Harborne looks after him,' Delia asserted.

‘Which reminds me that I am supposed to be looking after the Toland brothers, who would not be in hospital were it not for Slater,' Angelique blurted in hopes that her voice might carry.

Sam and Noel were to be separated for the first time and that was what made this day so crucial.

‘Why are you wearing that foolish suit?' snapped Angelique, following Noel out to the main field.

‘Why not, actress?' he said, walking on.

‘You aren't allowed to fly, Slater.'

‘Someone I know has bent the rules, and I shall now be on Spits,' he muttered, stopping and letting the others
proceed. ‘Did you know that until recently actresses were regarded as synonymous with harlots?'

‘Flight engineers with deficiencies are synonymous with accidents. The women's pool knows all concerning the Toland brothers.'

‘Are you proposing to report me to d'Erlanger?'

Angelique smirked, wanting to demolish this man and triumph on a Spitfire at the other end of the Anson's journey.

‘Harold Balfour would love to learn more about your behaviour,' she said calmly.

‘He couldn't care a fig about a bloke like me. There are a thousand men, at this very moment, being trained to fly all kinds of things. He has them on his mind, not Noel Slater.'

‘You have Sam Hardwick on your mind all the time, and that can't be very good for your record, big man.'

Slater took hold of his kit bag and, with a movement swift as any gazelle, pushed past Angelique. She walked to the edge of the field, the taxi Anson now filled with the best of her circle but joined by a man whose menace made her ache with dread. Determined to pursue a personal mission she had been formulating in her head during the night, she watched as the lovely aircraft left Maylands.

Noel's unchivalrous behaviour had moved her mind to images of disturbed acts in European ruins. As the Anson soared into the early morning sky she thought of Zack and Paul with terror. They were in a place unknown, but she knew she could not stay here much longer …