Spitfire Women of World War II (28 page)

The story could, in deference to the war, end there. But the Spitfire women were not known for their deference, nor for giving up flying when there was the slightest chance of carrying on. A fairer place to end would be Bandar Abbas, a desolate port-oasis on the north shore of the Persian Gulf.

It is 1953. The Iron Curtain has long since fallen across Europe. Eisenhower is in the White House, Queen Elizabeth II is on the throne, and in her honour Edmund Hillary and Sherpa Tensing have stood at last on top of the mountain that did for Trafford Leigh-Mallory's brother. Britain has lost an empire, and her former colonies and mandates are fighting new wars of their own. For these, they are building new air forces. Israel has bought dozens of Spitfires from England and has extracted sterling service from them in the first Arab-Israeli war, but is upgrading to jets for the second. To help fund the upgrade it is selling thirty used Spitfires to Burma. The town of Bandar Abbas, in Iran, is on the air route there.

Seasonal rains have turned Bandar's dirt streets into river beds. Between the town and the brilliant waters of the Strait of Hormuz there is a dun-coloured airstrip, thoroughly waterlogged. But the moisture is invisible from the air, held in salty suspension under a deceptively smooth layer of topsoil. When four Spitfire Mark IXs, newly painted in the blue, white and yellow livery of the republic of Burma, roar in off the Gulf in echelon formation at 200 feet, the lead plane sees no warning sign. While the others pull up to form a neat holding pattern, it lines up, lowers its wheels and floats in to land. The undercarriage skims the topsoil for a second, but as soon as the pilot feels the wheels touch they start to sink. Instead of rolling, the Spitfire digs in. When the pilot touches the brakes it pitches violently forward, burying its propeller in the mud. The second pilot sees the crash, fears the worst and dives for the airstrip, landing as an
urgent shout comes over the headset: ‘Don't use your brakes! Don't taxi!' The second aircraft lists heavily, but shudders to a halt undamaged. Out of it into the scalding Persian sun climbs Jackie Moggridge – née Sorour; former flying instructor and wartime ferry pilot.

Moggridge is four days' flying time from her husband, Reg, and daughter, Joy, and now she is marooned on the airstrip with two Spitfires and an ex-fighter pilot called Gordon Levett. They have been thrown together by this strange flight back to the future for six months already, after a chance meeting in Prestwick. She had tried and failed to become the first woman through the sound barrier: the Air Ministry complimented her on her ‘spirit' but then fobbed her off with regrets. At Prestwick she had been freelancing on a charter flight from Weston-super-Mare when she bumped into an old friend from the ATA, just in from Newfoundland on a Stratocruiser. He told her about a small ad he had seen for ferrying Spitfires to Burma.

By the autumn of 1953 Moggridge is on her fifth flight. Each one has been a major undertaking, with drop tanks, oxygen masks and detailed briefings on how to avoid the Syrian and Iraqi air forces, and what to do if forced down. (The answer was to say that you took off from Cyprus and hope for the best.) She has become a minor celebrity in the hotels and nightclubs of Nicosia, and the mechanics at Lydda airport outside Tel Aviv love her for her tight scarlet jeans. She knows the RAF bases from Karachi to Rangoon, and they know her and make exceptions to their men-only messing rules. She has been yanked out of housebound drudgery in Taunton and hurled back into the skies, and not just any skies but incandescent blue ones, with mauve dawns and pink sunsets; the land of the Bible beneath her and Gordon Levett on her wing.

Levett is miraculously unhurt after crash-landing at Bandar Abbas. Scrambling out of his Spitfire, he dashes across the mud to Jackie's and uses her headset to tell the two others circling above to go on to Sharjah, and order him a new propeller. They make a
low pass, whistling goodbye with their superchargers, then head south into the heat haze.

Moggridge and Levett spend six days in Bandar, pretending to be married in order to qualify for the only guest room in town. In the mornings they borrow a Jeep to drive out and inspect the runway. They bicker about logistics so as not to have to talk about each other. In the evenings they dine with the Iranian Oil Company representative, who has an Indian cook and beer. Sunsets are early. The evenings are long. They smoke on a balcony looking out towards the Gulf, and retire one at a time to their separate beds. On the seventh day Levett judges brusquely that the runway can be made safe enough for Moggridge to take off from, and she agrees. With the help of the Iranian Oil Company's resident engineer he assembles a team of labourers to prepare a hard central strip by shovelling gravel onto it and rolling up and down it in a truck. There is still a risk that her Spitfire might stick in the mud and flip onto its back. The truck will therefore have to stay with her on take-off for a long as possible, carrying sand, shovels, ropes, axes and a makeshift fire crew. Levett selects volunteers and briefs them in more detail before leading a small convoy out to the waiting aircraft.

Jackie climbs in, tightens her straps and pulls on her helmet. Gordon steps onto the wing to remind her she will need maximum power before releasing her brakes, then full right rudder to counteract the swing. She nods, and looks up at him. He leans forward to kiss her, but it's awkward – her helmet, his footing on the sloping wing.

‘Call me on the R/T after you take off,' he says.

The Spitfire does seem to stick at first, shaking and accelerating sluggishly despite the bellow of its engine at full throttle. Out of the corner of her eye Jackie can see the truck keeping up for longer than it should, but then it slips behind her wing. She feels her tail come up and kicks the rudder pedal to stay on course. Momentarily her nose dips, then it rears up again as the wheels spring clear of the gravel and the shaking stops and the wings and engine
are unleashed to hurl their tiny, blinking cargo into the clear blue sky.

Jackie Moggridge never did kiss Gordon Levett. She flew six Spitfires to Burma, then went home to Somerset to be with Reg and Joy. In 1957 she became Britain's first woman airline captain, though more often than not she was mistaken for a stewardess as she boarded her aircraft. In 1994 she flew a Spitfire again. It was a machine she had delivered from Castle Bromwich to Selsey on the Sussex coast half a century earlier, and when she died in 2003 her ashes were scattered over the English countryside from the wings of the same plane.

Freydis Leaf and Veronica Volkersz also flew fighters to Asia; Tempests to Pakistan in 1948, by which time Volkersz's brief marriage to a Dutch airman had failed. She was the first Englishwoman to have flown a jet, but was still barred from the officers' mess at RAF Langley where that 5,000-mile delivery flight began, and at Karachi, where it ended. ‘We thought we had proved ourselves in the war,' she wrote, ‘but some people have conveniently short memories.' Freydis bore no grudges, except against Hitler for the early deaths of so many in her family. She became a champion air racer, married and moved to Africa to run a farm, then took up micro-lighting on her return to England.

The race to be the first woman through the sound barrier came down to a contest between Jackie Cochran and the daughter of the President of France. Cochran won. She did it over Rogers Dry Lake in California in 1953 in a Canadian Air Force F-86 Sabre jet, with clearances secured from the Department of Defense by her good friend General Charles ‘Chuck' Yeager. Her grand vision of a women's air force for the United States was snuffed out by Congress in 1944, but she never dwelt on setbacks. She covered the end of the war in the Pacific as a magazine reporter, attended the Nuremberg trials and claimed some of the credit for persuading Eisenhower to run for President.

The first supersonic British woman was – who else? – Diana Barnato Walker. In 1963 she persuaded the Air Ministry to let her loose over the North Sea in an English Electric Lightning which made her, for a while, the fastest woman in the world. In the same week she was diagnosed with cancer, but she had no-one close with whom to celebrate her record or talk to about her illness. Her husband, Derek Walker, had crashed and died in a Mustang on his way to a job interview eighteen months after their wedding. She had a son and a long relationship with Whitney Strait, the businessman and aviator, but never married again.

One wet autumn day while researching this book I visited Lettice Curtis in her retirement home near White Waltham before lunch, and Diana for tea. Lettice was terrifying, as usual. I tried to learn from the mistakes of my previous visit and keep my questions short, well sourced and to the point. She still considered most of them ridiculous, and made it clear she'd rather be downstairs having coffee with the widow of the man who had led the Dambusters. Diana was, as usual, charm itself. She served Victoria sponge and sherry with the tea, and offered supper as the evening closed in. I declined in order to make the most of my time in her drawing room, where Bentley-owner magazines adorn the coffee table and her scrapbooks fill a long shelf next to the window. The star of the scrapbooks, in swimsuits, ballgowns, frocks by Schiaparelli and uniforms by Austin Reed, was a radiant, irresistible young woman who lived each day as if it was her last, which many of them nearly were. The owner of the scrapbooks is not so young now, but still somehow irresistible.

As I was getting ready to leave she went over to her bookshelves, from one of which hangs a group portrait of the pilots of No. 15 Ferry Pool at Hamble. ‘There's a tough bunch of babies,' she murmured, more to herself than me. And toughness, in the end, defined them. It is what Lettice and Diana had in common, even if they showed it differently. It is what Jackie Cochran and Pauline Gower had in common, even if they found they couldn't work together under the pressures of war. Could they have done
so in peace? We will never know. Pauline Gower died in 1947, two years after marrying and two days after giving birth to twins.

By then the former Dorothy Bragg had married David Beatty and given him an heir. It was a difficult pregnancy and a difficult marriage. Despite her new position as a countess, or perhaps because of it, certain members of the British ruling class still considered her both fascinating and available. She met Anthony Eden, then Shadow Foreign Secretary, at a weekend house party at Ditch-ley Park in the late 1940s. They fell in love. Beatty tolerated their affair at first, possibly hoping for political advancement, then he threatened to expose it.

The relationship was already an open secret in high society. Had it become an open scandal it would have ruled out Eden's progression to Prime Minister. The Suez Crisis, not to mention world history, might have turned out very differently. In the event, Churchill persuaded Beatty to withdraw his threat on condition that Eden stop seeing his wife. The affair ended quietly and Dorothy, divorced from Beatty in 1950, went on to marry Abe Hewitt, a millionaire horse-breeder and attorney who had helped draft the New Deal for Franklin Roosevelt. She had three more sons, took up scuba diving aged seventy-seven and died in 2006.

Her friend and mine, Ann Wood, died a few months earlier after becoming Pan Am's first female vice president and de facto custodian, via the new miracle of email, of the Cochran pilots' collective memory. Her early dismay at English fecklessness had long since been replaced by deep affection. In 1946 she told an audience at D'Youville College, her alma mater in upstate New York, that she would ‘always deem it the greatest privilege of my life to have served the British Government in its hour of need and to have come to know the English people so intimately'. She was a towering figure in aviation and in life, whose only complaint as it drew to a close was that George Bush had ruined her retirement.

Mary de Bunsen was lucky to have a retirement at all. Laid low by pneumonia and the hole in her heart – diagnosed as an interatrial septal defect – she flew to Philadelphia in 1954 for
pioneering surgery in which she was given a one in ten chance of surviving. She did survive, retiring to a two-room former army hut at the foot of the South Downs to write her memoirs (the chapter on her coronary crisis is proudly entitled ‘Not Beyond Salvage').

By the time of de Bunsen's operation, Margot Duhalde had joined the Free French, served in Morocco as their only female pilot and returned to Chile where for thirty years she worked as an air traffic controller in Punta Arenas, Patagonian gateway to the Antarctic. From the British government she received nothing more effusive in the way of thanks than her Certificate of Service with the ATA. From President Jacques Chirac of France she received a personal letter in June 2006, appointing her Commander of the Order of the Legion of Honour and thanking her for putting her life ‘in the service of the land of your ancestors'.

Joan Hughes, the second woman cleared to fly four-engined aircraft, received an MBE after the war – and an acquittal in 1968 from the Buckinghamshire Quarter Sessions at Aylesbury, after facing seven charges there of endangering people and property while flying under a motorway bridge during the filming of
Thunderbirds
. Shortly before her death in 1993 told her old friend Alex Henshaw, the former Castle Bromwich test pilot: ‘I have had a wonderful life and would not change a thing.'

Most of the surviving ATA women are now those who joined late in the war. Of these, the truly miraculous survivor is Betty Keith-Jopp. After sinking to the seabed off St Monans in her Barracuda and being hauled to safety by John Morris of the
Providence
, she was taken to the nearest RAF station, at Crail, across the Firth of Forth from Edinburgh. There she was laid in a heated cradle specially designed to thaw out frozen pilots. Like Captain Morris, she was ordered not to speak to anyone about her accident, but news of her escape spread quickly. On her return to Prestwick she found herself constantly approached by well-wishers who had heard a little and wanted to know more.

Betty was thankful to be alive, but mortified to have lost an aeroplane. To prove herself and repay the ATA for her training,
she continued flying. Her logbook shows four more Barracuda flights from Prestwick in the weeks after the accident. But her nerves were shredded. ‘You think nothing will ever happen to you,' she said. ‘But once it does you know it can, and probably will again.'