The Spitfire Girls(2)
‘Mama isn’t going to tell me whether or not I can fly if we enter the war. I’m a grown woman,’ she retorted, pressing the seal on the envelope. ‘She knows better than anyone that I can’t just sit here and do nothing.’
‘Keep writing those letters then. Keep fighting,’ her father replied. ‘And don’t let anybody tell you that you can’t fly a plane better than a man.’ He laughed and puffed again. ‘Your mother included.’
Lizzie curled up on the chair and stared out the window, looking up at the bright blue sky as she smiled at her father’s words. She would keep writing, and as much as she loved her mother, this was one thing she was more than prepared to defy her on. If Mrs Roosevelt wouldn’t help her, then she would write to the president himself, and to the army, and then she’d write to Mrs Roosevelt all over again. She wasn’t going to stop until someone took her seriously and gave her the chance to prove herself from the cockpit.
Her daddy was the finest and most decorated wartime pilot in Texas, and she’d show the world that she was every inch her father’s daughter.
Hatfield (north of London), 1940
May
May Jones clenched her jaw tight, hand trembling with anger as she held the well-thumbed copy of Aeroplane. Once, she’d loved reading the aviation magazine, but she vowed then and there never to so much as touch another issue of it.
She cleared her throat and glanced up at the seven other women watching her before starting to read out loud from the page in front of her. They’d been waiting at the factory for almost an hour, and she’d been wondering why the usually chatty group of girls had been so quiet. Now that she’d read what her second officers had been whispering about, she understood why no one had wanted to show her. She took a deep breath and shook her dark hair back, still unused to the short crop.
‘We quite agree that there are millions of women in the country who could do useful jobs in war. But the trouble is that so many of them insist on wanting to do jobs which they are quite incapable of doing.’
May paused, anger pulsing at her neck and setting her skin on fire as she read the words.
‘The menace is the woman who thinks that she ought to be flying in a high-speed bomber when she really has not the intelligence to scrub the floor of a hospital properly, or who wants to nose around as an Air Raid Warden and yet can’t cook her husband’s dinner.’
When she set the magazine down, silence fell, and May slowly considered every woman in the room with her. The concrete floor wasn’t helping the frigid conditions, and they all had their hands tucked into the armpits of their sheepskin jackets to stay warm, but she was burning with an anger so red hot she was no longer feeling the cold. They would never dare to say such things about men – but women? They treated them as second-class citizens no matter what they were doing, unless they were cooking dinner or holding some sort of cleaning apparatus, and she was sick and tired of it. They were all fighting for the same cause!
‘Ladies, this is the biggest load of nonsense I’ve ever read,’ she said, sighing and shutting her eyes for a beat as she tried to calm the fury pumping through her veins. ‘This editor, this’ – she took a deep breath – ‘this excuse of a man! To think he can write about us in this way is absolutely appalling. I don’t want to see anyone reading or talking about this ridiculous article ever again.’
Betty, one of her most experienced fliers, started to clap, and one by one every other woman followed suit until all of them were clapping and grinning back at her, their cold hands clearly forgotten. May held her head high as a mechanic walked in, a puzzled expression on his face as he looked at them, no doubt wondering what in God’s name they were doing. She met his gaze and nodded, feeling sorry for the poor lad that he’d walked straight into a room full of furious women.
‘He’s right though. I can’t scrub floors to save myself!’ Betty called out.
‘Scrubbing floors,’ May scoffed, shaking her head as she scanned the page again. ‘I’m not sure what he thinks we were doing before this, but I can tell you that women with more than five hundred hours’ flying experience have better things to do than scrub bloody floors!’
They were fully fledged members of the Air Transport Auxiliary, a civilian organisation established to ferry new, repaired and damaged military aircrafts for the Royal Air Force, not silly girls pretending to be pilots! And today, on their first official flight, they were going to prove how much they were needed in this war.
Another of her girls, Penelope, cleared her throat, and May turned to her. She’d always been the quietest of the bunch, so it was good to see her joining in.
‘My mother wrote to me the other day and said she chased a neighbour away with her broom when he questioned her about my pay,’ Penelope said. ‘Apparently it’s a national disaster that glorified female show-offs are being paid six pounds a week. But she told him where to stick it and not to come back!’
They all laughed, and as May watched them, the heat that had spiralled up her neck and burst into her cheeks turned to warmth. She hadn’t laughed in a long while, but it felt nice to be part of the camaraderie for once. It was lovely that Penelope’s mother had been so forthright in defending them, and she knew her own parents would do the same. They were proud of her and wouldn’t hear a bad word about their pilot daughter. Even if it had been months since she’d been home to see them. She pushed the guilt away.