Spitfire Women of World War II Read Online Free PDF Page A

Humphrey Gilberts of Revesby Abbey in Lincolnshire. ‘We got along fine,’ Diana recalled.
    Gilbert had the Magister’s spark plugs removed and Diana was forced to spend three days at Debden, in which time she and Gilbert fell in love. Within three weeks they were engaged. Within a month, Gilbert was dead. He had survived the Battle of Britain to be killed giving a corpulent air traffic controller a lift in his Spitfire. As the ATA women were soon to learn, there was no spare room in a Spitfire cockpit even for the slimmest of them. Humphrey Gilbert, with a whole extra body in his lap, had found out too late that he couldn’t pull the stick back. The aircraft barely left the ground.
    Diana mourned Humphrey for many years, but not to the exclusion of pleasure or excitement or the company of other men. Life was too short – and too ethereal – for that, and the importance of filling every unforgiving minute with excitement was something on which all the early ATA women could agree. These included a willowy blonde ski champion called Audrey Sale-Barker (better known for most of her life as the Countess of Selkirk); the ice hockey international Mona Friedlander, whom the Fleet Street diarists quickly nicknamed ‘the Mayfair Minx’; and Lois Butler,wife of the chairman of the De Havilland Aircraft Company, and former captain of the Canadian women’s ski team.
    Pauline Gower, who as Commander of the ATA women’s section was queen bee of British women pilots in the war, had first excelled as the perfect schoolgirl at the Convent of the Sacred Heart in Tunbridge Wells. She was the Mother Superior’s pet: bright, bouncy, diligent and fizzing with ideas. One of these, while still a teenager, was to follow her father into the Conservative party as an MP. But then an infection that required surgery almost killed her at seventeen, and permanently weakened her health. So she took up flying as ‘the perfect sedentary occupation’. Mary de Bunsen, who was seldom photographed without thick glasses and a furrowed brow, found it a thrilling distraction from ‘the ghastly importance of a good marriage’.
    When these young ladies landed at stately homes and castles converted for use as Satellite Landing Grounds, they would often recognise the great lawns from weekend house parties. When they first flew Hurricanes, they celebrated with a sumptuous dinner at the Ecu de France in St James’s – for who knew what tomorrow would bring?
    The weather was always the decisive factor. When the sun shone at White Waltham, and the great Flight Captain Frankie Francis set hearts aflutter by removing his shirt and flexing his muscles, and the spire of the Collegial Church of St John the Baptist at Shottesbrooke could be seen beyond the trees at the western end of the runway, that meant good flying weather; at least two miles’ visibility. The Shottesbrooke spire in plain view meant ferry chits at nine o’clock and long days in the air. It meant butterflies, because no good pilot ever assumed fog would not rear up out of a cloudless sky and grab her; but more than that it held the prospect of total gratification.
    No women in Britain in the war were more admired for doing their bit – nor for their uniform – than those who flew with the ATA. But in doing so they partook of a very private pleasure. ‘Our happiness was almost indecently visible in time of trouble anddistress,’ Mary de Bunsen fretted – unnecessarily. As Lettice Curtis knew, no-one ever saw these women at their happiest. To be airborne over the Pennines on a clear spring morning with a delivery to Colerne, Kirkbride or even Lossiemouth, jumping-off point for Scapa Flow and the murderous North Atlantic, was to be ‘blissfully cut off from the rest of the world’. Alone in the cockpit, ‘past and present would recede until existence became once more a pinpoint in time, concerned solely with