On the first of January 1940, as the war floundered on with much in the way of preparations and little in the way of battle, Skye became one of the first eight women to join the Air Transport Auxiliary—the ATA. She was made a second officer, starting at the very bottom, based out of the Hatfield airfield.
Austin Reed in London made up their uniforms: a dashing navy-blue skirt and jacket decorated with gold bars. Or it became dashing once each woman had altered it. The tailors at Austin Reed had never outfitted women before and had been overly careful not to touch anything untoward when taking their chest and inside leg measurements. The result was trousers with elongated crotches and blouses that could have accommodated two women. Skye hoped it wasn’t a sign of what was to come.
Women didn’t receive a billeting allowance and were required to arrange their own accommodation, unlike the men. Rose, Skye and Joan Hughes, who had perfectly appled cheeks and the dimpled adorableness of a baby, found rooms at the Stonehouse Hotel within walking distance of the airfield. This further sign that things were different depending on one’s gender didn’t especially alarm Skye, until she arrived with Rose and Joan for their first day of work.
They stood in the doorway of their new headquarters, staring into the muddy hut that was to serve as the operations office, the mess, everything.
“This is glamorous,” said Rose.
“Are there enough chairs for all of us to sit down?” Skye asked.
“No.” Pauline’s voice came from behind them. “You either have to get here early or perch on an armrest.”
At that, Rose, Joan and Skye scooted inside and claimed one of the too-few seats, whose split cushions and uneven legs made it apparent that the women’s hut was viewed by the RAF as a garbage dump.
For the next few days, various newspaper headlines alerted the nation that something out of the ordinary was taking place. The final straw was one that read: 8 Girls “Show” RAF. Skye winced when she saw it, knowing the RAF would be furious.
Clever Pauline invited the press to Hatfield to introduce this set of eight “girls” to the general public, reasoning that it might be easier to win over the broader sweep of opinion first, which might then soothe the tempers of the elitist men of the RAF.
At the press call, Skye was told to arrange herself alongside the other women around a tea table, as if finger sandwiches and sponge cake would make them more conventional. The photographers snapped pictures of the silent group, then asked for some “action.”
The women hoisted up their chutes and ran to the planes, only to be asked to do it again because the photographers hadn’t got quite the right shot. Decorum, Skye reminded herself, smiling grimly. But after six such sprints lugging a heavy parachute and for no good reason that Skye could see other than the photographers were incompetent, she felt her patience fading. So when Pauline asked Skye and Rose to each take a Moth up into the sky, Skye flipped the plane into a single flawless and very demure loop-the-loop in order to show the press that women didn’t need six attempts to fly an airplane properly. Upside down, she felt the joy that ordinarily swept through her when she flew, but that she hadn’t experienced since she’d seen the dilapidation of the women’s ATA headquarters.
Rose grinned at her as they landed.
Skye jumped down from the wing and pulled off her helmet, smiling at the sensation of the midair pirouette still swirling through her. She ran a hand through her hair, combing it into a less windblown state—as befitted newspaper photographs of serious young women doing an important job—and saw the combined blaze of a dozen flashlights. She thought nothing of it; was proud of herself for demonstrating the capableness of the ATA women—until the following day when the pictures appeared in the newspapers. Every paper who’d sent a photographer ran a shot of Skye’s plane upside down and, beside it, a picture of her, hand in hair, which was swept back becomingly off her beaming face as if she were a model posing for Vogue.
“Oh no,” was all she could think to say when Rose showed it to her; and “Oh no,” again when Pauline called her into the office.
The newspapers sat open on Pauline’s desk, displaying Skye’s seemingly model-like stance and her stunt, which now looked like the action of a devil-may-care woman who flung airplanes upside down one minute and simpered for the cameras the next.
“How bad is it?” Skye asked, sitting down before she was invited to because she honestly didn’t think she could stand. “I didn’t mean it to turn out like that. I never thought they’d be able to catch a plane upside down.”
“That’s right, you never thought.” Pauline’s words were ice. “This is a letter Aeroplane magazine has warned me will be published in their next edition. I think the whole affair of engaging women pilots to fly airplanes when there are so many men fully qualified to do the work is disgusting! They are contemptible show-offs.”
Disgusting, Skye thought. Hitler was disgusting. Not women flying airplanes.
“But there aren’t enough men,” she protested. “It’s not as if we’re stealing their jobs. We’re helping,” she said, voice trailing off as Pauline continued to read.
“The trouble is that women insist on wanting to do jobs which they are quite incapable of doing. The menace is the woman who thinks she ought to be flying a high-speed bomber when she really has not the intelligence to scrub the floor properly,” Pauline finished.
Shame burned through Skye. She closed the newspaper, unable to look at herself, understanding that her tendency to solitariness might be useful when flying an airplane but on the opposite side of it lay a propensity to think only of herself. Which one didn’t do when part of a team.
“Are they going to shut us down?” she asked, then stopped. Shut us down. No, shut her down. It was the only solution. Rose, Joan and the other five women had done nothing to be ashamed of.
“I’ll resign,” Skye said, trying to block out the image of a future devoid of flight because of her own incurable rashness.
Pauline sighed. “I’m not supposed to tell you this, but enough of the general public are so enamored of you and your derring-do and rather gorgeous face that the RAF have had to chew on their fingernails rather than on us. It would be more of a public relations disaster to close us down now than it would be to let us continue. The press is fascinated. Every man and woman on the street is fascinated—especially the men,” she added. “You’re the poster girl for the ATA, like it or not. And the RAF is smart enough to realize that firing their new poster girl is unlikely to win them any friends. But I’m giving you an official warning. Get another one and you’re out.”
“Thank you,” Skye whispered. “I’ll apologize to everyone. I’ve learned my lesson.”
Which was: don’t be Skye Penrose again. Not ever.
“Good.” Pauline’s voice was firm. “We only just landed on the side of good fortune this time. So the warning stands, as does me begging you to fly the planes with nary a smile nor a wing-waggle until this settles. Don’t bugger everything up.”
Skye returned to work determined to never get another warning, to forget she knew aerobatics at all, and to tame every maverick part of herself.