Five
On their first real day of flying, the ATA women juggled themselves into the few chairs—Skye perching on an arm and letting Joan take the seat—and Skye saw that Pauline looked tired again. As if she’d been fighting through a hailstorm and had acquired a lot more bruises.
“Tell us,” Skye said, and she felt Joan shift closer to her, as if they might need to be braced for whatever Pauline would say.
“This won’t be like any flying you’ve done before,” Pauline began, somewhat carefully. “You’ll rarely be able to take a direct route to wherever you’re ferrying as you need to avoid barrage balloons, antiaircraft guns, coastal defenses and restricted flight zones. But you won’t have any instruments for navigation. Instead, you have to fly by dead reckoning, using only maps, a compass and your watch, flying in sight of the ground at all times—that’s the only way you’ll know where you are. You have to become expert in identifying railway lines, Roman roads and other landmarks as those are the navigation aids that will get you from the start to the finish of your route.”
Skye found herself squeezing Joan’s hand and avoiding Rose’s eyes entirely because she didn’t want to see the incredulity she knew she’d find there. But, she reasoned, if they got lost while taking a plane from one side of Britain to another with only a watch and a railway line to guide them, they could always radio in to check both their position and what obstacles—like a German Messerschmitt—might be lying in wait for them along the flight path.
Then Pauline said, “You’re not allowed to use radio. Ever. Which means you can’t fly if the cloud base is less than eight hundred feet. If it’s lower, it’s scrub for the day. No going up into the clouds and trying to find a way over the top. Without radio and navigation aids, that would be suicide.”
“But . . .” Skye couldn’t form the words. She could scarcely believe what Pauline had said. They might as well be flying with blindfolds on.
“Righto,” said Rose, and Skye could hear the effort it took for her to be her usual chirpy self. “No instruments. No radio. Are we allowed a little luck?”
Nobody smiled. What they were being asked to do was not just risky but possibly deadly. Skye could easily set out on a day that looked clear, only to run into cloud fifty miles farther along and be stuck in the thick of it, like her mother had been, unable to see the railway lines on the ground and flying blind into a hill, with no way to call for help. Or losing her way and ending up somewhere over the North Sea with no fuel left.
Pauline allowed them a moment before passing them each a map. “You’ll notice,” she said drily, “that it says on your maps: Areas dangerous to flying not marked on this sheet. You’re not allowed to mark the location of hazards like barrage balloons in case your plane goes down and you and your map are taken by the enemy, thus giving them valuable intelligence.”
Skye couldn’t bear it anymore. She let a little of her old self escape. “As the editors of Aeroplane magazine don’t ascribe to us any intelligence, it shouldn’t matter what we write on our maps.”
Rose was the first to laugh, then Joan, then Mona and the others. What else was there to do?
“And these are for you.” Pauline handed Skye a pile of letters.
“Me?” Skye tore one open to find a request from a pilot to accompany him to dinner and a dance. The next was a similar request, this time from an engineer. And so it went on, through the pile.
“Your picture in the newspaper has made you somewhat sought after,” Pauline said.
Nary a smile. “I’ll decline them all, of course,” Skye said, pushing to the back of her mind the Skye who had danced all night in Parisian jazz clubs with handsome Frenchmen. She dropped the letters into the nearest rubbish bin.
“Quite,” Pauline said. “You’ll need to save your strength. Nobody will let us touch operational aircraft, which means the only planes the women of the ATA will fly are Tiger Moths. To Scotland.”
“Bloody hell.” Rose said what everyone must have been thinking.
Tiger Moths had open cockpits. It was winter. The air over Scotland was not even warm enough to be considered freezing. It was arctic.
The women were given fur-lined boots, a Sidcot flying suit and a leather helmet for protection. But when you were flying for four hours in minus thirty degrees windchill, it was like being naked in a snowstorm, Skye reflected through chattering jaw on her very first flight. She could barely concentrate enough to fly the plane as her body shut off every function besides keeping the blood moving through her.
She almost didn’t register the RAF base when she saw it, almost flew on, over the North Sea and into oblivion. She could see that her hands were still attached to her, but she couldn’t feel them. Somehow they moved, muscle memory still functioning, and she slowed the Moth for her final approach, thankful that some guardian angel ensured she landed safely.
She taxied the Moth after the follow-me car to dispersal, and at last heard the sound of the chocks being placed under the wheels. It was time to get out. But her legs wouldn’t work. Pauline needn’t have bothered to forbid her from smiling. She simply couldn’t.
An engineer climbed onto the wing and stared disgustedly at her. “The only good thing about having women in the ATA is your weight,” he snapped.
He reached into the cockpit and lifted her out, bodily. It was the most mortifying thing that had ever happened to her.
After he put her on the ground, she held on to the wing for dear life, knowing that if she fell down right now she would cry, not because she was hurt, but because she had never, in all her life, imagined having so little dignity.
“I’ll have to quit flying and become an engineer,” a pilot called out as he walked past. “Isn’t that two for today?”
The engineer laughed, and Skye understood that Mona or Joan or someone else had landed before her and had also had to be removed from the aircraft. It didn’t make her feel any better to know she wasn’t the first whose body had so let her down. Nobody, not even a man, could survive such a flight in bitter cold and be capable of movement at the end. But the men were ferrying closed cockpit planes to bases farther south where the air was milder, so it was just the women who looked weak.
The engineer threw her parachute down at her. “Don’t forget that,” he said.
It slipped through her arms. While she might be slowly defrosting, she didn’t yet have the range of movement needed to catch a heavy parachute when thrown at her from above. He tossed her bag down after it.
“Thanks,” she mumbled as she bent to pick it up. Then she forced one foot in front of the other so she could find somewhere to change, to abide by the ridiculous regulations that stated she must take off her much warmer flying suit immediately after she had landed and put on her skirt.
Once she’d pulled on thin lisle stockings and her skirt, she had to catch the overnight train from Scotland to St. Pancras. Still colder than she’d ever been in her life, Skye found a blue-lipped Joan on the platform, and was momentarily grateful for her prewar habit of swimming most days, even in winter, which had perhaps made her more robust.
On the train, Skye boosted Joan up into the luggage rack where she could at least lie down. Skye sat on the floor, head resting against a pole, eyelids closing occasionally but flying open with every noise and movement around her.