Spitfire Girls (17 page)

‘Of course I am,' he boasted, and Cal cowered, moving towards the door.

‘Stay where you are, boy.'

Cal sat, and Nora put her hand on his arm. He was always apt to run when a voice rose in volume. Hardwick
stared at the boy and wondered if he would flee someday when he was upon his first woman and had made her cry out in the night.

‘If there is anyone who is taking this war business on board, it's me,' the boss continued. ‘We have a world crisis looming and if it brings rationing my life is over.'

‘That won't be nothing new for me,' said Cal, squirming at Nora's touch. ‘My Dad's been rationing our table ever since I can remember.'

Nora and her employer were quiet.

‘My mum and I are like sticks,' Cal continued, ‘and the old man just gets fatter and fatter – funny, in't it?'

All had gone silent within their small surroundings, and the roar of men outside gained momentum. Hardwick looked up from his tea and took in the two children he had added to the workplace.

‘Why would a young woman of your class find satisfaction working in a place like this?' he asked.

Nora thought for a moment and her colour began to fade. ‘I suppose I ought to tell you the truth, as this seems to be crisis morning.'

‘Go on,' said Hardwick.

‘I rise at three a.m., to be here at four o'clock start, and in the afternoon when the Market has finished I dash to Maylands.'

‘The airfield!' the boy exclaimed.

‘People there work in any kind of toil to raise the three guineas an hour for a lesson,' Nora went on. ‘My friends are in theatre, the ballet, mechanical engineering – all girls, all pilots.'

‘Their dads know?' demanded Cal, wide-eyed.

‘Mine does,' said Nora. ‘It doesn't make him happy.'

‘He beats you?' asked Cal, quietly.

‘I've yet to see any bruises on her,' said Hardwick, rising from his chair.

‘You might say I am a daring young woman in a Puss Moth,' Nora asserted, her voice animated.

‘This is amazing.' Cal had calmed down. Nora's raised voice charmed him and for a few moments he was devoid of terror.

‘I have accumulated nearly three hundred flying hours,' she continued. ‘Every penny has been paid for from this – by you, Mr Hardwick. My parents have always refused to contribute, where my lessons are concerned. They're frightened, I think.'

‘Frightened?' asked Cal.

‘They would be.
I
would be,' mused Sam Hardwick. ‘Children make one fearful. Everything they undertake scares a parent.'

Nora felt a warmth towards her boss that transcended her class.

‘I suppose they haven't thought as far as a war,' she said. ‘They fear for my life because I boast that the flying is not a hobby.'

‘But what does your Dad think?' asked Cal anxiously, as if her entire future rested on patriarchal judgement.

‘They've both resigned themselves to my long days.'

Hardwick could not fight the paternal emotion rising with the warm tea in his belly.

‘When do you sleep?' he asked, aching for the daughter his spawn had never hatched.

‘Every spare minute is spent in the air, like all the other
girls in my group. I sleep when I'm not here in the middle of the night or flying at teatime.'

‘Will you be flying if there's a war?' Cal asked.

‘A hunch tells me I'll soon be airborne for the country. Whether I'll survive is up to the factory workers. If they make a faulty plane, I'm the one who dies.'

Hardwick scooped up a pile of messages and handed them to the boy.

‘Take these to Liverpool Street,' he commanded, and Cal returned to his cowering stance. He took the papers and as he moved to leave, turned to Nora:

‘When next you fly at teatime, look out for me. I'll find a way to be there.' Then he ran off as if pursued.

Sam Hardwick smiled and watched him run down the busy corridors, his reed-like legs circumventing tables of carcasses and animated men – many of whom would soon be butchered too. This boss was a warm character deeply entrenched in his comfortable routine, and terrified of change. How could these men think of soldiering? Like so many in that limbo between working-class and middle-class, his love of family was compounded by that terror of a return to poverty.

‘Be careful,' he murmured, turning back to Nora.

‘God, I'm more worried about you here on the ground, than about myself up in the air.'

‘I've spent a lifetime building up this corner of someone else's monumental profit and now I've a legacy of three sons.'

‘You won't lose both,' she said. He had touched her – she could not remember when last her own father had moved her so.

‘Soon I may be left alone,' he pondered. ‘How could you be part of a war machine?'

His sharpness had come abruptly and Nora felt lost, wanting to justify her peculiar goal but having no passion to express herself.

‘What about your family?' he shouted.

‘They can cope. It's in their blood.' She wanted to cry. ‘For you, I'll make an extra effort to keep alive.'

Clatter and conversation from the maelstrom of men was beginning to drown out their voices, and Nora returned to her typewriter, wondering whether she could keep to her promise. Hardwick went back to his desk and at the end of the day had convinced himself that if three sons and the meat market were doomed, and this girl had to be lost to a Spitfire, then he too would need to make an extra effort to stay alive.

At midday when the market shut and Nora left for the airfield, Sam Hardwick departed from his lifelong routine and did not return home to his wife on the dot of noon. Instead, he followed Nora at a distance, and at the airfield he stood on the outskirts, watching young men and women pursuing their unnatural obsession. As the sun began to set and he began to fall asleep standing up, Sam was approached by a pilot in smart flying gear. He was bespectacled and his age indeterminate, but Noel Slater had the gift of acquisitive charm. This he now used to acquire Sam Hardwick.

Mrs Hardwick would have a long wait that afternoon, and for the rest of her married afternoons to come.

In the cold-water misery that was his home, Cal March sat with his parents over a meagre lunch. One half of a dry
biscuit in his mouth seemed to stay there forever. Terrified of the thoughts surging through his head, he could not swallow. His mother glanced sideways at him and pushed a mug down the table towards his tightly clenched fist. Without looking at her, he opened his fist and grasped the drink, slurped it, and wondered if he dared broach a dreaded subject.

‘Slopping like swine again, are you?' grunted his father.

‘That new airbase is opening up to lads – only two and sixpence to learn to fly!' Cal blurted, the cold tea running down his chin.

March glowered, and sneered:

‘RAF types are there to teach little lads just one thing – queer habits picked up at fancy schools. If I ever hear that you've gone anywhere near them, you'll rue the day.'

‘What would you be wanting with the RAF, then?' asked Mrs Bridie March.

‘It was four guineas to learn for an hour, and now the Air Ministry is dropping it down to two and six, Mum. Anyone can join up.'

‘That's just what I'm saying,' groaned March. ‘It's white slavery – these top boys bring in poor lads and use them for evil carryings-on.'

‘Like what, Dad?'

‘Don't go on like that, Joe,' Cal's mother cautioned her husband.

Dry biscuits had never before curdled in Cal's stomach. ‘I've already been and I'm on to lesson three,' he rasped.

‘Been where?' Joe March inquired menacingly.

‘To the airfield––' A back-handed blow came down on Cal's ear before he could expand on his achievement.

‘You bloody young swine – I'll belt you like never before,' March raged. He drew his belt and pulled Cal to the floor, on his knees.

Bridie March gasped.

‘I'm listed for Air Cadets – the youngest ever!' screamed Cal, but he was overcome by the blows raining down from his father's raging fists. Was this the fear of which Nora and Hardwick had spoken?

When March had finished and gone, and the boy had vomited, his mother treated his bruises.

‘Give up this craziness, please,' she begged.

Brightly he sat up and his eyes sparkled again. ‘I see myself as Stepney's first Air Commodore.'

‘Dad is right, Cal,' said Bridie, her rough, work-swollen fingers stroking his soft face. ‘RAF means Background, and you'll always be trod on.'

‘War means there's no more class, Mum.'

‘Class comes back with peace,' she said, smiling sadly.

‘As long as the war lasts, no one can tread on me.'

‘You'd be surprised. For God's sake, Cal, don't do this.'

He was unmoved. As if left alone for the first time in his life, he felt a coldness creeping into his psyche. Staring at his mother, Cal remembered that his flesh was half hers and half that of the creature who feared him, and he welcomed the freezing sensation.

Could it be much different from death?

‘I must reach the sky,' Cal said, his mother now at the far end of the room, her eyes full of that fear. ‘Home is hell, and if flying means heaven, I'm ready to die now.'

Bridie March turned away. As she mopped the floor, Cal left – wondering why in one afternoon he had lost the
ability to cry. After every previous beating he had ended up in tears. This time he had been sick and he had been able to argue. He walked down the road and passed the local costermonger, who did not recognize him when he said the usual hello. That pleased the boy.

At Maylands, Angelique Florian was dramatizing excerpts from the latest news cuttings. Recently it had become a ritual for her flying group to listen together, entranced, as the wild brunette read the grim bulletins. On this day their sombre session was interrupted by the arrival of Noel Slater, the young flight engineer who could also pilot fifty different types of aircraft. His irritating boastfulness had made him intensely unpopular, compounded by a loud ambition to form his own airline.

Girls mocked him.

His poor eyesight and slight lameness had kept him out of the RAF, and every girl he dated reminded him that he would still be a flight engineer while they were transporting giant bombers. His contempt for them, in turn, would blaze in his tormenting criticisms when airborne with a lady pilot, often leading to near-catastrophes.

‘Which one of you was responsible for that dented Anson? It was spiffing new,' he shouted, stopping Angelique's magic.

‘It would have to be one of the boys, Noel – you know bloody well we're not yet allowed near those things,' Stella replied.

He slammed his gloves down on the table and grabbed a printed news-sheet from the actress.

‘There is something obscene about you people making a show out of horror,' he said, and he began pacing the room.

‘Have you got something new to offer us today, Noel?' asked Angelique, rising from her chair. She moved to the door, and all ears were alert. ‘Come with me,' she said. I recommend we go out, right now, in a training aircraft, which I will pilot, and that you show me all the latest developments in flying technique to have come about in the past twenty-four hours.'

There were some giggles, and Slater followed her to the field. She went for a new Oxford, and the man flinched.

‘We can't afford to ruin one of these,' he muttered.

‘I've flown three hundred hours and haven't ruined anything yet,' she said. ‘You know I have authorization, which is more than you get around here. Get in,' she said, glaring at his thick lenses. His body did not respond to her splendid shape, which now hung so close to his, and which made other men on this field drool. His own sex did not make him drool, so what could he call himself? Little wonder, he reflected as he boarded, that he had been dubbed Tin Man by his one or two friends.

When they were airborne, Noel put the trainer into a sharp spin. Angelique was livid – she was designated pilot and his hands were forbidden anywhere near the controls. Every time he went up with a lady pilot, he meddled. She had heard the stories from every quarter.

With an effort, Angelique righted the plane.

‘Feel sick?' he asked, grinning.

‘No!'

‘No, sir!' he snapped, attacking the instruments again and putting the machine into a reverse spin. It was a horrible sensation and extremely dangerous in this type of aircraft. He loved the effect this was having on the woman, without
thought for his own life. In the face of death, he might see and be whole.

Somehow Angelique managed to right the Oxford before disaster. ‘Now, do YOU feel sick?' she shouted.

‘I'll have you up for insubordination when we are back on base,' he yelled back.

‘On base? What do you think this is, the RAF?' They were cruising now.

‘I'm your superior, fatty,' he snorted.

‘That's a new one – I've been called buxom, and juicy, but you can only see fat, eh? Just remember, Slater, you'll never make the RAF, so we're in our own war together.'

At the airfield, a crowd had gathered as Angelique, senior pilot, came in to land after the unexpected show of aerobatics. It was not a smooth approach, and all breath was held as she did an extra circuit before wobbling and bouncing in. The craft was at a standstill and Angelique scrambled out of the cockpit as if pursued. Running to the main airfield building, she headed straight for the club supervisor.

Sean Vine was not sympathetic. As operations head of a civilian field he was long accustomed to female pilots making complaints about Noel Slater. With new faces invading the pitch and footage of jackboots being shown in Soho screening rooms, things were changing.

‘You had better get lost, Florian,' he said, and Angelique was dumbfounded.