Spitfire Girls (62 page)

Luxuriating on the sofa, Angelique thought of the next batch of war babies. Left in the care of their hapless father Duncan Worsley, Valerie's beautiful twin girls had eventually been given to her sister Annabel, debilitated though she was by her ordeal in Sobibor. How sad, thought Angelique, that Valerie had never lived to see her sister again.

‘What stupidity is engendered by destiny,' she muttered to herself.

Valerie had married Duncan not because she loved him, but because ATA had been wound to a close and she had been beside herself when Friedrich Kranz had left, so suddenly, for Austria. How ironic, Angelique reflected, that Valerie, who had ferried 3,300 aircraft in the ATA years, should expire in hours of prolonged agony because modern science had not yet devised a solution for ‘childbirth with complications', as they called her heartbreaking form of death. She had lain helpless and pathetic, life draining from
her beautiful face as two little women burst forth from her useless, ebbing womb.

In that wonderful year of 1944, Angelique recalled, the Normandy Invasion had kept the Spitfire girls working without respite, and the excitement of the European Liberation had been heightened when women pilots had been officially assigned the Continental routes. Angelique would never forget the look on Delia Seifert's face when the ATA flight captain arrived in Brussels in a twin-engined Mitchell and had found her lying underneath a defective Boston, her baby playing on the landing strip. Delia had wept for the first time in her adult life, babbling uncontrollably to Angelique about the organization having given her up for dead and having awarded her a special medal posthumously …

When Angelique returned to Britain she was astonished to find her brother Paul alive, and had decided never to tell him that she had found Zack's name on a list of men executed by the Fascists.

When Angelique returned to Britain she had joined the other girls in the hazardous flights to Amiens in Mosquitos, to Courtrai in Dakotas, to Istres in Wellingtons and to Brussels in Spitfires. Indelibly imprinted on her memory was the image of Kay, Sally, Barbara and Stella stepping out of Spitfires at Colmar, along the foot of the Vosges Mountains, on the eve of VE Day, 8 May 1945, and of the delicious brandy Kay had smuggled over, courtesy of Gordon Selfridge …

Now, Kay was to begin her career with the Old Vic Company, playing Queen Margaret in the Henry plays. Angelique had wanted the part very badly, as had many
other English-born actresses, but Kay was determined to land the role of a lifetime at the tender age of thirty-three, and she succeeded. As the rain began to patter against the windows of her family home, Angelique laughed at the memory of Kay sneaking away to rehearsals of
Henry VI, Part I
between ferry trips to France in the summer of 1945. When she had a near-fatal crash, Nora Flint cursed Kay for losing a valuable RAF Dakota and reminding her that her contract with the soon-to-be-disbanded ATA was exclusive:

‘Shakespeare or no Shakespeare,' as Nora so succinctly put it.

Angelique remembered the evening of Kay's opening in
Henry VI
, when her husband Noel Slater had been unspeakably rude to Lili Villiers. Everyone in ATA knew that Lili had talked her father into backing Kay's film career, the first cinema effort to dramatize the story of ATA. Noel had screamed at Lili in the presence of the Duke and Duchess of Gloucester, and a very drunken Kay had compounded the scandal by suggesting her former lover ought to abandon her new-found career as a film producer and be a lesbian call girl.

Somehow, Angelique reflected, women like Kay always got away with such outrageous behaviour, but then again, the postwar world had no time for gentility …

She had been ordered to rest until the birth of her next child, and Angelique was enjoying her weight gain, although she missed aeroplanes with a desperate kind of anxiety. She worried that the new generation of flying machines, like those pressurized Boeings about which she had heard so much, might prove beyond her scope, but she vowed
not to be deterred. Noel had teamed up with Sam Hardwick and Friedrich Kranz to start their new commercial airline, and the Spitfire girls had agreed amongst themselves to boycott Slater Airways when he refused to hire lady pilots.

Friedrich, Friedrich …

Every ATA girl had been mortified when Kranz returned from Austria, having given up the search for his lost family and determined to marry Valerie. Everyone knew he had always loved her passionately, and the girls had been mystified when she left the Closing Ceremony of ATA in 1945 and walked straight to the registry office to wed Duncan Worsley. Friedrich wept openly when he arrived in Britain and discovered that Valerie had died two dawns before, her tiny babes still screaming in a hospital ill equipped for peacetime prosperity. The Spitfire girls knew Friedrich would never recover from the tragedy, and when Worsley refused to let him visit the girls Kranz had thrown himself into his aeroplanes, becoming as cold and calculating as his new business partner Noel Slater.

Without Valerie to lead them, what would happen to all the lady pilots? Angelique wondered.

When ATA had been officially disbanded, men like Josef Ratusz and Bill Howes had found exciting work, some quite secret. Other men, of the calibre of Ludo and Zuki, had stayed in Britain to pursue the airborne women they had loved in wartime and who were now forced to remain grounded. Britain teemed with Americans, but Edith Allam and her Philadelphians chose to go home.

Would Kelvin Bray have committed suicide, Angelique wondered, had he stayed in this green and pleasant land of England?

Edith left flowers on Errol Carnaby's Norfolk grave, the villagers of Weston Longville having claimed him as one of their own. This was the birthplace of the Blood Libel – and now the natives were burying their deeply ingrained prejudices to accept the corpse of an African into their soil.

In the end, the ladies of ATA had been instrumental in the ferrying of over 57,000 Spitfires, 29,000 Hurricanes, 26,000 Wellingtons, 10,000 Lancasters and thousands of other aircraft including flying boats – the grand total, Angelique had been told, amounting to over 300,000 aeroplanes. She had kept her logbook, although the Air Ministry had ordered the Spitfire girls to turn in all ATA property when the organization was disbanded. Now, she sat on the sofa and browsed through its poignant pages. When she had used it, so many faces had not yet faced death … Delia Seifert had told her that the Ministry was shredding and burning any remaining piece of evidence of women's ATA, including the wonderful giant wall map in White Waltham Ops, the rationale being that the annals of history would condemn Britain for having had to resort to using female pilots during a world war …

And now they could no longer fly for the RAF.

Angelique pitied girls of the supreme excellence of Delia Seifert and fretted at the possibility of Nora Flint and Hana Bukova being left with no livelihood whatsoever. The ATA men and women had been refused a place of their own in the Cenotaph Ceremonies, having been ordered to march with the London Transport bus conductors – ‘You
were
transport workers,' the ATA had been reminded – or never to march at all.

They had chosen not to march, men and women united in defiance.

Angelique admired Hana Bukova for her dauntless determination to find her mother. The girl was convinced Vera was alive even after Friedrich's fruitless searches across the grisly wasteland of 1946 Europe.

So many faces passed in front of her mind's eye as Angelique awaited her husband's arrival. She would have tea today with Stella Teague, star choreographer of the Royal Ballet, and they would listen to their guest of honour, André Grunberg, raving on and on about the Blood Libel, the subject of his hugely successful book. People said he had shown superb timing, devising a volume that would coincide with the liberation of the souls they called Holocaust victims. Angelique had heard Britain was refusing entry to these refugees and that Sarah Truman, herself a survivor, had been fighting Sir Henry Cobb and Tim Haydon on the plight of these human skeletons who had once been scholars and doctors and scientists …

Tomorrow was the day the Spitfire girls would have their first reunion, and they would troupe to Hamilton Slade's tombstone on which had been inscribed:

I Don't Give a Damn.

Sally Remington would go off to play tennis at Forest Hills in New York, and Barbara Newman, crippled in a Blenheim bomber crash, would watch other women playing hockey, the game at which she had been national champion before Hitler and before the Spitfires …

It was said that Edith Allam had already created a nationwide clamour in the USA. Now an officer for the United Service for New Americans, she had used the press to
expose the unbelievable policy against Holocaust survivors. How could she send such people ‘back home' if they did not meet the criteria for becoming ‘New Americans'?

Angelique felt honoured to be seeing Edith again – a woman who was doing something of use for the remnants of humanity, numbering millions left over for a postwar world to deal with, God having yet to come out of His coma.

It would be tomorrow – Angelique would pay her respects to the memory of Martin Toland, the father her beautiful little girl would never know.

What had happened to Oscar? she often wondered.

And tomorrow …

Tomorrow, the Spitfire girls would pay their respects to the memory of Amy and Marion and Alec and Jo and Cal and Valerie, and then Angelique would settle in to await the arrival of her husband's first progeny.

His Lordship wanted a boy, of course, to continue the Truman line.

Angelique did not love Anthony, but he had made her a Lady.