Spitfire Women of World War II (6 page)

Part of her anguish was over having ceded the initiative at the last moment to someone she insisted she no longer loved. That spring she had sent him a devastating 2,000-word sign-off letter chiding him for stringing her along, chiding herself for her naivety and chiding men in general for their ‘staring, desiring eyes'. ‘I no longer want you, sexually or any other way,' she wrote. ‘I don't believe we could for a single moment be happy together, and if you came to live in London I should probably leave …'. Just in case he concluded that she was seeing someone else, she added in a postscript: ‘I do not want men and have no intention now of ever getting married.'

She would modify that position soon enough. In the meantime, reaching for something that might satisfy her yearning for excitement, and shock Arreger at the same time, she learned to fly.

To fly. Three quarters of a century later it is hard to think of any activity that comes close to the phenomenon of flying in the late 1920s in terms of danger, newness, glamour or the power to liberate and thrill. Pilots in 1928, like computer scientists in 1978, knew their machines were going to change the world. The difference was that every time the pilots went up in theirs they set themselves literally apart from the uninitiated throng, and risked their lives.

Johnson's first close encounter with this new world of daring and defiance came after a long bus ride to the London Aeroplane Club at the De Havilland aerodrome at Stag Lane, near Edgware. In April 1928 Stag Lane was London's launchpad to the skies, or at least to the clouds. Naturally inclined to push things until told to stop, Johnson walked onto the aerodrome without a membership card, found a deck chair and watched, enthralled, as the
cream of the flying set practised circuits and bumps. Eventually she plucked up the courage to talk to one of them, who told her teaching could be had for 30 shillings an hour. That evening she wrote briskly to her parents: ‘It is too good to be true … I'm going up one evening next week to sign the papers, and I'll probably have my first lesson next weekend.'

In twenty-five months she would be taking off for Australia with a thermos and a packet of sandwiches. The appearance of an epic journey accomplished on a whim was part of its extraordinary appeal, but in reality Johnson was fiercely driven – and not just by a desire to prove how much Arreger had underestimated her. She was also in search of powerful distractions from grief, for in the summer of 1929 her sister, Irene, had committed suicide by putting her head in the oven at her new marital home. Ultimately Amy was stubbornly convinced that whatever life threw at her she was destined for what came to be known as ‘stardom'.

Not many women pilots in the ATA shared this conviction. Most considered it vulgar to court publicity or were actually scared of it (as some still are, in their late eighties, self-censoring at the sight of a tape recorder out of modesty and a lifelong allegiance to the Official Secrets Act). But all of them understood Johnson's love of flying as an escape from the wretched trap that faced adventurous young women in the 1930s. They had been handed the vote and a few seats in Parliament. They had won sullen recognition that a man's work could sometimes be done quite well by women (though not yet – Heaven forbid – for the same pay). Yet in practice almost as soon as they applied for work they were thrown back on the mercy of men.

In Johnson's case these men included Vernon Wood, partner in a City law firm. He gave this Sheffield University graduate, with her second-class degree in Economics, French and Latin, the best job she had before becoming famous – in his typing pool. There was also Jack Humphreys, sinewy chief mechanic at Stag Lane, who every evening after her day job taught her how to dissect and reassemble Tiger Moth engines. And there was her father, who
sent regular envelopes of bank notes to his daughter, and boxed herrings to those who helped her.

For the women who followed Johnson into the air the war would give them a purpose. Johnson had to find her own. From the moment she first considered flying to Australia her best hope of sponsorship lay in persuading Lord Wakefield she could boost his sales of Castrol lubricants. She wondered about delivering an Irish setter to the Maharaja of Patula, since they both loved dogs, but eventually, less than a month before that misty Croydon takeoff, Wakefield came through with a promise of petrol and £300 towards the cost of a plane.

The flight to Australia launched her into a new, blindingly public life that had the rhythm of a professional boxer's. Every few months, slackening gradually to every few years, she would hatch a new plan to risk her neck, grab some headlines and secure a fat purse with which to fund a lifestyle of sometimes prodigious extravagance. Her first goal after Darwin was Peking, but she got no further than Moscow after crash-landing in a snowbound field sixty miles north of Warsaw. (In Moscow, she found her fame transcended ideology and immunised her against internment: Lenin's widow hailed her as a model for Soviet womanhood.) She then flew to Tokyo and sat there for tea and photographs with General Nagaoka of the Japanese Imperial Aviation Society. In 1932 she smashed the London-Cape Town-London record in a De Havilland Puss Moth by taking a wild western route over the Sahara and Fernando Po. And the following year she made it ‘backwards' over the Atlantic, against the prevailing westerlies, and joined the American aviatrix Amelia Earhart and the Roosevelts for tea.

Earhart apart, Johnson was the leading woman in an elite corps of aviation fanatics. Theirs was a golden age of record-breaking in which the right route, written up with the right sort of understatement and to deadline, could net a newspaper deal worth six figures in modern money. There was stiff competition for front-page treatment, but Johnson stayed in contention by means of the second
most audacious stunt of her career. Over lunch at Quaglino's in Soho, on a spring Monday in 1932, she agreed to marry her most formidable and flamboyant rival.

This was Jim Mollison. More than anyone, Mollison drew Johnson into the ‘Mayfair set' that epitomised 1930s style and superficiality, and from which the ATA eventually offered her relief. He was photogenic and knew all about the paralysing exhaustion of long-distance flying. Otherwise he wasn't her type. He was short-tempered and addicted to liquor and adrenalin. Scottish by birth, he had flown some of the earliest airliners to have entered service in Australia. It was there he met Johnson while escorting her to Sydney on her post-flight publicity tour in 1930.
They Flew Alone
depicts that meeting as the dreamy work of fate; an instant connection in a softly lit cockpit pushed through the night by four rumbling great piston engines. He asks for two dances at the Governor General's ball to which he is taking her, but when he seeks her out there the host himself, in cockaded hat and tails, declares her taken.

In reality, Mollison rates no mention in Johnson's diaries until 1932, when she met him in Cape Town and began to fall for him. Earlier that year she had had a hysterectomy, apparently to put an end to debilitating period pains that were interfering with her flying. At any rate, whoever married Amy Johnson would not have to be a model father, and when the press learned it was to be Mollison, this incomparably racy couple was adopted as story fodder with no sell-by date.

They lived together at once, not in a house or flat but in a succession of suites in the Grosvenor House Hotel. Their views were of Park Lane and the sky. Their public relations were handled by William Courtney's Aviation Publicity Services, which had a branch office in the lobby. Their shopping trips would often take in Selfridges – a short walk away on the far side of Oxford Street – which had its own aeroplane department.

Mollison was bad company. He was not quite a monomaniac: adulation and money interested him as much as flying. But he
brought out the monomaniac in his new wife, and she drifted rapidly away from the emotional moorings her long-suffering father had provided. After years of regular correspondence in which she would trail her schemes, their costs and their potential returns and he would offer cautious encouragement and money, they fell out of touch. Will and Ciss Johnson would read of their daughter's flights and fancies in the papers, or hear of them from neighbours and have nothing to add.

On 22 July 1932 they received a rare letter from Amy posted from the Grosvenor House Hotel saying there was nothing to the printed rumours that her wedding to Mollison was imminent. But a week later a telegram arrived in Hull, at 9 p. m., also from Amy, to say the wedding was set for 10 o'clock the following morning and that she and Mollison were ‘trying to keep it as quiet as possible‘. Her parents were patently not invited. But something in the senior Johnsons snapped. They drove all night, left their car in Golders Green at 9.40 a.m. and took the tube and then a taxi to St George's Church in Hanover Square, arriving as the service ended. As the bride walked out in a black coat and white gloves, she failed to notice them. By the time she learned that her parents had made the trip they were inconsolable, and on their way back home.

Mollison's best man had been Sir Francis Shelmerdine, the Director of Civil Aviation, who managed to straddle the new world of Mayfair aviation crazies and the older ones of civil service and landed gentry. Yet when fate began to sour on Amy Johnson, even he couldn't help. Her marriage suffered from the start from Mollison's inability to resist other women – chief among them Beryl Markham, who had been seducing the Duke of Gloucester at the Grosvenor House Hotel even as Johnson was fêted there on her return from Australia. (Markham, who grew up drinking cow's blood and curdled milk on her father's Kenyan farm, later became the first person to fly non-stop from England – rather than Ireland – to North America. She was as fearless as Johnson, and, some say, a more natural pilot.)

Johnson, now being squeezed off the aviation pages by wilder, more glamorous upstarts, began a defiantly elegant descent from stardom. In 1934, she and her husband entered a race from Suffolk to Melbourne as favourites. They lost it to Charles Scott, a preening ex-RAF officer who, four years earlier as an envious escort pilot on her victory tour of Australia, had taunted her unsubtly about her dreadful period pains. The race ended for ‘Jim and Johnnie', as the Mollison pair were known to the press, with a seized-up engine and a furious, whisky-fuelled argument in their cockpit in Allahabad.

By this time they had in any case been eclipsed in the publicity stakes by none other than Jackie Cochran, the New York beautician and pilot who had hauled herself into the air by her proverbial bootstraps – and by marrying a multi-millionaire. In the race itself, she fared even worse than the Mollisons, running out of fuel over the Carpathians, but she had already beguiled reporters by emerging from her plane at Mildenhall wordlessly and in full make-up, with a printed press release drafted by her lawyer.

Two years later, Amy Johnson was back in the air to publicise a doomed business venture that she and a putative French backer (and lover) were calling Air Cruises. She climbed aboard a Percival Gull in a woollen suit and newsprint scarf designed for her by Elsa Schiaparelli, bound once again for Cape Town. She got there eventually, but only after botching a take-off in North Africa and restarting the whole flight a month later. Even then, far from being fêted at her refuelling stops in Italian-occupied East Africa, she ‘could not shake off the feeling that I was a trespasser, and a nuisance at that'. She had been turned down by the
News of the
World
, but a deal with the
Daily Express
let her pay off her overdraft and a debt to her father. It failed to rescue her marriage, though. She and Mollison were divorced in 1936, and the approach of war found her broke again and desperate for work. In June 1939, after a brief stint as editor of
The Lady Driver
, a decidedly earthbound new monthly, she accepted her first full-time flying job, shuttling day and night between Hampshire and the Isle of Wight for a local
airline known as the Solent air ferry.
The Daily Mirror
considered it a story. ‘Folks, you've got a chance of being flown by a world-famous air pilot for five bob a time,' it announced. It was honest work, but it ended abruptly with the outbreak of war and failed to serve as a springboard to the job she really wanted: the head of the ATA.

Johnson already knew and liked Pauline Gower. They had met at the London Aeroplane Club in 1931, when Gower was immersed there in the improvised sort of aero-engineering apprenticeship that Johnson had glamorised the year before.

Years later, she spent a weekend at the Gower family home near Tunbridge Wells, where Pauline and her friend Dorothy Spicer invited Amy to join their two-woman firm providing joyrides in the sky to crowds who would queue up at fairgrounds across the country for a taste of the fad that was changing the world. Johnson considered them ‘nice girls', but declined. Theirs was a raucous, retail sort of flying, taking off from new airfields for new crowds every day of the summer. Johnson considered it several steps beneath her. But as far as the aviation establishment was concerned, she was beneath them.

Francis Shelmerdine and Pop d'Erlanger favoured Gower for the ATA job on the grounds that she had never been an aviation record-seeker like Johnson, ‘with all the publicity which is attached to that role'. This may have been sensible: the idea of putting women in RAF aircraft in wartime was an invitation to scarlet-faced apoplexy in the RAF's own high command, especially if they were to be led by the curious, chippy creature who had pioneered the heretical unisexing of the cockpit. But d'Erlanger's verdict was also a simply coded confirmation that Gower was ‘One of Us'. Johnson, with her flat, Humberside vowels and undisguised need for recognition – not to mention money – clearly was not.

But Pauline Gower didn't forget about her. On the contrary, after she was appointed head of the ATA's women's section she
sent Johnson a formal letter inviting her to apply to join up. Johnson did, and was put on a waiting list. In May 1940 she agreed to take a flying test that Gower assured her would be a formality, but Johnson appears to have been simultaneously revealed as a clumsy lander (which she was) and repelled by the idea of mucking in with the other hopefuls. She described one of them in a letter home as ‘all dolled up in full Sidcot suit, fur-lined helmet and goggles, fluffing up her hair etc. – the typical Lyons waitress type … I suddenly realised I could not go in and sit in line with these girls (who all more or less look up to me as God!), so I turned tail and ran'.