Page 2 of The Spitfire Girls
May
May Jones clenched her jaw tight, hand trembling with anger as she held the well-thumbed copy ofAeroplane. Once, she’d loved reading the aviation magazine, but she vowed then and there never to so much as touch another issue of it.
She cleared her throat and glanced up at the seven other women watching her before starting to read out loud from the page in front of her. They’d been waiting at the factory for almost an hour, and she’d been wondering why the usually chatty group of girls had been so quiet. Now that she’d read what her second officers had been whispering about, she understood why no one had wanted to show her. She took a deep breath and shook her dark hair back, still unused to the short crop.
‘We quite agree that there are millions of women in the country who coulddouseful jobs in war. But the trouble is that so many of them insist on wanting to do jobs which they are quite incapable of doing.’
May paused, anger pulsing at her neck and setting her skin on fire as she read the words.
‘The menace is the woman who thinks that she ought to be flying in a high-speed bomber when she really has not the intelligence to scrub the floor of a hospital properly, or who wants to nose around as an Air Raid Warden and yet can’t cook her husband’s dinner.’
When she set the magazine down, silence fell, and May slowly considered every woman in the room with her. The concrete floor wasn’t helping the frigid conditions, and they all had their hands tucked into the armpits of their sheepskin jackets to stay warm, but she was burning with an anger so red hot she was no longer feeling the cold. They would never dare to say such things about men – but women? They treated them as second-class citizens no matter what they were doing, unless they were cooking dinner or holding some sort of cleaning apparatus, and she was sick and tired of it. They were all fighting for the same cause!
‘Ladies, this is the biggest load of nonsense I’ve ever read,’ she said, sighing and shutting her eyes for a beat as she tried to calm the fury pumping through her veins. ‘This editor, this’ – she took a deep breath – ‘thisexcuse of a man! To think he can write about us in this way is absolutely appalling. I don’t want to see anyone reading or talking about this ridiculous article ever again.’
Betty, one of her most experienced fliers, started to clap, and one by one every other woman followed suit until all of them were clapping and grinning back at her, their cold hands clearly forgotten. May held her head high as a mechanic walked in, a puzzled expression on his face as he looked at them, no doubt wondering what in God’s name they were doing. She met his gaze and nodded, feeling sorry for the poor lad that he’d walked straight into a room full of furious women.
‘He’s right though. I can’t scrub floors to save myself!’ Betty called out.
‘Scrubbing floors,’ May scoffed, shaking her head as she scanned the page again. ‘I’m not sure what he thinks we were doing before this, but I can tell you that women with more than five hundred hours’ flying experience have better things to do than scrub bloody floors!’
They were fully fledged members of the Air Transport Auxiliary, a civilian organisation established to ferry new, repaired and damaged military aircrafts for the Royal Air Force, not silly girls pretending to be pilots! And today, on their first official flight, they were going to prove how much they were needed in this war.
Another of her girls, Penelope, cleared her throat, and May turned to her. She’d always been the quietest of the bunch, so it was good to see her joining in.
‘My mother wrote to me the other day and said she chased a neighbour away with her broom when he questioned her about my pay,’ Penelope said. ‘Apparently it’s a national disaster thatglorified female show-offsare being paid six pounds a week. But she told him where to stick it and not to come back!’
They all laughed, and as May watched them, the heat that had spiralled up her neck and burst into her cheeks turned to warmth. She hadn’t laughed in a long while, but it felt nice to be part of the camaraderie for once. It was lovely that Penelope’s mother had been so forthright in defending them, and she knew her own parents would do the same. They were proud of her and wouldn’t hear a bad word about their pilot daughter.Even if it had been months since she’d been home to see them.She pushed the guilt away.
‘Excuse me, but do you have a match you could spare?’ May asked, gesturing to the handsome mechanic in overalls, who was still hovering near the door.
He walked over, dark eyes searching out hers, his broad, straight shoulders and easy stance telling her that he wasn’t in the least intimidated by what he’d heard. She watched as he reached into his pocket, and when he politely extended the matches and some cigarettes, she thanked him and took only one match, swiftly lighting it and placing it to the open page of the magazine.
‘You can’t light a fire in here!’ he blurted, flapping his hands at the paper she still held as a low flame licked across it. ‘What the heck do you think you’re doing?’
‘I don’t want any of you reading this kind of rubbish again,’ May insisted loudly, ignoring the poor mechanic. She dropped the paper to the concrete floor and he stomped on it to put the fire out. ‘We have every right to be flying, and one day our fellow countrymen will look back proudly on what we did for the war effort.’
‘Hear, hear!’ cried Betty, stamping her feet.
‘We are doing our duty and enabling men to go to the front and fight, and I will not hear a bad word said about any of you brave ladies. Do I make myself clear?’
‘Perfectly clear, ma’am!’ Sarah called back, saluting and giving her a big grin.
May received murmurs of ‘Yes’ and nods from the seven women gathered, and in that moment, as she saw how proudly they wore their flying suits while they waited to be assigned their planes, she could hardly believe what they were about to do. Their flying outfits might not be fashionable like their smart dark-blue uniforms, with their gold threaded wings and ATA insignia on their jackets, but they were practical, and they’d been made just for them. And she’d never been so proud to wear anything in all her life. To hell with their superiors, who’d thought they could wear skirts in the air in almost polar conditions – a pilot was a pilot, and they all needed the same protective clothing in the sky. She wasn’t going to stand for men making decisions about her women, not if they were going to be taking to the sky to help defend their beautiful country.
They were the First Eight, and they were about to show the rest of England exactly what they were made of.
‘It’s time for wheels up, ladies,’ she said, signalling for the women to follow her and shrugging at the mechanic’s still-furious expression. ‘Any questions?’
She received none, and she hadn’t really expected any. She’d hand-picked the women herself, and with impeccable logbooks and thousands of hours of flight experience between them, their ability to do their job wasn’t something she worried about. The weather conditions?Yes. She was constantly concerned about the cloud cover that England was so well known for. The chance of being fired upon when they had no bombs or guns to defend themselves with?Absolutely. And the fact they were flying without radios and instruments?Every second of every day. But not once had she doubted their ability to fly whatever plane they were asked to transport; and the slow, sturdy Tiger Moths weren’t difficult by any means. It wasn’t glamorous work, and no one else wanted to fly the sluggish aircraft in the middle of winter, but she was going to prove that her little squadron could fly every darn plane the military had. If they had to prove themselves in Tiger Moths first, then so be it.
‘What’s your name?’ she asked the mechanic, turning her attention back to him.
‘Benjamin,’ he replied. ‘I’m actually your flight mechanic, ma’am.’
She froze. ‘You’remymechanic?’
‘That’s me,’ he said, his dark gaze never straying from hers. She couldn’t decide if she liked how forthright he was or whether it irked her. ‘I’ve completed a thorough visual check of your engine; it’s been uncovered and completely examined for leaks. She’s warmed up and ready to fly.’
