Page 64 of The Spitfire Girls
Lizzie had been dreading this question, knowing it would come up eventually. On her other visits he hadn’t been well enough to sit and chat, but now he seemed more like his old self. ‘Well, I wasn’t the first, Daddy. Another highly capable pilot beat me to it, but it was a fair race.’
‘Good to hear. Did you get the next flight?’
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘It was a great learning experience, actually.’
‘Well, good. Nothing worse than a cocky pilot, Liz.’ He patted her hand. ‘You seem more grown-up, more level-headed. Don’t get me wrong, I loved you just fine the way you were, but England did you good. I’m so proud of you.’
Lizzie blinked away tears and leaned into him. All she’d ever wanted was for him to be proud of her, and hearing him say it was the best thing in the world.
She sat with him all afternoon, talking, but when her mother called them for dinner, she realised she hadn’t asked him something she’d been holding on to for some time.
‘Daddy, I met a pilot in London. He told me that his father was on your squadron.’
‘His name?’
‘Montgomery,’ she said.
‘Ah, yes. What a coincidence.’ She watched as he reached for his pipe again and this time she didn’t stop him. ‘He was always to my right. I couldn’t have flown without him.’
She swallowed hard. ‘I always imagined you flying solo, and taking down the enemy all on your own.’
He laughed and then coughed, spluttering on his first inhale. ‘Darling, there’s no such thing as a solo assault. We always flew in formation, and we had each other’s backs.’
She nodded. ‘I know that now.’ The fact that Jackson had known more about her father’s flying escapades than she did cut deep, but she could see how wrong she’d been.
‘I wasn’t a hero, Lizzie. I might have been the one to receive the medal and make my targets, but I was never doing it for myself. All of us,’ her father coughed again and cleared his throat, ‘we all did what we had to do for our country.’
Lizzie curled up beside him, inhaling the aroma from his smoking pipe and placing her head on his shoulder. She might only have forty-eight hours leave, but it had been worth every second to come home and see her daddy.
‘Was that Montgomery a pain in the backside?’ she asked.
Her father chuckled. ‘Not at all. Why?’
‘Because this one is,’ she muttered, trying not to grin.
Her daddy started to laugh. ‘I have a funny feelingyou’reusually the pain in everyone’s backside, Liz.’
She glared at him, but couldn’t keep a straight face. Her daddy was probably right.
CHAPTER TWENTY
HAMBLEAIRFIELD,HAMPSHIRE,
OCTOBER1942
MAY
May crossed the tarmac and looked for Ben, wanting to see how much longer he’d need to finish checking the two Spitfires she was waiting to send up. Ever since they’d heard about Tom going missing, she’d avoided him, no longer sitting in her spot for tea. Thinking about what Ruby was going through had brought every vivid memory back to her, making her relive how Johnny had died all over again. Only the night before she’d been up, pacing, wondering for the millionth time if she’d somehow caused him to crash, and then panicking that one of her girls might be next. But now, with all the girls off flying and hardly anyone on base, it was time to seek Ben out again.
‘Benjamin?’ she called, walking into the hangar. ‘Ben, are you here?’
She heard the familiar sound of a tool falling to the concrete and waited for him to appear.
‘Hi stranger,’ he called out from somewhere beneath a plane.
When Ben finally emerged, rubbing his hands on a cloth, her heart skipped a beat. This was why she’d avoided him. Because the warmth she felt whenever she saw him, it scared her. Feelings like that were too easy to lose, to disappear in one stroke of fate.
‘I’ve missed you,’ she said, the words flying from her mouth before she could stop them.
