The Spitfire Girls Read online

  THE SPITFIRE GIRLS

  Jenny Holmes

  Contents

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  About the Author

  Jenny Holmes has been writing fiction since her early twenties, having had series of children’s books adapted for both the BBC and ITV.

  Jenny was born and brought up in Yorkshire. After living in the Midlands and travelling widely in America, she returned to Yorkshire and brought up her two daughters with a spectacular view of the moors and a sense of belonging to the special, still undiscovered corners of the Yorkshire Dales.

  One of three children brought up in Harrogate, Jenny’s links with Yorkshire stretch back through many generations via a mother who served in the Land Army during the Second World War and pharmacist and shop-worker aunts, back to a maternal grandfather who worked as a village blacksmith and pub landlord. Her great-aunts worked in Edwardian times as seamstresses, milliners and upholsterers. All told stories of life lived with little material wealth but with great spirit and independence, where a sense of community and family loyalty were fierce – sometimes uncomfortable but never to be ignored. Theirs are the voices that echo down the years, and the author’s hope is that their strength is brought back to life in many of the characters represented in these pages.

  www.penguin.co.uk

  Also by Jenny Holmes

  The Mill Girls of Albion Lane

  The Shop Girls of Chapel Street

  The Midwives of Raglan Road

  The Telephone Girls

  The Land Girls at Christmas

  Wedding Bells For Land Girls

  A Christmas Wish for the Land Girls

  and published by Corgi

  For my daughters, Kate and Eve.

  And in memory of my Land Girl mother, Barbara,

  and my father, Jim, who served in the Royal Navy

  during the Second World War.

  CHAPTER ONE

  September 1943

  ‘Hold on to your hat!’ Lilian Watkins yelled at Mary Holland as the merry-go-round at Highcliff fair eased forward.

  Sitting side-saddle on her gaily painted horse, Mary jammed her forage cap more firmly over her forehead. She held tight to the pole with her left hand and grinned over her shoulder at her fellow ATA driver who had failed to take her own advice and now squealed with dismay as her hat was dislodged by a sudden rise into the air. The cap fell to the floor beneath Lilian’s prancing stallion’s hooves. Her carefully curled fair hair blew into her eyes as she leaned sideways to retrieve it.

  ‘Here, let me.’ A lad in Navy ratings uniform beat Lilian to it. Jumping from his horse, he nipped underneath her rising mount and rescued her hat then handed it to her with a wink and a mock salute.

  ‘Lilian Watkins, you did that on purpose!’ Mary challenged her friend above the hurdy-gurdy music and the low rumble of the engine that propelled them forward. ‘I know you did.’

  Lilian grinned. On they soared astride their lacquered, wild-eyed chargers, high in the air then dipping low, with the laughing sailor back on his horse and stretching out to offer Lilian a cigarette. Observers on the ground smiled and waved at the riders, eager for their own turns, while the stony-faced operator in her pay booth cast a disapproving eye over the sailor’s and Lilian’s shenanigans.

  ‘Is that it?’ the nimble Navy man cried as, all too soon, the ride slowed and came to an end. ‘That’s never worth threepence!’

  ‘Hear, hear!’ Lilian agreed. She let her skirt slide up to within an inch of her stocking tops as she slipped from her mount.

  The operator’s take-it-or-leave-it shrug told them there was no point arguing. Before they knew it, fresh riders had swarmed on to the platform to take their places and Mary, Lilian and her new acquaintance stood aimlessly on the muddy grass.

  ‘Tom Robbins,’ the sailor introduced himself. He seemed a cocksure chap, with shoulders back and chest out. ‘But it’s Spanner to my friends. I’m a mechanic on board one of His Majesty’s merchant ships,’ he explained. ‘I’ve got twelve hours’ shore leave and I’m ready and willing to make the most of every minute.’

  ‘Pleased to meet you, Spanner.’ Lilian leaned in for a light for her cigarette. ‘Mary and I belong to the ATA, in case you were wondering. But you can already tell by our uniform.’ She ran a hand lightly down her front, over her dark blue jacket, tightly belted at the waist, and her matching skirt. Then she ostentatiously straightened her black tie.

  ‘Like a Woodbine?’ Spanner asked Mary, who shook her head. It was obvious that three was a crowd. Lilian and her sailor boy had already linked arms and were sauntering past the dodgems towards the shooting gallery.

  ‘Anything to Anywhere; that’s what ATA stands for, isn’t it?’ Spanner quipped as they walked along.

  Lilian jabbed him with her elbow. ‘Air Transport Auxiliary, I’ll have you know.’

  ‘Is that right? You mean you two Atta girls do your bit for the war effort by hurtling through the air in Spitfires and the like?’ Spanner was clearly impressed as he anchored Lilian’s arm around his waist.

  ‘I should cocoa!’ Lilian exclaimed. ‘We leave that to the Lucinda Cholmondley-Smythes of this world, don’t we, Mary? We’re just drivers who taxi the pilots back to the ferry pool at Rixley. We let the toffee-nosed daredevils of this world do the flying, ta very much.’

  For a while Mary listened to their chatter then chose to lag behind. Soon the brash music and the stallholders’ cries drowned out Lilian and her brand-new beau’s teasing voices. This was the last Mary would see of her friend all evening, she forecast, as she watched their back views disappear under the red and white striped awning of the shooting gallery. She breathed in the sweet, earthy smell of trampled grass, heard the dull thump of dodgem cars colliding and watched sparks fly from the overhead mesh.

  ‘Got a light, love?’ a man asked as she walked on towards the Moonrocket ride. He was a fisherman type, dressed in cable-knit sweater and rubber boots, holding the stub of a cigarette between nicotine-stained fingers. His face was in shadow, eyes gleaming, and his tone implied that he expected more than a light if she stopped to oblige.

  So Mary shook her head and concentrated on the huge sign ahead: ‘Moonrocket – Thrill Ride of the Year’, with a metal dome rising high behind it. Under the brightly lit canopy there were a dozen or so rocket-shaped cars ready to whirl passengers around a central pillar to which they were attached by long steel arms.

  Why not give it a go? Mary thought. She handed over her coppers and chose an empty space rocket. As she waited for the ride to fill up, she began to think about the drive home from the Yorkshire fishing port of Highcliff to Rixley. Shall I wait for Lilian or leave her to find her own way? she wondered as the final door clicked shut and the Moonrocket shot into action. There was an excited yelp from a pair of lads in the car in front and Mary just had time to snatch her cap from her head before she was thrust backwards against the wooden backrest and the lights of the fairground became a blur.

  Her rocket rose and tilted
on its steel arm. Music thumped through a loudspeaker. The wind caught her hair. I’m flying! High in the air, with pale blobs of faces staring up at her – tilting inwards, speeding on. If only, if only!

  Still, Mary’s heart lifted with the thrill of it – the surge of exhilaration at being airborne that ended all too soon as the machine slowed and her space rocket dipped to the ground.

  Suddenly her mood changed. She was sick of the funfair – the gaudiness and shallowness, the whipping up of excitement, the false thrills. It had been a long day: driving two pilots to a ferry pool in the north-east where she had met up with fellow driver Lilian for the return journey. They’d taken in the travelling fair at Highcliff en route because it happened to be there and because they were two girls at a loose end on their Friday night off and why not ride the helter-skelter and pick up a couple of chaps while they were there? It had seemed a good idea at the time.

  ‘No need to wait for me!’ Lilian caught up with Mary beside the entrance to the Ghost Train. She still had her sailor boy in tow and a teddy bear prize tucked under her arm. ‘Spanner here rides a motorbike. He’s promised to give me a lift home.’

  Mary nodded and smiled.

  ‘Don’t worry, I’ll look after her.’ Spanner slipped an arm round Lilian’s waist. The Ghost Train doors flew open and three laden carriages rattled to a stop. Breathless passengers tumbled out.

  Mary understood that the rides provided moments of escape for fishermen’s wives whose homes had been flattened by Luftwaffe bombs, for sailors on leave like Spanner and for drivers like themselves who dutifully ferried pilots to aerodromes scattered along the east coast of England and across the Yorkshire Wolds and Moors. She accepted all that but for the moment she’d had her fill.

  ‘Have a grand time,’ she told Lilian with a faint smile.

  ‘We will,’ Lilian and Spanner chimed as they joined the queue for the Ghost Train.

  For Mary there was a dark, solitary drive ahead, followed by a night in the narrow bed in her Nissen hut billet, a new chit to pick up in the morning and no doubt another long, arduous day tomorrow. Meanwhile, the night-time journey to Rixley proved to be a ghost train of sorts, peopled with RAF airmen Mary knew who had never returned from sorties over the North Sea, and with school friends missing in Burma, North Africa and now Sicily where the Allies scrapped it out with Mussolini. Their faint, echoing voices accompanied her along narrow lanes with high hedges, past silent farmhouses and the church of St Wilfred in Rixley, overlooking the village green and row of cottages; past officers’ quarters at stately Burton Grange until at last Mary reached the row of long, low huts at the edge of the woods bordering the base that she now called home.

  There was the usual jumble of chairs and tables and a strong smell of bacon sizzling under the grill when Mary entered the canteen the next morning. A couple of girl pilots from the ferry pool had pushed aside the furniture to do their exercises while a third had dragged two tables together to lay out a paper pattern over the tweed fabric she’d chosen for her winter skirt. The ops-room typist pinned and snipped, all the while humming along to the music blaring from the loudspeaker. Various members of the ground crew sat around smoking thin roll-ups and wolfing down platefuls of bacon and eggs with lashings of HP sauce; among them was Stan Green, who gave Mary a wave as she crossed the room to line up at the counter.

  ‘Where’s your pal?’ he called to her.

  Lilian’s bunk bed hadn’t been slept in. Mary had noticed this without surprise as she’d headed for the wash house first thing that morning. ‘Last seen heading for the Ghost Train in Highcliff,’ she reported with a straight face.

  The spit and crackle of bacon drew her attention and when she’d been served and she turned around again, she almost bumped into pilots Angela Browne and Bobbie Fraser, fresh from their callisthenics in the corner of the room.

  ‘Oh, I say!’ A breathless Angela eyed Mary’s full plate: sausages were heaped on top of the bacon and there was fried bread to mop up the sauce from the baked beans. ‘If I ate all that lot I’d never squeeze into my uniform. How do you do it, Mary? How do you stay so slim?’

  ‘I expect it runs in the family,’ Bobbie surmised. ‘Mary comes from a line of women without an ounce of spare fat between them. Am I right?’

  ‘Something like that,’ Mary mumbled as she headed for Stan’s table. ‘Give me strength,’ she muttered crossly as she sat down.

  ‘What’s up?’ Stan asked when he saw the frown and pursed lips. ‘Has First Officer Browne been getting up your nose again?’

  ‘No more than usual.’

  ‘Take no notice.’ Stan was an RAF mechanic seconded to the ferry pool. A broad-featured, good-humoured chap, his boyhood love of Meccano models had led to a job in a motorcycle workshop – ‘Royal Enfield Bullets are my speciality’. From there, at the age of twenty-one, he’d joined the Royal Air Force and trained to service fighter aircraft – ‘Spitfires mainly; there’s nothing to beat the sound of that Merlin engine at full throttle’. He and Mary had arrived at Rixley together at the start of the second week in May and had immediately hit it off, though she was the shy, thin-skinned type while nothing ever got Stan down. ‘What did Lilian get up to exactly?’

  Mary shrugged. ‘Don’t ask me. But I expect she’ll be here soon.’

  ‘Say no more.’ Stan winked. ‘Talk of the devil,’ he added as a bedraggled Lilian put in a bleary-eyed appearance, jacket unbuttoned and black tie askew.

  She was immediately spotted and seized upon by Flight Lieutenant Cameron Ainslie. Rixley’s strict second in command took Lilian by the arm and hustled her out of the door, heading across the small square of mowed lawn and out of sight into the office at the foot of the control tower.

  Mary’s stomach tightened and her frown deepened.

  ‘What’s this? Lilian’s second warning?’ Stan asked as he pushed aside his empty plate.

  ‘Third,’ Mary said.

  Stan sucked his teeth. ‘Tut-tut. This is Flight Lieutenant Cameron Ainslie we’re talking about; you don’t want to get on the wrong side of him.’

  ‘On the other hand, he won’t want to lose one of his drivers if he can help it.’ Mary pointed out the obvious. Air Transport Auxiliary personnel didn’t grow on trees, despite a recent War Office push to recruit new ground staff and pilots under the proud Latin motto Aetheris Avidi, which few took the trouble to learn the meaning of. However, last year’s advertisement featuring the latest Spit Mark IX had succeeded in pulling in more wounded ex-pilots from the Great War and the usual smattering of socialite women eager to follow in the footsteps of Amy Johnson and Pauline Gower. But there was still more work to be done before supply met an ever increasing demand, a fact that Ainslie would be all too well aware of as he disciplined Lilian.

  Mary glanced anxiously out of the window in time to see her friend emerge from the flight lieutenant’s office. Clattering her knife and fork on to her plate and asking Stan to keep an eye on her food, she rushed to the door.

  ‘Don’t ask,’ Lilian said before Mary could speak, making a slashing gesture across her throat. ‘That’s me; I’ve had my marching orders.’

  ‘Really and truly?’ Mary spotted Ainslie in his office, standing with his back to the window and speaking into the telephone. She followed Lilian along the narrow asphalt path towards their bunkroom, shaded by the boughs of ancient oak trees at the edge of Burton Wood.

  ‘As of right this moment,’ Lilian confirmed. Her chin was up and her heavily made-up face had taken on a defiant expression. ‘For bringing the organization into disrepute, whatever that means. See if I care. They can put their Hurricanes and their Lancasters and their yes-sir-no-sirs in their pipes and smoke them!’ Like Mary, Lilian had harboured dreams of learning to fly when she’d jointed the ATA, only to find that lack of previous flying experience would keep her confined to duties on the ground. ‘Typist or canteen worker; that’s what to aim for,’ the prune-faced recruitment officer had informed her. Lilian had proved
her wrong by training as a driver but that wasn’t exactly flying, was it?

  ‘I’m sorry you’re leaving.’ Mary watched her friend take shirts and skirts from her locker and fling them into a battered brown suitcase. ‘So what now?’

  ‘Who cares?’ Lilian couldn’t wait to be gone. ‘Don’t worry about me, Mary. I’ll land on my feet.’

  ‘I don’t doubt it.’

  ‘I will. There’s a big world out there, don’t you know.’ She snapped her suitcase shut then glanced at her reflection in the mottled mirror on the inside of her locker door. Her fair curls had drooped and her lipstick was smudged. ‘Shall I tell you what Spanner said to me last night? He said I should try for a job as a fashion model; I was better-looking than a lot you see on the covers of magazines.’ That had been before the couple’s heated fumblings in a bus shelter overlooking Highcliff harbour and the rest that had gone on in the grounds of the ruined church perched on the clifftop half a mile outside town. And before Spanner had looked at his watch and beaten a hasty retreat, pleading curfew and leaving Lilian to hitch a lift back to Rixley in the grey dawn light. No motorbike ride home after all; no address, nothing.

  ‘Write to me, let me know how you get on,’ Mary urged.

  ‘I will,’ Lilian promised.

  She won’t. Mary sighed as she headed back to the canteen to finish her breakfast. Girls like Lilian never did.

  ‘It’s my birthday next month.’ In the noisy melee of the canteen Bobbie watched Angela polish off her second cup of tea of the morning. ‘October the fifth, to be exact.’

  Angela swallowed before she spoke. ‘May one ask?’

  ‘How old? Yes, one may. I’ll be twenty-two and I’ve got my heart set on being promoted to first officer before then, if I can clock up the five hundred hours in time. Then I’ll be able to fly Wellingtons and Whitleys as well as Spits.’

  Angela smiled at the idea of Bobbie, all five foot three of her, taking charge of the big, twin-engine bombers. With her wavy, sandy-coloured hair, pale skin and eager smile, she had the gleeful look of a schoolgirl on a day’s outing to the seaside. ‘If you don’t clock up the five hundred, I’m sure your mama can have a word in the sainted Pauline’s shell-like ear.’ Although they’d known each other for less than a year, Angela was aware that Bobbie’s family was well connected; so much so that in the years leading up to the war, their big estate in the Scottish Highlands had often hosted shooting parties from south of the border, comprising politicians, titled lords and close friends of the ATA commander herself.