Annie Groves - When the Lights Go On Again

Every new recruit was told hideously graphic tales of pilots who had ignored this rule and ended up losing their planes and their lives.

Here at Thame, though, which was close to ATA’s Ferry Pool Number 5 at Luton, Lou had also heard tales of certain daredevil ATA female pilots who not only ignored the rules to fly above the cloud but who also performed acrobatic manoeuvres with the fighter planes they were delivering, something that was strictly forbidden and for which they were not trained.

Lou couldn’t imagine herself ever being skilled enough to do that, even though she had made such good progress in Grade 1 that she had been sent back to Thame to undergo her conversion course to Grade 2 in record time.

‘We’ve both got an off-duty weekend coming up – why don’t the two of us spend it in London?’ June suggested.

‘I’d love to,’ Lou told her truthfully, hitching her parachute higher onto her shoulder, ‘but I can’t. I haven’t been home in an age. My twin has been engaged for over two months and I haven’t congratulated her properly yet.’

Good pals though they had become, Lou didn’t feel she could confide in June how guilty she felt that she and Sasha had drifted so far apart that sometimes, reading Sasha’s short, stilted letters to her, Lou felt as though they had become strangers, and that they had nothing in common any more.

‘Oh, well, never mind,’ June accepted philosophically. ‘But promise that you’ll come with me the next time we get a weekend pass.’

‘Of course I will,’ Lou agreed, wincing as the Tannoy broke into life, announcing that the two pilots whose names had been broadcast were required to present themselves at the admin block for ferry duties.

Lou couldn’t wait until she was properly qualified. What a thrill it would be to hear her own name being broadcast. Inside her head Lou replayed the message delivered in the stentorian accents of the base’s admin controller, but substituting her own name for those of the girls called.

Their admin controller was, like the original instructors for ATA, a BOAC employee. Now, though, the Government, in the belief that the Allies would win the war, had allowed BOAC to recall all its own instructors to start preparing post-war training for the corporation. The job of training ATA pilots had been handed over to instructors who had themselves been ATA pilots, many of them women who had the advantage of knowing exactly what the work of an ATA pilot entailed.

Lou’s instructor this morning, Margery Smythe, who had sent her out on her first solo Grade 2 flight, was a firm disciplinarian but very fair and encouraging.

She had been so lucky to have been upgraded on to a Grade 2 course so speedily after having first qualified, Lou reflected as she tucked into her salad lunch in the canteen. She’d be flying again this afternoon and she didn’t want a heavy meal lying on the butterflies she knew would invade her tummy. June had qualified two months ahead of her and insisted that Lou had to be ‘super good’ to have been pushed up a grade so quickly.

Lou suspected, more modestly, that it was more a case of her being in the right place at the right time. Not that she hadn’t been thrilled and excited. She had, the words almost falling over themselves as she wrote them when she sent Sasha a letter telling her about her potential up-grade to fly advanced single-engined planes, but in her response her twin hadn’t even mentioned Lou’s triumph. What made Lou feel even more guilty now was that secretly she would much rather have spent her precious leave weekend in London with June than in Liverpool with her twin sister.

‘I just hope that when we finish this conversion course we’re both posted together, that neither of us gets posted to Ratcliffe,’ June announced, breaking into Lou’s thoughts.

Lou finished chewing a rubbery piece of Spam, and demanded, ‘Why, what’s wrong with Ratcliffe?’

June raised her eyebrows and shook her head so vigorously that the bun into which her auburn hair was knotted threatened to unravel.

‘Haven’t you heard about those Americans who joined ATA who are based there?’

‘No, what about them?’ Lou demanded.

‘They’ve put it about that they can outfly and outplay any other ATA female pilot, and they’ve got the reputation to prove that they mean it. There was a pilot at my last ferry pool who swore blind that she’d seen two of them deliberately racing one another to see who could put down first. They don’t like us and they’re quite happy to show it, or so I’ve heard.’

‘There were a couple of American pilots at my last posting and they were nothing like that.’ Lou felt obliged to defend the two senior and very dedicated American women she’d seen flying in and out of Barton-in-the-Clay.

‘Well, I’m only telling you what I’ve heard, and I certainly wouldn’t want to be posted to Ratcliffe. I like a good time but when it comes to some of the things I’ve heard that they get up to, I’m afraid I draw the line.’

‘What kind of things?’ Lou pressed her.

‘Like I just said – wild parties. Very wild parties. The kind where you end up in some man’s bed,’ June emphasised darkly. ‘I mean, I’m no prude, but. ’

If what June had said was true then she had to agree with her, Lou reflected as they cleared what was left on their plates into the slop bin and then placed them on the trolley for washing.

‘I’ve got my first solo this afternoon.’ June rolled her eyes. ‘I’m dreading it. What about you – what are you doing?’

‘Margery is going to go through the details of my three cross-country solo flights with me, ready for the first one tomorrow. She’s not told me yet which plane I’ll be flying, though.’

‘See you tonight then.’

Lou nodded.

Although most of the ferry pools didn’t have accommodation blocks, and ATA pilots were normally billeted with local people or clubbed together to rent somewhere between them if they could, at Thame Sir William Currie had put one wing of his Tudor mansion at the disposal of ATA to provide a ‘live-in mess’.

After living in basic WAAF accommodation at an RAF base before transferring to ATA, Lou had been round-eyed with disbelief when she had first been shown her new quarters – a wood-panelled room with its mullioned windows overlooking the knot garden.

She even had a four-poster bed, with the same heavy ruby-red velvet curtains as were hanging at the windows. Her room had its own fireplace, and a large polished wardrobe and a chest of drawers, both of which smelled of lavender.

On the wall next to Lou’s bed hung a sampler, requesting ‘Bless this House’, stitched, so she had been told by the housekeeper, by Sir William’s great-aunt as a young girl.

‘Their’ wing of the large house was accessed via the main hall with its magnificent polished wood staircase, the banister carved with symbols from Sir William’s family crest. Since ATA did not have an officer structure – pilot seniority being denoted by length of service and ability to fly a variety of planes – there was no official ‘mess’. Instead the girls ate their meals in the base’s canteen or occasionally by invitation in the house’s elegant dining room, furnished with an antique Hepplewhite dining-room table and chairs, eating off delicate china and using silver cutlery, with Sir William as their genial host. One of the drawbacks, though, as far as Lou was concerned, were the bathrooms, with their huge baths, which they were allowed to fill with only two inches of hot water.

‘Yes, see you tonight,’ Lou confirmed as she set off in the direction of the hangars.

‘Yes, Charlie, of course I understand why Daphne won’t be coming with you, with her own mother not being very well, but I must warn you that Mummy is bound to be disappointed. You know how much she thinks of Daphne.’ Bella Polanski pushed the thick waves of her golden-blonde hair back from her face as she spoke patiently but firmly into the telephone receiver. Her blue eyes were shadowed with disappointment as she assured her younger brother that she had got the message that his visit to Wallasey would be a solo affair.