Look at the timing though. Maddie started flying in late October 1938 … Hitler (you will notice that I have thought better of my colourful descriptive terms for the Führer and carefully scratched them all out) invaded Poland on 1 September 1939 and Britain declared war on Germany two days later. Maddie flew the practical test for her ‘A’ licence, the basic pilot’s licence, six months before all civil aircraft were grounded in August. After that, most of those planes were taken into government service. Both Dympna’s planes were requisitioned by the Air Ministry for communications and she was mad as a cat about it.
Days before Britain declared war on Germany, Maddie flew by herself to the other side of England, skimming the tops of the Pennines and avoiding the barrage balloons like silver ramparts protecting the sky around Newcastle. She followed the coast north to Bamburgh and Holy Island. I know that stretch of the North Sea very well because the train from Edinburgh to London goes that way, and I was up and down all year when I was at school. Then when my school closed just before the war, instead of finishing elsewhere I went to university a bit suddenly for a term and took the train to get there too, feeling very grown-up.
The Northumbrian coast is the most beautiful length of the whole trip. The sun still sets quite late in the north of England in August, and Maddie on fabric wings flew low over the long sands of Holy Island and saw seals gathered there. She flew over the great castle crags of Lindisfarne and Bamburgh to the north and south, and over the ruins of the twelfth-century priory, and over all the fields stretching yellow and green towards the low Cheviot Hills of Scotland. Maddie flew back following the 70-mile, 2000-year-old dragon’s back of Hadrian’s Wall, to Carlisle and then south through the Lakeland fells, along Lake Windermere. The soaring mountains rose around her and the poets’ waters glittered beneath her in the valleys of memory – hosts of golden daffodils, Swallows and Amazons, Peter Rabbit. She came home by way of Blackstone Edge above the old Roman road to avoid the smoke haze over Manchester, and landed back at Oakway sobbing with anguish and love; love, for her island home that she’d seen whole and fragile from the air in the space of an afternoon, from coast to coast, holding its breath in a glass lens of summer and sunlight. All about to be swallowed in nights of flame and blackout. Maddie landed at Oakway before sunset and shut down the engine, then sat in the cockpit weeping.
More than anything else, I think, Maddie went to war on behalf of the Holy Island seals.
She climbed out of Dympna’s Puss Moth at last. The late, low sun lit up the other aeroplanes in the hangar Dympna used, expensive toys about to realise their finest hour. (In less than a year that very same Puss Moth, flown by someone else, would ferry blood deliveries to the gasping British Expeditionary Force in France.) Maddie ran all the checks she’d normally run after a flight, and then started again with the ones she’d run before a flight. Dympna found her there half an hour later, still not having put the plane to bed, cleaning midges off the windscreen in the late golden light.
‘You don’t need to do that.’
‘Someone does. I won’t be flying it again, will I? Not after tomorrow. It’s the only thing I can do, check the oil, clean the bugs.’
Dympna stood smoking calmly in the evening sunlight and watched Maddie for a while. Then she said, ‘There’s going to be air work for girls in this war. You wait. They’re going to need all the pilots they can get fighting for the Royal Air Force. That’ll be young men, some of them with less training than you’ve got now, Maddie. And that’ll leave the old men, and the women, to deliver new aircraft and carry their messages and taxi their pilots. That’ll be us.’
‘You think?’
‘There’s a unit forming for civil pilots to help with the War Effort. The ATA, Air Transport Auxiliary – men and women both. It’ll happen any day. My name’s in the pool; Pauline Gower’s heading the women’s section.’ Pauline was a flying friend of Dympna’s; Pauline had encouraged Dympna’s joyriding business. ‘You’ve not the qualifications for it, but I won’t forget you, Maddie. When they open up training to girls again, I’ll send you a telegram. You’ll be the first.’
Maddie scrubbed at midges and scrubbed at her eyes too, too miserable to answer.
‘And when you’re done slaving, I’m going to make you a mug of best Oakway Pilot’s Oily Tea, and tomorrow morning I’m going to march you into the nearest WAAF recruitment office.’
WAAF is Women’s Auxiliary Air Force, auxiliary to the RAF, the Royal Air Force. You don’t fly in the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force, but the way things are now you can do almost any job a man does, all the work associated with flying and fighting: electrician, technician, fitter, barrage balloon operator, driver, cook, hairdresser … You would have thought our Maddie would go for a job in mechanics, wouldn’t you? So early in the war, they hadn’t yet opened up those jobs to women. It didn’t matter that Maddie already had a deal more experience than a lot of boys; there wasn’t a place for her. But she’d already learned Morse code and a bit about radio transmission as part of her training for her pilot’s ‘A’ licence. The Air Ministry was in a panic in August 1939, scrambling for women to do radio work as it dawned on them how many men they’d need to do the flying. Maddie joined the WAAF and eventually became a radio operator.
Some WAAF Trades
It was like being at school. I don’t know if Maddie thought so too; she didn’t go to a Swiss boarding school, she was at a grammar school in Manchester and she certainly never thought about going to university. Even when she was at school, she came home every day and never had to share a room with twenty girls, or sleep on a straw mattress made up of three bricks like a set of settee cushions. We called them biscuits. You were always so tired you didn’t care; I would cut off my left hand to have one here. That fussy kit inspection they made you do, where you had to lay out all your worldly belongings in random but particular order on the folded blanket, like a jigsaw, and if anything was a millimetre the wrong way you got points off your score – that was just like being in school. Also all the slang, the ‘square-bashing’ drilling exercises, and the boring meals and the uniforms, though Maddie’s group didn’t get issued proper uniforms at first. They all wore matching blue cardigans, like Girl Guides (Guides don’t wear Air Force blue cardigans, but you see what I mean).