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).
Maddie was stationed at Oakway to begin with, very convenient to home. This was late 1939, early 1940. The Phoney War. Nothing much happening.
Not in Britain anyway. We were biting our nails, practising.
Waiting.
Telephonist
‘You! Girl in the blue cardigan!’
Five girls in headsets looked round from their switchboards, pointed to their chests and mouthed silently, Me?
‘Yes, you! Aircraftwoman Brodatt! What are you doing here? You’re a licensed radio operator!’
Maddie pointed to her headset and the front cord she was about to connect.
‘Take the damned thing off and answer me.’
Maddie turned back to her switchboard and coolly plugged in the front cord. She toggled the appropriate keys and spoke clearly into the headset. ‘The Group Captain is through to you now, sir. You may go ahead.’ She took off the headset and turned back to the troll who was waiting for a reply. It was the chief flight instructor for Oakway’s Royal Air Force squadron, the man who had given Maddie her flight test nearly a year ago.
‘Sorry, sir. This is where I’ve been posted, sir.’ (I did say it was like being at school.)
‘Posted! You’re not even any of you in uniform!’
Five dutiful Aircraftwomen First Class straightened their Air Force blue cardigans.
‘We’ve not been issued full dress, sir.’
‘Posted!’ the officer repeated. ‘You’ll start in the radio room tomorrow, Aircraftwoman Brodatt. The operator’s assistant is down with influenza.’ And he lifted the headset from her console to perch it precariously over his own large head. ‘Put me through to the WAAF administration unit,’ he said. ‘I want to talk to your Section Officer.’
Maddie flipped the keys and plugged in the cords and he gave her posting orders over her own telephone.
Radio Operator
‘Tyro to ground, tyro to ground,’ came the call from the training aircraft. ‘Position uncertain, overhead triangular body of water to east of corridor.’
‘Ground to tyro,’ answered Maddie. ‘Is it a lake or a reservoir?’
‘Say again?’
‘Lake or reservoir? Your triangular body of water.’
After a short silence, Maddie prompted: ‘A reservoir has got a dam at one end.’
‘Tyro to ground. Affirm reservoir.’
‘Is it Ladyswell? Manchester barrage balloons at ten o’clock and Macclesfield at eight o’clock?’
‘Tyro to ground, affirm. Position located. Overhead Ladyswell for return to Oakway.’
Maddie sighed. ‘Ground to tyro, call on final approach.’
‘Wilco.’
Maddie shook her head, swearing unprettily under her breath. ‘Oh my sainted aunt! Unlimited visibility! Unlimited visibility except for the dirty great city in the north-west! That would be the dirty great city surrounded at 3000 feet by a few hundred silver hydrogen balloons as big as buses! How in the name of mud is he going to find Berlin if he can’t find Manchester?’
There was a bit of quiet
