Rose Under Fire Read online

  ‘It was back in June,’ Maddie said. ‘The week after the flying bombs started. I was delivering a Spitfire and I saw it coming towards me, only a couple of hundred feet below. I thought it was another plane. It looked like another plane. But when I waggled my wings it just stayed on course, and then it passed below me – terribly close – and I realised it was a doodlebug. They aren’t very big. Horrible things, eyeless, just a bomb with wings.’

  Pilotless, I thought. Ugh. ‘Weren’t you scared?’

  ‘Not really – you know how you don’t worry about a near miss until later, when you think about it afterwards? It was before I’d heard about anybody tipping a doodlebug, and anyway I hadn’t a hope of catching it. By the time I’d realised what it was, it was just a speck in the distance, still heading for London. I didn’t see it fall.’

  I haven’t seen one fall, either, but I’ve heard them. You can hear them THIRTY MILES away, rattling along. Southampton doesn’t get fired on as relentlessly as London and Kent, but we get the miserable things often enough that the noise terrifies me. Like being in the next field over to a big John Deere corn picker, clackety clackety clackety. Then the timer counts down, the engine stops, and for a few seconds you don’t hear anything as the bomb falls. And then you hear the explosion.

  I hate to admit this, but I am so scared of the flying bombs that if I’d known about them ahead of time I would not have come. Even after Uncle Roger’s behind-the-scenes scrambling to get the paperwork done for me.

  I’ve read the mechanic’s letter now myself. He thinks Celia damaged her wing in a separate incident – separate from the crash, ‘possibly the result of a deliberate brush with another aircraft’. He didn’t actually mention flying bombs. But you could tell the idea was in his head.

  Now I am upset all over again, remembering the crash. It took me by surprise, watching – I knew something was wrong, of course, but I never expected her to lose control like that, so close to the ground. It happened so suddenly. I’d been waiting for her so we could come back to Hamble together.

  I want to talk to Nick about it. He left a message for me – sweet of him, worrying about me having to go to Celia’s funeral. It’s after nine now, but it’s still light out. They have two hours of Daylight Saving in the summer here – they call it Double Summer Time. So I’ll walk down to the phone box in the village and hope Nick’s not away on some mission. And that I don’t get told off by his landlady for calling so late.

  Horrible war. So much more horrible here than back in the States. Every few weeks someone’s mother or brother or another friend is killed. And already I am fed up with the shortages, never any butter and never enough sleep. The combination of working so hard, and the constant fear, and just the general blahness of everything – I wasn’t prepared for it. But how could I possibly, possibly have been prepared for it? They’ve been living with it for five years. All the time I’ve been swimming at the lake, playing varsity girls’ basketball and building a tree house for Karl and Kurt like a good big sister, crop dusting with Daddy and helping Mother make applesauce, Maddie’s been delivering fighter planes. When her best friend was killed by a bomb or whatever it was eight months ago, I was probably sitting in Mr Wagner’s creative writing class working out rhyme schemes.

  It’s so strange to be here at last, and so different from what I expected.

  I have put my accident report into verse after all. (I think I am trying to trick myself into writing this darn accident report.) I wish I’d written this poem earlier. It would have been nice to read at Celia’s service. I will send a copy to her parents.

  For Celia Forester

  (by Rose Justice)

  The storm will swallow

  the brave girl there

  who fights destruction

  with wings and air –

  life and chaos

  hover in flight

  wing tip to wing tip

  until the slight

  triumphant moment

  when their wings caress

  and her crippled Tempest

  flies pilotless.

  Now that I am an ATA pilot at last, I wish I were a fighter pilot.

  August 5, 1944

  Hamble, Southampton

  And that was the first thing I said to Nick when I got him on the phone. I did get him at last. He wasn’t at home so I rang the airfield, and they said he was on his way, but hadn’t got there yet, AND he was ‘busy’ tonight so he might not be able to call back. I was so desperate I waited in the phone box for three-quarters of an hour till he got in, and we talked for exactly as long as my cigarette tin of pennies held out. In three weeks he will be off to France and I will not.

  ‘Hello, Rose darling.’

  ‘I want to fly Tempests,’ I said through clenched teeth. ‘I want to be operational. I want to be in the Royal Air Force, 56 Squadron 150 Wing, blasting flying bombs to smithereens.’

  There was a good penny’s worth of silence down the wire before Nick answered. Maybe that’s where the saying comes from, penny for your thoughts. Speak up or the operator will cut you off.

  Finally Nick said sympathetically, ‘What’s made you so bloodthirsty?’

  ‘I’m not bloodthirsty. There’s no blood in a pilotless plane, is there! I’m a good pilot, I’ve probably been flying five years longer than half the boys in 150 Wing. I flew with Daddy from coast to coast across America when I was fifteen, and I did all the navigation. You’ve never flown a Tempest, or a Mustang, or a Mark 14 Spitfire – I’ve flown them all, dozens of times. They’re wasting me, just because I’m a girl! They won’t even let us fly to France – they’re prepping men for supply and taxi to the front lines, guys with hundreds’ fewer hours than me, but they’re just passing over the women pilots. It isn’t fair.’

  I stopped to breathe. Nick said evenly, ‘And there’s me worrying you’d be upset by your friend’s funeral. Instead you’re after shooting down doodlebugs. What’s going on, Rose?’

  ‘How do you topple a doodlebug?’ I asked. ‘The girls say you can do it with your wing tip.’

  Nick laughed. Then he paused. I didn’t say anything, because I knew he was thinking. ‘You couldn’t,’ he said at last. ‘Yes, I’ve heard that too, but you need to be flying something fast, not a taxi Anson or a Spitfire with only enough fuel to get you to the maintenance airfield. An ATA pilot couldn’t topple a V-1 flying bomb.’

  ‘Celia did. She tried to anyway. We think that’s why she crashed. How do they do it? Do you just bash it with your wing tip? The Polish pilots have a word for it. Taran. Aerial ramming.’

  Another longish pause. I had stuffed in the entire contents of the cigarette tin right away, more than two shillings’ worth – after feeding thirty of those gigantic pennies into the telephone, I felt like I’d just thrown away a pirate’s treasure hoard. At any rate it added up to more than ten minutes. I didn’t want to be cut off.

  And, of course, the operator was probably listening in. Nick’s job is very secret. I didn’t want to get him in trouble.

  ‘No,’ he said at last. ‘No, for God’s sake don’t try that, Rose, you’ll kill yourself. Is that what Celia did? Good God almighty. The idea is not to touch them at all. The doodlebug’s a bloody brilliant bomb, but it’s not a brilliant aircraft. It’s unstable, and if you get your wing tip just beneath the bomb’s wing, half a foot or so away from it, you can upset the airflow around it and make it stall. But you have to fly fast enough to keep up with it, and it’ll still go off when it hits the ground. Promise me you won’t try?’

  My turn to be silent. Because I couldn’t make that promise. I guess I’ll never get the chance anyway, but if I did – well, I’m a better pilot than Celia was.

  ‘Rose, darling?’ Nick had to prompt me. ‘I’m not a fighter pilot either. They also serve who only stand and wait.’

  Show-off, quoting Milton. He knows I like poetry.

  ‘That’s garbage, Nick, and you know it,’ I said hotly. ‘You’re not standing and
waiting. You’re dropping off –’ I choked back what I was going to say, thinking of the operator listening in. I’m not supposed to know what he’s doing, and I don’t know much about it, but Maddie’s boyfriend is in the same squadron – that’s how I met Nick – and you figure a little bit out after a while. They’ve been flying spies and saboteurs and plastic explosive and machine guns in and out of France for the past two years – secret supplies for the D-Day invasion.

  ‘You’re on the front line,’ I insisted.

  There was this long, guilty silence at the other end.

  ‘Oh, you really are at the front,’ I guessed angrily. ‘What? They’re going to transfer you, aren’t they, now that the front’s moved back? Or are they getting the Royal Air Force Special Duties squadron to do ferry work so they can weasel out of sending civilian ATA pilots into Europe?’

  ‘They’re moving the squadron,’ Nick gave me cautiously.

  I didn’t ask where. He wouldn’t have told me anyway.

  ‘Far?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Oh.’

  That means out of the United Kingdom. Maybe the Mediterranean. ‘Well –’ Nick hesitated. ‘We’ve got three days’ leave before we go. It’s not much time, but it matches up with your next two days off. We could get married.’

  I am sorry to say that I laughed at him.

  I mean, it is just so stupid. He is sweet and funny and kind and brave, and we talk so easily when we are together, and he is so proud to have a pilot for a girlfriend – ‘Looks like Katharine Hepburn and flies like Amelia Earhart’ is how he introduced me to his parents (an exaggeration in both cases but oh how I burned with joy and embarrassment when he said it)! But we still haven’t ever even been on a real date, dancing or to a film or anything like that – it’s always lunch in a pub or a quick cup of tea in the coffee shop at the train station just outside Portsmouth, which is halfway for both of us. It is so hard to get time together. Apparently Maddie has supper with her boyfriend Jamie at his airbase something like once every two months. And the last time Nick and I had the same day off, I had to stand him up because Uncle Roger and Aunt Edie were taking me out. Of course, it never occurred to me to stand up Uncle Roger – but I am in debt to Uncle Roger, I mean morally, for pulling the strings that got me here. Nick doesn’t get that. I know he was hurt.

  And now I hurt him again, by laughing at his proposal. I tried to make it up to him by promising we would have a whole day, a real day to remember, all to ourselves before he went away.

  It makes me angry. Why should it have to be like this, for all of us, all our generation? That the only way for a young couple to be together is to get married? No chance of a honeymoon, no flowers or champagne because the gardens are all full of cabbages and turnips and France is a war zone? No pretty silk dress unless someone manages to steal a parachute for you? No. I know I wouldn’t get married suddenly even if it weren’t wartime. I’d never do it without Daddy there to walk me down the aisle – with only a telegram to let him know!

  It is the same for every young couple. We are all panicking that one of us will be killed next month, next week, tomorrow. All of us panicking that if we don’t do it now, we’ll never get a chance. Well, I don’t care, I’m not letting the war take over my life.

  Maddie laughed too when I told her about Nick’s proposal.

  ‘I know where he got that idea,’ she said. ‘Jamie and I are getting married on the twelfth of August. Next week!’ She gave another hoot of laughter. ‘That is Nick all over. He’s like a puppy. You said no, didn’t you, Rosie? The poor lad! Tell you what – you can give him a good excuse and say you’ve a previous engagement. Come be my bridesmaid.’

  ‘Oh, how could I!’

  What a thoughtless thing to say. Her dead friend wasn’t going to do it, was she? And all it did was remind her.

  Anyway, of course I will.

  I asked her if she knew where Nick and Jamie are going, and she gave me a funny look.

  ‘Careless talk costs lives,’ she said.

  I do know things I shouldn’t know. I know a lot about what Uncle Roger is doing, because Aunt Edie tells me. She’s not supposed to know either. I am a little uncomfortable about it sometimes, but I think they see it as keeping me Ready for Action – Roger always asks for me when he needs to be taxied anywhere. Felicyta thinks it is very funny that this highly important person wants to be piloted by a lowly Third Officer, and a girl too! He is building pontoons in France at the moment, as the Allies fight their way inland. The next big push will be to cross the Seine. Then Paris.

  It is a week since Celia’s accident. I have submitted my report. I didn’t draft it on these pretty gold-edged pages after all, because I didn’t have this notebook with me when I wrote it. The day after her funeral I was stuck at RAF Maidsend for a whole day due to lousy weather, and I couldn’t go home because there was a top-priority Tempest (of course) that I had to ferry away for repair as soon as the visibility was good enough to take off. It felt a bit ironic, and spooky, to spend the day writing about Celia’s accident and then take off strapped into a broken Tempest. The plane had a big hole punched in the windshield. It was perfectly flyable, but WOW was it ever windy! Even with goggles on my face I felt like I had frostbite by the time I landed – absolutely frozen. It’s true I was going 225 mph at 3500 feet, but you’d never know it was August. It’s been such a cold summer.

  You have to fly that high to get across Kent, because you have to be higher than the barrage balloons they have got tethered there to try to catch the flying bombs.

  I can’t get over how beautiful the barrage balloons are. I can’t even talk about it to anyone – they all think I am crazy. But when you’re in the air, and the sky above you is a sea of grey mist and the land below you is all green, the silver balloons float in between like a school of shining silver whales, bobbing a little in the wind. They are as big as buses, and me and every other pilot has a healthy fear of them because their tethering cables are all loaded with explosives to try to snarl up enemy aircraft. But they are just magical from above, great big silver bubbles filling the sky.

  Incredible. It is just incredible that you can notice something like this when your face is so cold you can’t feel it any more, and you know perfectly well you are surrounded by death and the only way to stay alive is to endure the howling wind and stay on course. And still the sky is beautiful.

  August 7, 1944

  Ladies’ Sitting Room, Prestwick Aerodrome, Scotland

  I am waiting for Uncle Roger to get out of his meeting. I have decided it is a good idea to always take this notebook with me in case I get stuck somewhere again, like last week at Maidsend, so I have something to do. We had a heck of a time getting here – we had to fly through a hailstorm which came out of nowhere. It sounded like we had our heads in a bucket that was being pelted with rocks. I don’t know when I’ve ever been so frightened while flying.

  Roger seemed to be all unconcerned. He was in the back, in the middle of a cigarette, with his legs up on the second pilot’s seat – the aircraft is a Proctor, not very big. Along with the hail came a bit of wind shear bumping us around, which made him accidentally kick me. I snapped angrily, ‘Could you please put your feet down.’

  It’s amazing what a short, sharp command, instantly obeyed, does for your morale. I was absolutely not going to let him know how worried I was! He didn’t stretch out his legs again for the rest of the flight.

  After we landed, and I was taxiing off the runway, I said, ‘Sorry about the bumpy ride.’ When I switched off the engine, he reached over my shoulder and shook my hand.

  ‘You’re a damned fine pilot, Rosie,’ he said. ‘A real credit to your father. For a moment there I thought we were being hit by machine-gun fire!’

  I took a deep breath and let myself clench my fists at last, just to get the tension out of them. Daddy never let me hold tight to the control column; he used to make me use one finger just to practise the ‘light touch’. I do it
automatically now, but it sure does feel good to squeeze your hands shut after a flight like that. ‘Is that what machine-gun fire sounds like?’ I asked.

  ‘Pretty much! Didn’t you notice me looking around wildly for the Messerschmitt that was firing on us? I thought we’d had it! Ready to go down fighting though –’

  He held up his other hand. He’d got out his pistol. Here was me thinking he hadn’t been worried.

  ‘Gee whiz, Uncle Roger, it was just bad weather!’

  ‘And that’s what kills most ATA pilots, right? You kept your head and got us down safely. I always say there’s no other pilot I’d rather have in control of my plane. Except your dad, of course!’ He laughed, unstrapped his harness and put away his pistol. ‘Ready to take me to France some day soon?’

  I unlatched the door. ‘Uncle Roger, if you can engineer getting me to fly you to France, you really are a Royal Engineer. They haven’t let any ATA pilots go to France yet. And when they do, it’ll be the men.’

  Roger gave his characteristic ‘harrumph’ of disgust. ‘There were American women on the beaches of Normandy four days after D-Day. Army Nurse Corps – plucky girls, carrying all their own gear just like the lads. And our British ladies began to arrive only a few days later. They’re at the front now, or just behind it. I know you’re “civilian pilots”, but at least in a plane you can scarper on home when you’ve dropped me off!’

  ‘You’re preaching to the choir, Uncle Roger!’ I hauled myself out on to the wing and reached back in so he could pass me our bags. ‘If you pull the strings, I’m ready to go.’

  I don’t really believe he can pull those strings. But it gives me a warm, excited feeling in the pit of my stomach that he thinks he can, and might actually try.

  August 14, 1944

  Hamble, Southampton, Hampshire