When the Lights Go On Again. Annie Groves

       TWO

      ‘Lou, you are soooo lucky. You brought that Harvard down daisy-cutter perfect first time, but when I had to do it I came in too high and had to go round again.’

      ‘It didn’t feel like a perfect landing,’ Lou assured her friend and fellow ATA pilot June Merryvale as they walked away from the airfield and its hangars, carrying their parachutes with them.

      The breeze filled out the loose fabric of their Sidcot flying suits, worn not, as it was rumoured so many of the ferry pool pilots did, over merely their underwear, but over their smart navy-blue uniform trousers and pale blue shirts. The same breeze was lifting the wind sock on the airfield and also tugging at Lou’s curls, the tips of her hair sun-bleached now by the summer sunshine.

      The two girls had been posted to the ATA training airbase at Thame at the same time for their ongoing training from flying Grade 1 only planes to flying Grade 2 planes – advanced single-engined aircraft, primarily fighter aircraft, such as Hurricanes, Spitfires, Typhoons, Mustangs, Airacobras, and even ‘tricky’ aircraft like the Walruses. The aircraft, though, that Lou most longed to fly was the Spitfire, the small fighter plane that those women pilots who had flown them declared were perfect for female flyers.

      Spits – Lou’s heart lifted with excitement every time she thought of flying one. She knew that some of the RAF men disapproved of girls flying at all, but especially disliked and resented the idea of girls flying Spitfires, feeling that only the male ATA pilots – those pilots who for one reason or another could not fly in combat, but who were still good airmen – should be allowed to do so.

      So much had happened since she had undergone her ab initio training at Barton-in-the-Clay, the small grass airfield where she had spent the regulation two weeks having lessons in ‘ground school’, followed by bumps and circuits in the school’s Gypsy Moth training plane. From there she had gone on to solo flight, before being assigned the thirty cross-country flights every would-be ATA pilot had to complete successfully before getting her ‘wings’. These flights, designed to hone the skills the trainees had been taught in ground school, had involved putting into practice their navigation ability. The rule was that all ATA pilots, no matter how skilled, had to stick to ‘contact’ flying, which meant that they had to fly beneath any cloud cover so that they could navigate using their maps and what was visible on the ground below them. One of the worst test flights, so far as Lou was concerned, had been when she’d had to navigate round the Spitfire factory at Castle Bromwich avoiding the barrage balloons that protected the site.

      Every ATA pilot was expected to progress to more complicated planes as speedily as she could – it was her role, after all, to move as many planes as possible around the country – but in accordance with her own confidence and the wisdom of those teaching her.

      Once an ATA pilot was qualified and had her wings, she was then sent to one of the ATA ferry pools where she would be given ‘chits’ to collect and deliver planes.

      The ferry pools used Avro Ansons in a taxi service to get the pilots to the planes they had to deliver. The pilots then had to collect the planes, and deliver them to MUs, as the maintenance units were called. Only then would the planes be fitted with their onboard navigation systems and other equipment. This was why the ATA pilots had to learn to fly without anything other than basic instruments, and were forbidden to go above the clouds, or from an MU to an RAF station.

      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