Read Spitfire Women of World War II for Free Online

insurance payment her mother would receive. There was Mary de Bunsen, lame from childhood polio and with a congenital heart defect that left her breathless every time she climbed into a Hurricane. ‘You know,’ she told a fellow pilot towards the end of the war, ‘when I was in training pool I was so certain that I was going to be killed within the next few weeks that I didn’t bother much.’ By morbid contrast there was Flying Officer W. F. Castle, married with a son, from Birmingham. He had arrived at White Waltham in November 1941 with both arms and both eyes but precious little confidence – which the ATA training staff proceeded to undermine.
    Castle brooded nightly in his diary:
    November 8th. Our instructors are forever emphasizing the lethal nature of the forces which will soon be under our control if misused. This point is pressed home as every subject is taken.
    Â Â Â 
    November 19th. Now that I have started flying it is being brought home to me very clearly that this is not what you would call a particularly safe job … Although we are not required to fly in bad weather it often seems to happen that someone has flown into a hillside during bad visibility. Three deaths are reported this week, and there must have been two or three others besides since I have been here. I dread to think of leaving Peg and Daniel alone … the thought of Daniel, my son, being brought up without me chills my heart. I am determined to take every precaution possible.’
    The next day, after stalling on take-off in a Magister, Castle was close to desperate:
    It is being borne in on me more and more that if I am to preserve my skin I must quickly develop a sound flying sense and take no chances whatever … The sooner I can get away from the congested area of White Waltham the better it will suit me. 
    As long as the very human Castle pondered his mortality, and the ice cool Lettice Curtis flew in and out of White Waltham, rain or shine, as if on auto pilot, there could be no room for overt male chauvinism within the ranks of the ATA.
    In the wider world, it was a different story. From the moment Pauline Gower had first talked to Sir Francis Shelmerdine about hiring women pilots at government expense to help mobilise for war, those who considered flying somehow intrinsically male began to vent. And no-one gave them more space to do so than C.G. Grey, editor of Aeroplane magazine and an old friend of Betty Keith-Jopp’s uncle, Stewart. Early on, Grey weighed in himself. ‘We quite agree that there are millions of women in the country who could do useful jobs in the war,’ he wrote in reply to a letter Mary Bailey had sent in support of Gower. (Lady Bailey had flown from London to South Africa in a Tiger Moth in 1929, pausing only to attend a reception in her honour in Khartoum in a tweed flying suit.)
    But the trouble is that so many of them insist on wanting to do jobs which they are quite incapable of doing. The menace is the woman who thinks that she ought to be flying a high-speed bomber when she really has not the intelligence to scrub the floor of a hospital properly, or who wants to nose round as an Air Raid Warden and yet can’t cook her husband’s dinner.
    Grey was right about the dinner, wrong about the menace. Lettice Curtis was a consummate flyer and completely uninterested in cooking. To be obsessive about flying and deliberately careless about anything conventionally ‘female’ was, in fact, the norm for ATA girls. This infuriated Harold Collings ( Aeroplane , 5 January, 1940):
    Women are not seeking this job for the sake of doing something for their country … Women who are anxious to serve their country should take on work more befitting their sexinstead of encroaching on a man’s occupation. Men have made aviation reach its present perfection.
    Some of Aeroplane ’s female readers agreed: ‘I think the whole affair of engaging women