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pilots to fly aeroplanes when there are so many men fully qualified to do the work is disgusting!’ one wrote. ‘The women themselves are only doing it more or less as a hobby, and should be ashamed of themselves!’
    She was not entirely wrong. Some of the women had taken up flying strictly for practical reasons. Lettice Curtis and Ann Wood, for instance, insisted that at first they saw it simply as a livelihood. But for most it was indeed a hobby, and one that often deepened into an obsession. And why not? What self-respecting pilot would not have grown obsessional about the prospect, however remote, of flying something as fast and glamorous and responsive – and as feminine – as a Spitfire?
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    Nothing parked these days on the grass apron at White Waltham comes close to the sheer power of a Spitfire. Even the Mark 1, with its bashful two-bladed propeller, had the thrust equivalent of six supercharged racing Bentleys crammed into its nose. At 16,000 feet its 27-litre Merlin II engine could generate more than 1,000 horsepower; enough to pull the pilot wedged behind it through the air at more than half the speed of sound.
    Spitfires were so streamlined that when taxiing the heat produced by their engines had nowhere to go. Reginald Mitchell had removed the side-mounted radiators on the Supermarine seaplane on which he based his new design, replacing it with ineffectual slimline air intakes under the wings. If Spitfires weren’t released quickly into the air, the glycol in their cooling systems would boil. They hated sitting around once started up, but once off the ground they made their pilots sing.
    Even four-engined bombers proved easily handled by the tiniest women pilots. But the Spitfire, without exception, was theirfavourite. Mary de Bunsen would rejoice when let loose in one by humming fugues from Bach’s B Minor Mass. Lettice Curtis warbled in prose: ‘To sit in the cockpit of a Spitfire, barely wider than one’s shoulders, with the power of the Merlin at one’s fingertips, was a poetry of its own,’ she wrote. ‘The long, flat-topped cowling and the pop-popping stub exhausts gave an almost breathtaking feeling of power, and the exhilaration of throwing it around, chasing clouds or low flying – strictly unauthorised in our case – was something never to be forgotten by those who experienced it.’
    And who would experience it? The arrival of the Americans risked dividing the women of the ATA. Would they all be as bumptious as Jackie Cochran? Could they fly? Were they really needed? But the yearning to fly Spitfires, and to a lesser extent Hurricanes, was something they all shared. This, no less than their desire to be involved in the war, was what accounted for their steady convergence on southern England, not just from across Britain and the United States but from Poland, Chile, Argentina and the Dominions.
    Most of them believed passionately in the Allied cause, but all could have served it elsewhere and less dangerously had they not become smitten with the idea of flying the most thrilling aeroplane yet built. And verdant, crowded, hungry England was the only place in the world where they would be allowed to do it.
    For the pilots, the war meant virtual parity of opportunity with men, eventual parity of pay, and all the flying they could handle. For their mentors, Pauline Gower and Jackie Cochran, it seemed to be a stepping-stone to an elevated yet egalitarian future. ‘I would say that every woman should learn to fly,’ Gower declared in an interview for the April 1942 issue of Woman’s Journal . ‘Psychologically, it is the best antidote to the manifold neuroses which beset modern women. The war has already accomplished much in this regard, but with the return of peace my advice to all women will still be – “Learn to fly”.’
    Jackie Cochran would have seconded that, but she wanted to do more than liberate modern