Spitfire Women of World War II by Whittell Giles

Author:Whittell, Giles [Giles Whittell]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780007287123
Publisher: Harper Perennial
Published: 2007-05-26T16:00:00+00:00

13

Over Here

Several months after disembarking at Liverpool – possibly on 27 March 1943, but she was coy about it in her letters home out of respect for the censors – Ann Wood took off from Castle Bromwich in a Spitfire. By this time she had been posted to No. 6 Ferry Pool at Ratcliffe Hall in Leicestershire, a friendly, popular place owned by Sir Lindsay Everard, a brewing magnate and Conservative MP.

No. 6 Pool had been set up expressly to clear the great Castle Bromwich factory of its Spitfires before they could be bombed. Sir Lindsay was passionately air-minded. He had relinquished the use of his private aerodrome together with many of its outbuildings to the ATA for the duration of the war, and Ann was billeted above his eight-car garage in digs originally intended for visiting cricketers. She made good friends at Ratcliffe, and among them was Johnnie Jordan, the wealthy and strong-willed grandson of the Bedfordshire manufacturer of breakfast cereals.

Wood and Jordan would remain friends until their deaths within weeks of each other sixty-three years later, but even after that other ATA veterans were at pains to stress that Johnnie’s flying style did not reflect that of his comrades. Most ATA types took their mission of delivering planes intact extremely seriously. Jordan was different. Though skilled as a pilot, he was utterly undisciplined. Having chafed at his grandfather’s draconian way of running the family business, he had left the firm. He was later court-martialled by the RAF for ‘borrowing’ a Swordfish biplane in order to escape from his bomber squadron’s base, to which he had been confined for hedge-hopping.

The ATA gave him much greater freedom ‘to express himself in the air’ – and to lead other pilots astray. He loved the feel of his weight on his shoulder straps and blood rushing to his head so much that he once spent ten minutes inverted in a Spitfire before force-landing it at Edgefield when its engine failed. At Castle Bromwich it was said that Alex Henshaw, the test pilot, liked to hold his aircraft down until it gained enough speed to pull up into a half loop that left him upside down but above the barrage balloons and heading in the opposite direction. Henshaw denied the story, but the more exuberant Ratcliffe pilots liked to emulate what they had heard about him and Jordan surely would not have missed the opportunity. (Wood was not averse to the occasional loop, either. ‘I always believed that aerobatics was a good way to familiarise yourself with your aircraft,’ she told me, and she once lost all power while upside-down in a Miles Magister. Like Jordan at Edgefield, she told no-one about the inversion and was commended for not losing the plane.)

Jordan was with Ann at Castle Bromwich that spring day in 1943, in another Spitfire; so too was a third pilot whom Wood remembered as Don Spain, although his real name was probably Leslie Swain. They took off in quick succession into a corridor of barrage balloons that dead-ended a mile or two beyond the runway.

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