‘They’ll let us fly ’em,’ Maddie said mournfully. ‘Desperate times and all that.’
She’s probably right. The fighter pilots need all the Tempests they can get. They’re the best planes we’ve got for shooting down flying bombs.
When Maddie and I got back to the aerodrome at Hamble, Felicyta was waiting for us. She was sitting in a corner of the Operations room and had made a little funeral feast. She had a plate of toast cut up in one-inch squares with a bit of margarine and the tiniest blob of strawberry jam on each square – simple but pretty.
‘We make do with not much as usual,’ Felicyta said, and tried to smile. ‘Here are teacups. Was it terrible?’
I nodded. Maddie grimaced.
‘Celia’s mother says we should share the things from her locker,’ I said. ‘Mrs Forester doesn’t want any of it back.’
Now we all grimaced.
‘Someone’s got to do it,’ I said. Maddie began pouring tea, and Felicyta touched me lightly on the shoulder, like she wanted to support me but was a little embarrassed to show it. She gave an odd, tight smile and said, ‘I will take care of Celia’s locker. You must report this accident, Rosie?’
‘Yes, I’m writing the accident report. Lucky me.’
‘These papers are for you.’ Felicyta patted a cardboard file folder on the table’s worn oilcloth. ‘It is a letter from the mechanic who examined Celia’s plane after her crash. He gave it to me when I flew there this morning. You need to read this before you write the report.’
‘Is it secret?’
I had to ask, because so many things are confidential.
‘No, it is not secret, but –’ She took a deep breath. ‘You saw Celia crash. You said you thought the ailerons on her wings did not work. This letter tells why. Celia hit a flying bomb.’
Now that I’m sitting here with this notebook I don’t know if I should tell the Accident Committee what the mechanic said, because it is exactly the kind of thing they’ll use as an excuse to stop girls flying Tempests – though I bet any guy would do the same thing, given the chance.
Felicyta wasn’t kidding. The mechanic thinks Celia ran into a V-1 flying bomb. No – not ‘ran into’ it – not accidentally. He thinks she did it on purpose. He thinks she tried to tip a flying bomb out of the sky.
Oh – it is crazy.
When Felicyta told me, over the sad little squares of memorial toast, it made me angry. ATA deaths are never that heroic. An ATA pilot is killed every week flying faulty planes, flying in bad weather, coming down on cracked-up runways – there was that terrible accident where a plane skidded and flipped after landing because of the mud, and by the time people got out to the poor pilot he’d drowned – stuck upside down in a cockpit full of standing water. HORRIBLE. But not heroic. I’ve never heard of an ATA pilot getting hit by enemy fire. We don’t dogfight. Our bomb bays are empty, our gunsights aren’t connected to anything. Our deaths don’t ever earn us posthumous medals. Drowning in mud, lost at sea, engine failure after take-off.
So I didn’t believe Felicyta initially – she was so convinced by the mechanic’s letter, but it felt like she was trying to make Celia’s death into a hero’s death, when it was just another faulty aircraft.
‘Anti-aircraft guns are good for shooting down flying bombs,’ Felicyta said. ‘But you know the Royal Air Force Tempest squadron takes down as many flying bombs in the air as the gunners do on the ground, and Celia was in a Tempest –’
‘She didn’t have any guns,’ I said. ‘She wasn’t armed.’ Holy smoke, she didn’t even have a radio. She couldn’t even tell the radio room what was wrong as she was coming in to land.
‘You do not need guns,’ Felicyta insisted passionately, her eyes blazing. ‘The mechanic says if you fly fast enough you can ram a pilotless plane with your wing tip.’
We all leaned our heads in together over the tiny decorated squares of toast, talking in low tones like conspirators.
‘I’ve heard the lads talk about that,’ Maddie said. ‘Doodlebug tipping.’
‘In Polish we call it taran – aerial ramming. A Polish pilot rammed a German plane over Warsaw on the first day of the war! The Soviet pilots do it too – same word in Russian. Taran. It is the best way to stop a pilotless plane in the air,’ Felicyta said. ‘Before it reaches a target, when it is still over sea or open country, not over London or Southampton. That is what 56 Squadron 150 Wing does with their Tempests.’
‘But they’re armed!’ I insisted.
‘You do not need to be armed for taran,’ Felicyta said. ‘You do not need guns to ram another aircraft.’
‘She’s right,’ Maddie said. ‘When our lads come up behind a flying bomb and fire at it, they have to fly into the explosion. Absolutely no fun. But if you tip the bomb with your wing before it’s over London, it just dives into a field and there’s no mess.’
I just couldn’t believe Celia would try such a trick, her first time in a Tempest. But as we all kept saying, we didn’t really know her.
‘Would you do it, Maddie?’ I asked.
She shook her head slowly. It was more of an I don’t know than a no. Maddie’s a very careful pilot and probably has more hours than the rest of us put together. She is the only one of us who is a First Officer. But I realised, just then, that I don’t really know Maddie, either.
‘Felicyta would do it,’ Maddie said, avoiding an answer. ‘Wouldn’t you, Fliss? You see a flying bomb in the sky ahead of you, and you’re flying a Tempest. Would you make a 180 degree turn and run the other way? Or try to tip it out of the sky?’
‘You know what I would do,’ Felicyta said, her eyes narrowed. ‘Don’t you believe a woman could make a taran as well as a man? You know what I would do, Maddie Brodatt. But I have never met a flying bomb in the air. Have you?’
‘Yes,’ Maddie said quietly.
We all stared at her with wide eyes. I am sure my mouth hung open.
‘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.