Ep 5

Beryl was there to catch the dragging weight of the pilot’s senseless

body. It was easier for Maddie to get down off the plane than it had been for

her to get up, just a light hop to the ground. Maddie unbuckled the pilot’s

helmet and goggles; she and Beryl had both done First Aid in Girl Guides,

for all that’s worth, and knew enough to make sure the casualty could

breathe.

Beryl began to giggle.

‘Who’s the gormless cow!’ Maddie exclaimed.

‘It’s a girl!’ Beryl laughed. ‘It’s a girl!’

—

Beryl stayed with the unconscious girl pilot while Maddie rode her Silent

Superb to the farm to get help. She found two big strong lads her own age

shovelling cow dung, and the farmer’s wife sorting First Early potatoes and

cursing a cotillion of girls who were doing a huge jigsaw on the old stone

kitchen floor (it was Sunday, or they’d have been boiling laundry). A rescue

squad was despatched. Maddie was sent further down the lane on her bike

to the bottom of the hill where there was a pub and a phone box.

‘She’ll need an ambulance, tha knows, love,’ the farmer’s wife had said

to Maddie kindly. ‘She’ll need to go to hospital if she’s been flying an

aeroplane.’

The words rattled around in Maddie’s head all the way to the telephone.

Not ‘She’ll need to go to hospital if she’s been injured,’ but ‘She’ll need to

go to hospital if she’s been flying an aeroplane.’

A flying girl! thought Maddie. A girl flying an aeroplane!

No, she corrected herself; a girl not flying a plane. A girl tipping up a

plane in a sheep field.

But she flew it first. She had to be able to fly it in order to land it (or

crash it).The leap seemed logical to Maddie.

I’ve never crashed my motorbike, she thought. I could fly an aeroplane.

There are a few more types of aircraft that I know, but what comes to

mind is the Lysander. That is the plane Maddie was flying when she

dropped me here. She was actually supposed to land the plane, not dump

me out of it in the air. We got fired at on the way in and for a while the tail

was in flames and she couldn’t control it properly, and she made me bail out

before she tried to land. I didn’t see her come down. But you showed me

the photos you took at the site, so I know that she has crashed an aeroplane

by now. Still, you can hardly blame it on the pilot when her plane gets hit

by anti-aircraft fire.

Some British Support for Anti-Semitism

The Puss Moth crash was on Sunday. Beryl was back to work at the mill in

Ladderal the next day. My heart twists up and shrivels with envy so black

and painful that I spoiled half this page with tears before I realised they

were falling, to think of Beryl’s long life of loading shuttles and raising

snotty babies with a beery lad in an industrial suburb of Manchester. Of

course that was in 1938 and they have all been bombed to bits since, so

perhaps Beryl and her kiddies are dead already, in which case my tears of

envy are very selfish. I am sorry about the paper. Miss E. is looking over

my shoulder as I write and tells me not to interrupt my story with any more

apologies.

Over the next week Maddie pieced together the pilot’s story in a storm

of newspaper clippings with the mental wolfishness of Lady Macbeth. The

pilot’s name was Dympna Wythenshawe (I remember her name because it

is so silly). She was the spoiled youngest daughter of Sir Somebody-or-

other Wythenshawe. On Friday there was a flurry of outrage in the evening

paper because as soon as she was released from hospital, she started giving

joyrides in her other aeroplane (a Dragon Rapide – how clever am I), while

the Puss Moth was being mended. Maddie sat on the floor in her granddad’s

shed next to her beloved Silent Superb, which needed a lot of tinkering to

keep it in a fit state for weekend outings, and fought with the newspaper.

There were pages and pages of gloom about the immediate likelihood of

war between Japan and China, and the growing likelihood of war in Europe.

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