Bobby's War Read online

  Contents

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  Welcome to the world of Shirley Mann!

  Letter from Author

  Mrs Hill’s Scone Recipe

  Don’t miss Shirley Mann’s inspiring debut novel . . .

  And watch out for Shirley’s next book . . .

  Memory Lane Club

  Wartime Tales from Memory Lane

  Here are other Memory Lane titles you may enjoy . . .

  Copyright

  To our daughters, Sarah and Jayne – they are proof of the lasting impact of the groundbreaking work done by ATA women pilots

  Prologue

  1942

  The cow’s huge black eyes stared impassively from its position at the front propeller of the Tiger Moth aircraft. Roberta, Bobby for short, stuck her tongue out at it, but it carried on chewing. The aircraft was being rocked by the skittish movements of the twenty or so Friesian cows that had raced across the field to examine this enormous bird that had seemingly fallen out of the sky.

  ‘Hah, fallen, my foot,’ Bobby told her sceptical audience, ‘it was skilfully landed despite cross-winds and the fact that this Moth’s nose is high on landing.’

  She pushed her thighs together and winced. She needed to reach the hedge – and quickly – but she scanned the herd and they showed no sign of moving.

  ‘Shoo,’ she yelled at the crowd around her, but still they did not react. A farmer’s daughter, she had no fear of cows, but she gave them enormous respect. She breathed in sharply and tensed her stomach. She should never have had that last cup of tea.

  Bobby glanced at her watch. Time was marching on and she was only in Lancashire. She had to get to Oxford before nightfall.

  She waved her arms frantically at the crowd of four-legged admirers and then froze mid-wave as a human face appeared in the middle of the herd. A brown-haired, freckled man in RAF uniform was gently pushing the cows out of the way. Once other uniforms appeared, the cows backed off, sensing defeat. The coast was finally clear and Bobby was able to unstrap herself and jump down to the ground.

  ‘Blimey, it’s a girl!’ the freckled young man exclaimed. ‘You’re surely not on your own, darlin’?’

  Bobby gave a very curt nod and said, ‘Excuse me one moment,’ and walked with great haste towards the far side of the hedge. She crouched down and heard guffaws of laughter from the other side of field.

  Roberta Hollis never blushed, but there was a rosy tinge to her cheeks when she emerged from the hedge, rearranging her uniform.

  ‘Now gentlemen, I thank you for your assistance, but could I ask you to move out of the way while I take off?’

  ‘Not so fast,’ a blond-haired lad said, standing with his arms folded in front of the wing. ‘We abandoned perfectly good pints in The King’s Arms and came to check you were OK. We want an explanation.’

  ‘Have you never seen a female pilot before?’ Bobby looked in exasperation at her watch. She did not have time for this.

  ‘It’s the ATA,’ a Scottish voice said from the back from the group.

  ‘What’s that when it’s at home?’ the freckled one demanded.

  ‘Air Transport Auxiliary – the “glamour girls”. They deliver planes,’ the Scot explained patiently.

  ‘Interesting as this aviation history lesson is,’ Bobby butted in, ‘I’ve got a delivery to make and need to get to Oxford by nightfall.’

  She looked up at the fading sun and pushed past the ‘sentry posts’ to her plane.

  ‘Does that mean . . . you . . . fly . . . these things on your own?’

  ‘Yes, now you have to let me leave. As you’re here, you can get me started, this ground is rougher than it looked from the air. You can wing walk me over the ruts.’

  ‘Good job we’ve been specially trained in this war by the RAF or we’d never have known how to do that,’ one tall man muttered as he moved to hold the wing tip, ready to walk it forward to keep it steady.

  ‘And you,’ Bobby added, pointing to another one with dark hair, ‘you can swing the prop. Watch for my thumbs up.’

  Bobby mounted the wing and climbed into the aircraft, hurriedly buckled the four straps around her and started the cockpit checks. ‘OK!’ she shouted to the dark RAF man at the front. He turned the prop several times and then stepped away, shaking his head. She was concentrating too hard to even notice the stroking of chins and amazed expressions she was leaving behind as she taxied down the field, scattering the cows once again.

  Tutting to herself, she swore never again to drink more than one cup of anything before she set off. That was another lesson she had learned.

  On the ground, the crowd of men stood with their mouths agape, watching the wings soar into the air, the tail kept impressively steady, and the small aircraft with a woman at the controls disappear into the October sunshine.

  Chapter 1

  It was almost dark when Bobby reached Bicester airfield near Oxford. She knew the route but had only just made it in daylight. A tall girl with burnished auburn hair that bounced as she walked, she went first to sign in at the control tower and then made her way across the airfield to the WAAF quarters, her heavy parachute on her shoulder. She cut a striking figure as she strode across the airfield but, at the age of twenty-seven, Roberta Hollis was oblivious to both the stares and the nudges that followed her in her distinctive blue uniform. Her complete concentration was on the job in hand.

  Roberta had no time to think about the strange path that had led her to the Air Transport Auxiliary – the distant father, the troubled mother or the cold atmosphere of the brick farmhouse in Norfolk. There were so many problems at home that she had learned to ignore over the years, knowing that one day she would have to deal with her fractured family, but today was not the day. She had a tight schedule to tackle and, once again, she needed to ignore the haunting thoughts that engulfed her whenever she had a spare minute. Fortunately, the relentless timetables left her with few enough of those, and that suited Bobby just fine. ‘First Officer Hollis, signing in,’ she told the WAAF on the front desk.

  ‘No beds, I’m afraid. You’ll have to make do with a mattress on the floor,’ the WAAF said, and pointed her in the direction of a wooden hut to the right of the office.

  Bobby sighed. She had been up since six and had delivered four planes to different locations around the country. All she wanted was a quick supper and a warm bed.

>   An hour later, after a very lumpy cauliflower cheese in the NAAFI, she had her wish.

  ‘You can use mine,’ said a sleepy WAAF, climbing out of her bunk. ‘I’m on duty tonight.’

  Bobby delightedly pushed the three ‘biscuit’ mattresses together and smoothed back the sheet and rough blanket to climb in. She was so tired she could have slept on a tailfin, and within ten minutes, she was fast asleep, unaware of the constant stream of WAAFs who came in and out of the hut, either going to or returning from a shift. They ignored the lump in the bed until one of them noticed the dark blue uniform with its distinctive gold braid hanging up next to the bunk.

  ‘She’s one of those ATA pilots.’ She nudged her friend who turned around to look.

  ‘Personally, I don’t care if she’s the Queen of Sheba, I’m so tired. I’ve been on duty for more than ten hours and I didn’t even get a break.’

  Another girl handed them both cups of cocoa that had been warming next to the black stove in the middle of the room for latecomers, according to custom.

  They sipped gratefully.

  ‘Oh, that’s better,’ one of them said. ‘So that’s one of the “glamour girls” is it?’ She put her head on one side assessing the curled up, snoring figure in the bed. ‘She doesn’t look very glam.’

  ‘I heard they get invited to all the parties and are treated like goddesses,’ another chipped in. ‘It must be exciting, though, being up there in the sky.’

  ‘Bloody dangerous if you ask me. No radar, no radio and no gun to shoot back,’ her friend commented, shaking her head in awe.

  They finished their cocoa, got their washbags and went to the ablutions block to get ready for bed. They could not wait to tell the crowd of girls in the washrooms that they had a real-life ATA girl in their hut, which led to a constant stream of WAAFs peering round the door to examine the snoring figure of Bobby, tucked up in bed, and pointing in amazement at her uniform hung up behind it.

  Unaware of all the attention, Bobby slept like a log, waking only when the morning tannoy went off. She stretched luxuriously like her family’s farm cat, Perry, but then her mind immediately switched into gear and she bounded out of bed, ready for another day of heaven knows what.

  She was into her second year as an ATA pilot after a whirlwind of training, classroom lessons, trial flights and nights spent peering at her instruction manuals in the dim light. Each level left her breathless and exhilarated and endorsed her belief that flying was the only thing she wanted to do. She completed her training at White Waltham with dedication and determination, gaining her first qualifications. She knew she was good, but she also knew that it would only take one unexpected storm, a barrage balloon or a moment’s lack of concentration to add her name to the list of dead ATA pilots that was posted far too regularly. She also knew that to waver would not only put her life in jeopardy, but also the reputation of women pilots, that was already fragile to say the least.

  Only last week, Bobby and her friends in the ATA had gathered around a copy of Aviation magazine in outrage at the words written by the male editor:

  There are millions of women in the country who could do useful jobs in war. 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 in a high-speed bomber when she really has not the intelligence to scrub the floor of a hospital properly, or who wants to nose around as an Air Raid Warden and yet can’t cook her husband’s dinner.

  Bobby brushed her teeth furiously at just the memory of that quote, using the dregs of a tin of baking powder. There was a notice above the washbasins warning that there was only a tiny cup of water per girl and she measured out three drips into her mouth to rinse with. Nobody dawdled in the freezing cold ablutions block so she dressed quickly, unearthed her bowl and her ‘irons’– the knife, fork and spoon – as well as her metal mug from her bag and ran over to the NAAFI to grab some porridge, hesitating over the tea urn to work out her chances of finding a toilet en route. She shrugged her shoulders in resignation, only half filling her mug and sat down to look at her notes, trying to second-guess her aircraft for the day. She hardly noticed the curious glances of the men and women on the long tables in the room, concentrating on getting the piping hot porridge down her as quickly as possible. Bicester was an Operations Training Unit and although it was under Bomber Command, fighters did not fly from there. Bobby had heard rumours of collapsing field drains that would sometimes cause pitted holes, and as thorough as ever, even though she had arrived safely the night before, she decided she would like to walk the runway to scan the surface before she took an aircraft off the ground from there.

  Bobby glanced at her watch. She had to hurry so swished her ‘irons’ in the soapy water by the door, like the WAAFs around her did, before running to the locker room to pick up her overnight bag, her parachute and the precious bar of chocolate that kept her going on long flights. She then raced across towards the operations room to receive her ‘chits’ – the list of deliveries for the day – clutching her blue Ferry Pilots Notes, the Bible of every ATA pilot, with its comprehensive instructions on how to fly a dazzling array of planes. Bobby mentally ran through the list of possible aircraft she might face that day. She had flown nineteen different types so far. She looked up at the sky, where the clouds were moving fast. ATA pilots were not supposed to fly above the clouds, which always caused problems in a country like Britain where the weather was so variable. She hoped she would not be assigned to a Walrus. They were so lumbering with minds of their own and a pain in strong wind.

  Outside the office, on the side of the runway, were a line of Spitfires and Mosquitoes, used for training. The ground crews, or Erks as they were known, were all working fast to get them ready for flight. It was the ATA’s job to get planes to where they were needed – and fast.

  She recognised a blonde girl holding two small blocks of wood on a piece of string around her neck coming towards her. The girl raised her hand in greeting.

  ‘Bobby, I didn’t know you were here.’

  ‘Daphne! You been here all night?’

  ‘Yep, arrived by transport late last night. Had to sleep on mattresses on the floor. I can tell you, my neck really hurts. Those ‘biscuits’ parted company at three this morning and left my backside on the floor.’

  Daphne was a petite girl from Lancashire whose feet sometimes failed to reach the pedals. She carried small blocks of wood around with her to attach to the pedals so she could reach them, but she was an excellent pilot.

  ‘Get any sleep?’ she asked Bobby.

  ‘Yes, some kind WAAF left me her bed and it was still warm, so I was nice and toasty.’

  ‘Lucky you,’ replied Daphne, ‘I was frozen. But I suppose I was lucky to get a mattress and staying in the WAAF huts does mean we save the quid for overnight accommodation, which always helps, doesn’t it? Are you back at Hamble tonight?’

  ‘Well, who knows, I suppose it’ll depend on what those darned clouds decide to do,’ Bobby replied, looking up dubiously.

  Hamble was the headquarters where many of the ATA girls were based. There was a good feeling of camaraderie on the days when there was a group of them grounded by bad weather, known as ‘washout days’, but more often than not, the pilots got held up somewhere round the country, staying in hostels, WAAF huts, inns and sometimes in train stations. It was not always a comfortable life and their timetables were relentless, so they frequently felt like ships that passed in the night.

  ‘You Roberta Hollis? Here are your ‘chits’, an operations manager said as Bobby and Daphne arrived at the ops room. ‘You’d better get going. You have four today.’

  The ATA pilots took turns to be operations manager. This was a nightmare job involving ridiculous logistics getting pilots and planes where they were supposed to be, and although she did not recognise the tall, dark girl behind the desk, Bobby gave her a sympathetic smile and took the top sheet from the huge pil
e of ‘chits’ the girl was holding.

  Bobby scanned her list – a Swordfish to White Waltham, a Barracuda to Kemble and an Albacore to Woolsington, then a Moth back to Hamble.

  She was not yet qualified to fly the faster single-engined planes like the Spitfire but she had gone through the instructions so many times in her head, she believed she could have flown one blindfold. She was just longing to get to the grade when she would be able to pilot one of those Spitfires; the aircraft ATA pilots loved above all others.

  ‘Well, the plan is to get back to base and my own bed tonight,’ Bobby called over her shoulder to Daphne as they struggled out onto the airfield, with their parachutes and tiny overnight bags. ‘But we’ll see how that works out. Remember what they told us in training – England doesn’t have a climate, it has . . .’

  ‘WEATHER!’ they both shouted together, laughing.

  ‘See you in the restroom if we get back in time, then,’ Daphne said, but Bobby was already checking through her notes to see how the Swordfish behaved in high winds.

  Bobby stared up at the sky, threatening the clouds with fury if they got too thick or started to run too fast. She did not want to get stuck again tonight and pleaded with them to behave before running over to the Met Office to check the forecast.

  ‘I haven’t been back to base for three nights,’ she told the good-looking Met officer behind the desk. He had nice eyes, she thought. ‘Please tell me it’s going to be fine in Newcastle this afternoon.’

  He glanced down at his charts, shifted a few papers and then his face cleared.

  ‘Yep, you should be OK. Just don’t go anywhere near the west coast.’

  Bobby looked scornfully at him. He was not that good-looking, she decided. ‘I do know my east from west, you know.’

  She strode quickly along the edge of the runway, narrowing her eyes to check the surface and then, satisfied that no new holes had appeared, went over to the Swordfish and walked round, appraising it. An engineer was making final checks.

  ‘Ah, got a girl, have we? Well, I’ve just fixed this aircraft, don’t you go breaking it.’

  ‘You’re only saying that because I’m a girl!’