Читать книгу Spitfire Women of World War II - Giles Whittell - Страница 10

The film playing at Leicester Square that March night in 1942 depicted one of the most spectacular lives of the thirties, and one of the more mysterious deaths of the war. Towards the end of the film there is a scene set at Squire’s Gate aerodrome outside Blackpool.

The date is 4 January 1941. The time is 11.45 a.m. Mist shrouds the aerodrome buildings, but within sight of them a bulky twin-engined Airspeed Oxford, both propellers spinning, sits on the concrete apron. In the cockpit is Amy Johnson, Hull fish merchant’s daughter, ferry pilot and celebrity. Without her example of reckless daring over the previous ten years it is doubtful that the ATA would have had a pool of trained women pilots to call on, let alone an army of women volunteers hoping to be trained from scratch. As she waits she smokes a cigarette and chats to a refueller who has climbed into the co-pilot’s seat to keep her company; she is hoping for better weather.

The scene unfolds on film as in life, except that in They Flew Alone Amy Johnson’s face is Anna Neagle’s – a thing of perfect skin and symmetry, and pluck shining from her very eyes. In real life the face was longer; a mournful-looking oval. Even so, despite a washed-out Christmas at Prestwick’s Orangefield Hotel, with nothing to stare at for six days but fog, everyone Amy Johnson talked to over those last few days recalled that she seemed unusually content.

In the film she talks like Eliza Doolittle after Professor Higgins’s ministrations. In life, a trace of a Hull accent lingered despite years of elocution lessons. In the film, when a third figure emerges from the mist to report that the weather’s just as bad right down to Oxfordshire, she glances up at him and makes the only decision that was in fact imaginable for Amy Johnson. She says she will ‘crack through and fly over the top’. In reality she said something very similar.

For most of the 164 women who ferried planes for the ATA during the war it was the pinnacle of their flying careers, unrepeatable after the war even as men went supersonic, into orbit and to the moon. For Amy Johnson it was something of a come-down, and a point of realisation that her celebrity could no longer cleave a path through Britain’s hidebound bureaucracy. She had wanted a wartime role crafted specially for her, pioneering fast new airline routes to bind beleaguered Britain closer to her colonies, or swooping into northern France (before it fell) to keep young Tommy chipper. She offered to advise the Air Ministry – on what she wasn’t sure. As it turned out, the Air Ministry had plenty of advisors.

Johnson had been overlooked for head of the ATA’s women’s section in favour of Pauline Gower, and even when Gower begged her to join she had to take a test. Once a ferry pilot, she had to leave her Astrakhan-collared flying coats in storage and wear navy worsted and a forage cap. And she had to share common rooms and taxi planes with the other girls even though, as she commented to her father, they practically worshipped her. Was this any way to treat the most famous woman pilot in the world?

Eleven years before that dank morning at Squire’s Gate, Johnson had been sitting in another cockpit waiting for another weather window. This time the aircraft was a De Havilland Gipsy Moth, the Morris Traveller of the skies, a dope-and-canvas biplane built to cruise at 90 mph. Amy had named it Jason, which was the telegraphic address of her father’s fish business. The venue was Croydon Airport. She had tried once already to take off but had failed to get the throttle forward fast enough to compensate for the weight of two extra fuel tanks and had pulled up a few feet from the perimeter fence. Now she tried again. Her father and a small group of friends watched from the tarmac in front of the aerodrome hotel. Jack Humphreys, her mentor and engineering tutor, had a sense of what she was getting into and was rigid with tension. William Johnson, down from Hull specially for this, had even less idea than his daughter of the risks she was running.

This time the Moth just cleared the fence. It staggered over the rows of houses beyond, its tiny engine (one tenth as powerful as the least powerful Spitfire’s) hammering up into the westerly wind. Johnson climbed over Purley Rise and the Selsden Park golf course and levelled out over the waking villages of Kent. She set course for Vienna.

Virtually unknown, she was airborne thanks to her father’s patronage and a modest fuel sponsorship arrangement with Charles ‘Cheers’ Wakefield, father of the Castrol brand of engine oil. But what made the combination combustible, and almost fatal, was her own searing ambition to be someone special. And three short weeks later she had realised that ambition. She was being mobbed by crowds of Australians wherever she put down, and bombarded with telegrams from Blériot, Einstein and King George V.

Amy Johnson was the first woman to fly solo to Australia. In the cockpit she wore leather when it was cold and cotton when it was hot, and she depended throughout her twenty-day flight on a four-cylinder, 110-horsepower engine pulling an aircraft with a spare propeller strapped to the outside of its fuselage. It was a breathtakingly modern thing to do. A handful of men had squeezed the 11,000 miles from Southampton to Sydney into a journey measured in days rather than weeks, but for a woman to attempt it – less than half a generation after being given the vote – was practically unthinkable. She had beaten Bert Hinkler’s record as far as Delhi, but it was not for speed that Australia adored her. It was for having shrunk the world more vividly and definitively than a strutting male action hero could ever have. Here was the girl next door (sunburned and overtired, it was true), whose next door was in Hull. She had a toothy smile, a perpetually awed voice and actually seemed to like Australia. She also had the strange aura of someone who had cheated death.

Johnson’s strategy for beating Hinkler’s record rested on the idea of flying in a straight line. As far as she could tell from the primitive maps that were all Stanford’s bookshop had for most of the journey, this would shave 700 miles off his route. Hinkler had looped south through Rome to Malta to maximise, he hoped, his number of nights on British imperial soil. Johnson headed straight for Constantinople via Austria. On the way, an overbearing crew of Viennese mechanics insisted on overhauling her engine but succeeded only in gumming up a spark plug. (This may never have come entirely ungummed; despite Johnson’s hard-won engineering certificate and her meticulous filtering of all the fuel that entered Jason’s engine, one of the male pilots deputed to escort her on her victory lap of Australia wrote later, with ill-disguised satisfaction, that he had never seen ‘an engine in such appalling condition’ as hers.)

From Constantinople, Johnson had to find a way through Anatolia’s forbidding Taurus Mountains, and this is where her straight line became sinuous. As she approached the mountains around lunchtime on 7 May, they were covered by cloud. She climbed to stay in clear air, as she would years later with much less reason to be scared. But at 11,000 feet her ‘engine started an ominous coughing and spitting’, she wrote afterwards:

I descended to 10,000 feet and decided to try to follow the railway through its winding gorges … I had one very unpleasant moment when threading my way through an exceptionally narrow gorge with the mountains rising sheer on either side of me only a few feet from my wings and towering high above. Rounding a corner I ran straight into a bank of low clouds, and for an awful minute could see nothing at all. In desperation I pushed down the nose of the machine to try to dive below them, and in half a minute – which seemed to me an eternity – I emerged from the cloud at a speed of 120 with one wing down and aiming for a wall of rock. Once I could see where I was going it was easy to straighten the machine, but I was rather badly shaken.

Johnson’s passage through the Taurus Mountains was undoubtedly terrifying and it marked her graduation from suburban dilettante to Shackletonian adventurer.

From Aleppo she flew to Baghdad, with only one forced landing in the desert, then down the Tigris, over Basra and on to Bandar Abbas at the eastern end of the Persian Gulf, her journey advanced across the Middle East like a line on a map in a movie. It was followed with quietly mounting interest in newsrooms the length of Fleet Street.

On 10 May, Johnson flew clear over Baluchistan and into aviation legend. Landing that evening at Drigh Road aerodrome outside Karachi, she had beaten Hinkler’s Croydon-to-India record by two days and handed the papers an exquisitely constructed rolling news story. The tale of Britain’s lone girl flyer had been germinating nicely ever since a reporter for the London Evening News had chanced on her at the Stag Lane Flying Club’s hangar in North London five months earlier. He had written a prominent exclusive about a twenty-two-year-old blonde from the Midlands that was inaccurate in every detail except the headline: ‘Girl To Fly Alone To Australia’. The scoop was widely followed up. Then interest slumped. It began to return when she took off, and when she smashed her first record she was considerate enough to do so a short drive from a major node of the British Empire. Karachi had reliable telegraphic links to London and a surfeit of hungry stringers. Best of all, it was at least ten days from Australia, even in a Gipsy Moth. If this Johnson lass could only keep flying, her story had legs.

She obliged. She pressed on despite crash-landing on a playing field near Rangoon, impaling her wings on bamboo shoots on a sugar plantation in Java, going missing for twenty-four hours over the shark-infested waters of the Balinese archipelago and shuddering to a halt in the half-light among six-foot anthills near the Portuguese colonial outpost of Atamboea. Every night she threw herself on the mercy of those she found. Every day she fought fatigue, rain, heat, volcanic dust storms and a private catalogue of terrors including, but not limited to, cannibals, engine failure and death by corkscrew dive into the sea.

It made terrific copy. The News of the World wanted exclusive rights and opened the bidding at £500 while Johnson was in the air between Calcutta and Rangoon. Before she took off again, the Daily Mail had won the auction (which was handled by her father) for four times as much.

When she landed in Darwin on Empire Day, solid servants of that empire cried with joy from Hull to Canberra. One who confessed to tears was a retired naval rating who wrote to Johnson’s parents that ‘in all a long, adventurous life’ he’d seen nothing to compare with their daughter’s flight. ‘I was down the Java coast in 1858; you see I have been all that long journey myself and so have just a little idea of what it means. But then to do it alone, and in the air; it is more than wonderful, it is marvellous.’

The use of ‘wonderful’ was a reference to ‘Wonderful Amy’, an instant, cloying hit that played in music halls from Clapham to Llandudno all that summer. Not to be outdone, the pseudonymous Wilhelmina Stitch divided her ‘Fragrant Minute’ column in the Daily Sketch into four breathlessly worshipful stanzas, ending:

Amy! For ever more your name will stand synonymous with pluck;

And when we weary of life’s game, or when we whine and blame ‘our luck’;

We’ll think of your immortal plane and spread our wings and try again.

Johnson’s flight to Australia was a singular achievement: pure in conception, pure in execution and perfectly encapsulating the escapist yearnings of a nation ground down by the Depression. But it was conjured from a complicated life.

As a teenager Amy had been a tomboy and a rebel. When she ‘grew up’, which she never really did, she combined soaring ambition with morbid self-doubt, vanity with shyness and outward prudishness with a serious libido. At the Boulevard School in Hull she was the only girl who could bowl overarm in cricket, and she led two mutinies. One of these involved wearing soft straw Panamas instead of hard straw boaters because she hated straw boaters and because her more vivacious sister, Irene, had moved to the more exclusive Hull High School – where they wore Panamas.

Constance Babington Smith, Johnson’s first biographer, insists that the ‘Revolt of the Straw Hat Brigade’ ended up a humiliating solo effort. (The evidence from Johnson herself tends to support this: ‘The majority of schoolgirls have no gumption at all,’ she wrote later to her younger sister, Molly.) But there was no place for solitary gumption in They Flew Alone, shot in wartime as a propagandist piece. Everybody needed it. So everyone at the school shows up in Panamas and Amy is the Boulevard’s Boadicea.

In fact she was a loner, quick to brood and slow to smile, especially after losing her two front teeth to a cricket ball and having them inexpertly replaced. As a teenager she may have been shy, though this was not the same as being afraid of boys – or men. On the contrary, by the time she was sixteen she was infatuated with one of the more exotic creatures to have graced Hull society before the war. Babington Smith, writing in the 1960s, spared his blushes by referring to him as ‘Franz’. His real name was Hans Arreger. He was Swiss, sarcastic, rather squat, full in the lips and twenty-four years old. Johnson’s aunt Evelyn had met him at her tennis club and invited them both to one of her parties. She was his ticket to better English and, eventually, to furtive encounters in London hotels. He was her Rudolph Valentino.

By later, wartime, standards their affair was not wildly adventurous. But for years it teetered on the brink of scandal, and it did not end happily. In the summer of 1928, seven years after the party at Aunt Evelyn’s and almost as many since Johnson had made plain her wish to marry him, Arreger turned up unexpectedly at the London flat she was sharing with a girlfriend, to tell her he had married someone else – a BBC researcher based in Manchester. She flung herself on her bed and sobbed her heart out.

Part of her anguish was over having ceded the initiative at the last moment to someone she insisted she no longer loved. That spring she had sent him a devastating 2,000-word sign-off letter chiding him for stringing her along, chiding herself for her naivety and chiding men in general for their ‘staring, desiring eyes’. ‘I no longer want you, sexually or any other way,’ she wrote. ‘I don’t believe we could for a single moment be happy together, and if you came to live in London I should probably leave …’. Just in case he concluded that she was seeing someone else, she added in a postscript: ‘I do not want men and have no intention now of ever getting married.’

She would modify that position soon enough. In the meantime, reaching for something that might satisfy her yearning for excitement, and shock Arreger at the same time, she learned to fly.

To fly. Three quarters of a century later it is hard to think of any activity that comes close to the phenomenon of flying in the late 1920s in terms of danger, newness, glamour or the power to liberate and thrill. Pilots in 1928, like computer scientists in 1978, knew their machines were going to change the world. The difference was that every time the pilots went up in theirs they set themselves literally apart from the uninitiated throng, and risked their lives.

Johnson’s first close encounter with this new world of daring and defiance came after a long bus ride to the London Aeroplane Club at the De Havilland aerodrome at Stag Lane, near Edgware. In April 1928 Stag Lane was London’s launchpad to the skies, or at least to the clouds. Naturally inclined to push things until told to stop, Johnson walked onto the aerodrome without a membership card, found a deck chair and watched, enthralled, as the cream of the flying set practised circuits and bumps. Eventually she plucked up the courage to talk to one of them, who told her teaching could be had for 30 shillings an hour. That evening she wrote briskly to her parents: ‘It is too good to be true … I’m going up one evening next week to sign the papers, and I’ll probably have my first lesson next weekend.’

In twenty-five months she would be taking off for Australia with a thermos and a packet of sandwiches. The appearance of an epic journey accomplished on a whim was part of its extraordinary appeal, but in reality Johnson was fiercely driven – and not just by a desire to prove how much Arreger had underestimated her. She was also in search of powerful distractions from grief, for in the summer of 1929 her sister, Irene, had committed suicide by putting her head in the oven at her new marital home. Ultimately Amy was stubbornly convinced that whatever life threw at her she was destined for what came to be known as ‘stardom’.

Not many women pilots in the ATA shared this conviction. Most considered it vulgar to court publicity or were actually scared of it (as some still are, in their late eighties, self-censoring at the sight of a tape recorder out of modesty and a lifelong allegiance to the Official Secrets Act). But all of them understood Johnson’s love of flying as an escape from the wretched trap that faced adventurous young women in the 1930s. They had been handed the vote and a few seats in Parliament. They had won sullen recognition that a man’s work could sometimes be done quite well by women (though not yet – Heaven forbid – for the same pay). Yet in practice almost as soon as they applied for work they were thrown back on the mercy of men.

In Johnson’s case these men included Vernon Wood, partner in a City law firm. He gave this Sheffield University graduate, with her second-class degree in Economics, French and Latin, the best job she had before becoming famous – in his typing pool. There was also Jack Humphreys, sinewy chief mechanic at Stag Lane, who every evening after her day job taught her how to dissect and reassemble Tiger Moth engines. And there was her father, who sent regular envelopes of bank notes to his daughter, and boxed herrings to those who helped her.

For the women who followed Johnson into the air the war would give them a purpose. Johnson had to find her own. From the moment she first considered flying to Australia her best hope of sponsorship lay in persuading Lord Wakefield she could boost his sales of Castrol lubricants. She wondered about delivering an Irish setter to the Maharaja of Patula, since they both loved dogs, but eventually, less than a month before that misty Croydon takeoff, Wakefield came through with a promise of petrol and £300 towards the cost of a plane.

The flight to Australia launched her into a new, blindingly public life that had the rhythm of a professional boxer’s. Every few months, slackening gradually to every few years, she would hatch a new plan to risk her neck, grab some headlines and secure a fat purse with which to fund a lifestyle of sometimes prodigious extravagance. Her first goal after Darwin was Peking, but she got no further than Moscow after crash-landing in a snowbound field sixty miles north of Warsaw. (In Moscow, she found her fame transcended ideology and immunised her against internment: Lenin’s widow hailed her as a model for Soviet womanhood.) She then flew to Tokyo and sat there for tea and photographs with General Nagaoka of the Japanese Imperial Aviation Society. In 1932 she smashed the London-Cape Town-London record in a De Havilland Puss Moth by taking a wild western route over the Sahara and Fernando Po. And the following year she made it ‘backwards’ over the Atlantic, against the prevailing westerlies, and joined the American aviatrix Amelia Earhart and the Roosevelts for tea.

Earhart apart, Johnson was the leading woman in an elite corps of aviation fanatics. Theirs was a golden age of record-breaking in which the right route, written up with the right sort of understatement and to deadline, could net a newspaper deal worth six figures in modern money. There was stiff competition for front-page treatment, but Johnson stayed in contention by means of the second most audacious stunt of her career. Over lunch at Quaglino’s in Soho, on a spring Monday in 1932, she agreed to marry her most formidable and flamboyant rival.

This was Jim Mollison. More than anyone, Mollison drew Johnson into the ‘Mayfair set’ that epitomised 1930s style and superficiality, and from which the ATA eventually offered her relief. He was photogenic and knew all about the paralysing exhaustion of long-distance flying. Otherwise he wasn’t her type. He was short-tempered and addicted to liquor and adrenalin. Scottish by birth, he had flown some of the earliest airliners to have entered service in Australia. It was there he met Johnson while escorting her to Sydney on her post-flight publicity tour in 1930. They Flew Alone depicts that meeting as the dreamy work of fate; an instant connection in a softly lit cockpit pushed through the night by four rumbling great piston engines. He asks for two dances at the Governor General’s ball to which he is taking her, but when he seeks her out there the host himself, in cockaded hat and tails, declares her taken.

In reality, Mollison rates no mention in Johnson’s diaries until 1932, when she met him in Cape Town and began to fall for him. Earlier that year she had had a hysterectomy, apparently to put an end to debilitating period pains that were interfering with her flying. At any rate, whoever married Amy Johnson would not have to be a model father, and when the press learned it was to be Mollison, this incomparably racy couple was adopted as story fodder with no sell-by date.

They lived together at once, not in a house or flat but in a succession of suites in the Grosvenor House Hotel. Their views were of Park Lane and the sky. Their public relations were handled by William Courtney’s Aviation Publicity Services, which had a branch office in the lobby. Their shopping trips would often take in Selfridges – a short walk away on the far side of Oxford Street – which had its own aeroplane department.

Mollison was bad company. He was not quite a monomaniac: adulation and money interested him as much as flying. But he brought out the monomaniac in his new wife, and she drifted rapidly away from the emotional moorings her long-suffering father had provided. After years of regular correspondence in which she would trail her schemes, their costs and their potential returns and he would offer cautious encouragement and money, they fell out of touch. Will and Ciss Johnson would read of their daughter’s flights and fancies in the papers, or hear of them from neighbours and have nothing to add.

On 22 July 1932 they received a rare letter from Amy posted from the Grosvenor House Hotel saying there was nothing to the printed rumours that her wedding to Mollison was imminent. But a week later a telegram arrived in Hull, at 9 p. m., also from Amy, to say the wedding was set for 10 o’clock the following morning and that she and Mollison were ‘trying to keep it as quiet as possible‘. Her parents were patently not invited. But something in the senior Johnsons snapped. They drove all night, left their car in Golders Green at 9.40 a.m. and took the tube and then a taxi to St George’s Church in Hanover Square, arriving as the service ended. As the bride walked out in a black coat and white gloves, she failed to notice them. By the time she learned that her parents had made the trip they were inconsolable, and on their way back home.

Mollison’s best man had been Sir Francis Shelmerdine, the Director of Civil Aviation, who managed to straddle the new world of Mayfair aviation crazies and the older ones of civil service and landed gentry. Yet when fate began to sour on Amy Johnson, even he couldn’t help. Her marriage suffered from the start from Mollison’s inability to resist other women – chief among them Beryl Markham, who had been seducing the Duke of Gloucester at the Grosvenor House Hotel even as Johnson was fêted there on her return from Australia. (Markham, who grew up drinking cow’s blood and curdled milk on her father’s Kenyan farm, later became the first person to fly non-stop from England – rather than Ireland – to North America. She was as fearless as Johnson, and, some say, a more natural pilot.)

Johnson, now being squeezed off the aviation pages by wilder, more glamorous upstarts, began a defiantly elegant descent from stardom. In 1934, she and her husband entered a race from Suffolk to Melbourne as favourites. They lost it to Charles Scott, a preening ex-RAF officer who, four years earlier as an envious escort pilot on her victory tour of Australia, had taunted her unsubtly about her dreadful period pains. The race ended for ‘Jim and Johnnie’, as the Mollison pair were known to the press, with a seized-up engine and a furious, whisky-fuelled argument in their cockpit in Allahabad.

By this time they had in any case been eclipsed in the publicity stakes by none other than Jackie Cochran, the New York beautician and pilot who had hauled herself into the air by her proverbial bootstraps – and by marrying a multi-millionaire. In the race itself, she fared even worse than the Mollisons, running out of fuel over the Carpathians, but she had already beguiled reporters by emerging from her plane at Mildenhall wordlessly and in full make-up, with a printed press release drafted by her lawyer.

Two years later, Amy Johnson was back in the air to publicise a doomed business venture that she and a putative French backer (and lover) were calling Air Cruises. She climbed aboard a Percival Gull in a woollen suit and newsprint scarf designed for her by Elsa Schiaparelli, bound once again for Cape Town. She got there eventually, but only after botching a take-off in North Africa and restarting the whole flight a month later. Even then, far from being fêted at her refuelling stops in Italian-occupied East Africa, she ‘could not shake off the feeling that I was a trespasser, and a nuisance at that’. She had been turned down by the News of the World, but a deal with the Daily Express let her pay off her overdraft and a debt to her father. It failed to rescue her marriage, though. She and Mollison were divorced in 1936, and the approach of war found her broke again and desperate for work. In June 1939, after a brief stint as editor of The Lady Driver, a decidedly earthbound new monthly, she accepted her first full-time flying job, shuttling day and night between Hampshire and the Isle of Wight for a local airline known as the Solent air ferry. The Daily Mirror considered it a story. ‘Folks, you’ve got a chance of being flown by a world-famous air pilot for five bob a time,’ it announced. It was honest work, but it ended abruptly with the outbreak of war and failed to serve as a springboard to the job she really wanted: the head of the ATA.

Johnson already knew and liked Pauline Gower. They had met at the London Aeroplane Club in 1931, when Gower was immersed there in the improvised sort of aero-engineering apprenticeship that Johnson had glamorised the year before.

Years later, she spent a weekend at the Gower family home near Tunbridge Wells, where Pauline and her friend Dorothy Spicer invited Amy to join their two-woman firm providing joyrides in the sky to crowds who would queue up at fairgrounds across the country for a taste of the fad that was changing the world. Johnson considered them ‘nice girls’, but declined. Theirs was a raucous, retail sort of flying, taking off from new airfields for new crowds every day of the summer. Johnson considered it several steps beneath her. But as far as the aviation establishment was concerned, she was beneath them.

Francis Shelmerdine and Pop d’Erlanger favoured Gower for the ATA job on the grounds that she had never been an aviation record-seeker like Johnson, ‘with all the publicity which is attached to that role’. This may have been sensible: the idea of putting women in RAF aircraft in wartime was an invitation to scarlet-faced apoplexy in the RAF’s own high command, especially if they were to be led by the curious, chippy creature who had pioneered the heretical unisexing of the cockpit. But d’Erlanger’s verdict was also a simply coded confirmation that Gower was ‘One of Us’. Johnson, with her flat, Humberside vowels and undisguised need for recognition – not to mention money – clearly was not.

But Pauline Gower didn’t forget about her. On the contrary, after she was appointed head of the ATA’s women’s section she sent Johnson a formal letter inviting her to apply to join up. Johnson did, and was put on a waiting list. In May 1940 she agreed to take a flying test that Gower assured her would be a formality, but Johnson appears to have been simultaneously revealed as a clumsy lander (which she was) and repelled by the idea of mucking in with the other hopefuls. She described one of them in a letter home as ‘all dolled up in full Sidcot suit, fur-lined helmet and goggles, fluffing up her hair etc. – the typical Lyons waitress type … I suddenly realised I could not go in and sit in line with these girls (who all more or less look up to me as God!), so I turned tail and ran’.

It was true, or true enough. The younger pilots did revere her, but when Johnson eventually enrolled in the ATA in May 1940 she found she didn’t mind. One of her admirers was Jackie Sorour, a tungsten-tipped South African who affected a ditzy innocence but would later pull off an extraordinary aerial hitchhike to Pretoria and back. Sorour, a qualified instructor by the age of twenty despite her mother’s dogged opposition to her flying, was interviewed by Gower at Hatfield in July 1940, and immediately admitted to the ATA. From Gower’s office, she wrote later:

I went to the crew room to find the pilot who was to give me a brief refresher on the Tiger Moth. There were four or five women lounging on chairs and tables. One was laughing as I entered. I looked at her dumbfounded as I recognised the face that had inspired me during my brief flying career and had flitted on the world’s headlines for a decade. I rushed over to her and gushed: ‘Miss Johnson, may I have your autograph?’ She stared at me. There was a painful silence. Oh God, I wished the floor would open up and devour me. How could I have behaved so inanely? Suddenly she grinned: ‘My dear child, I’ll swap it for yours.’

There was something else that gradually endeared Johnson to the ATA besides the return of the old adulation – the prospect of flying Spitfires. For all her experience, Wonderful Amy had never flown anything faster than a De Havilland Comet, maximum speed 200 mph. The war was forcing up speeds. By the summer of 1940, when Fighter Command’s precious Hurricanes and Spitfires were being tested daily to destruction by the Luftwaffe’s formidable Messerschmitt 109s and Focke-Wulf 190s, the Vickers Super-marine factories in Southampton and Castle Bromwich were already turning out Mark V Spitfires capable of 400 mph when straight and level and no-one knew quite how fast in a dive.

Johnson never flew one. She died too soon. One reason for her death, oddly, was national security. Before the war the Lorenz company in Germany had devised a beautifully simple radio navigation system based on corridors of land-based transmitters. The transmitters on one side of the corridor would broadcast, continuously, only the Morse signal for A – a dot and then a dash. Those on the other side would broadcast only the signal for N – a dash, then a dot. Suitably equipped aircraft flying straight along the corridor would know they were on course because of antennae mounted at opposite ends of their fuselages: one tuned to the N signal and one to the A. As long as each antenna was the same distance from its signal’s source, the dots and dashes would overlap into a continuous tone, dull but infinitely reassuring. If the plane drifted off this radio ‘beam’ in either direction, its antennae would slip in relation to their sources. The overlapping would become imperfect, the tone interrupted, and the pilot would be snapped out of her daydream or funk.

If you had an ordinary voice radio you could also call up the nearest radio-equipped aerodrome and ask it where you were. Eric ‘Winkle’ Brown, the finest test pilot Britain ever produced, once did this over a fogbound patch of Kent, and it probably saved his life. But in that Airspeed Oxford at Squire’s Gate, with her chit for Kidlington in Oxfordshire, Johnson had no radio of any kind, and nor did any other ferry pilots. As the spliced-in newsreel puts it in They Flew Alone: ‘No radio of course. Too useful for Jerry.’

The other reason Johnson would never fly a Spitfire was the weather that was keeping her on the ground at an aerodrome near Blackpool on that miserable Sunday in January 1941; the weather that would have made the radio navigation option something of a life-saver; the sodden, all-pervading, bloody-minded British weather.

Johnson finally lost patience and took off at 11.49 a.m. Not many others ventured up that day, but Jackie Sorour did. ‘That same afternoon I took off from South Wales in a twin-engined Oxford aircraft bound [like Johnson] for Kidlington,’ she wrote in Woman Pilot.

The weather … lay like a blanket over the Southern Counties. Drizzle and low cloud was forecast for most of the route to Kidlington but with a promise of improvement. Reluctantly I headed into the curtain of rain and, a few hundred feet above the ground, searched for the promised improvement. It was non-existent. I should have turned back but valleys beckoned invitingly. I flew into one and peered ahead but the trap had sprung. The other end of the narrow valley was blocked with a wall of cloud. I rammed open the throttles, pulled the control column back and climbed steeply. With unnerving suddenness the ground vanished as the clouds swirled around the Oxford in a cold embrace and forced me to climb on instruments … I tried to keep the angle of climb constant. Suddenly at four thousand feet the clouds splintered into bright wintry sunshine; beneath me the clouds stretched to all horizons like a soft woollen blanket. Desperately lonely and frightened, I searched for a gap. There was none. Whilst I stayed above I was safe. Like a spotlight the sun cast a shadow of the Oxford on the top of the clouds and circled it with a halo of rainbow hue. I had the odd thought that I was the shadow and the shadow was me. Curiously I watched it to see what it was going to do next; silly thing, it was going round in circles.

The petrol gauge drooped inexorably. I had to go down … Reluctantly I throttled back and eased the nose down. The clouds embraced me like water around a stone as I slowly descended. Two thousand feet. Fifteen hundred. One thousand. Six hundred. It’s no good, prompted experience, get back. Ignoring the urgent warning I eased lower with the altimeter ticking off the altitude like a devilish clock. If I were lucky I would be over the hill-less sea. If not, I had not long to live. Suddenly the clouds broke, revealing, just beneath, the grey, sullen waters of the Bristol Channel. I pulled off my helmet and wiped the sweat from my face before turning towards the Somerset coast faintly visible to the east.

I looked at the petrol gauge. Twenty minutes left to find an aerodrome. Absently I worked out the little problem. Twenty times sixty. Two sixes are twelve. Add two noughts. That’s it. One thousand two hundred seconds before I wrecked the aeroplane and paid the penalty for not turning back. But all the luck in the sky was with me that day. Soon after crossing the coast an aerodrome blossomed out of the ground like a flower from the desert. Pulling the Oxford round in a tight circuit I landed on the glistening, rain-soaked runway.

Next day on returning to Hatfield I learned that Amy Johnson was dead.

There is not much that can be said with any confidence about Johnson’s last flight, though it must have droned on against an appalling crescendo of fear. For those left to reconstruct it over the years there is also the knowledge that, for all her fear, she had every reason to believe until the last second of her life that she would survive this scrape as she had so many others.

Did she, in fact, kill herself? She did once tell a friend that she was sure she’d finish up in the drink. And it was alleged by Jimmy Martin (later Sir James, an aircraft builder who never quite finished an aircraft for her to fly) that she told him her first impulse on learning years earlier that Hans Arreger had married someone else had been to end it all by finishing her flying training and then crashing. But the idea that her doomed run down to Kidlington was a suicide mission is even less plausible than the more popular conspiracy theory that she was carrying a mystery passenger on a clandestine or illicit trip (some speculated she was smuggling the faithless Arreger back to Switzerland, even though there is no evidence that she was still in contact with him) – and had to bale out because of a catastrophic malfunction or even after being hit by friendly fire.

The truth was almost certainly more prosaic, but just as deadly. She went ‘over the top’, as she said she would and as Sorour also did. But she couldn’t ‘crack on through’ because there were no cracks in her swathe of sky: just deep, unrelenting cloud. Sorour had risked everything by descending through it. Johnson actually risked much less by summoning the courage to do what she had always dreaded and bale out– something, amazingly, that she had never had to do before. After three and a half hours the Oxford’s second tank ran dry. As the two engines died, she feathered the propellers and levelled the plane at 3,000 feet, and falling. It was now gliding eastwards. She unstrapped herself from her seat, strapped on her parachute and walked a few steps back down the floating fuselage to the emergency exit door, which was not hinged. It had to be wrenched right out of its opening. Johnson managed this, and jumped. She would have experienced a considerable physical shock because the cabin had been heated but the cloud was nothing but freezing moisture; for anyone below, it was snowing gently.

When the parachute opened cleanly, and high enough for an orderly descent, Johnson would also have felt relief. At this point, still with no view of whatever part of England was beneath her but uninjured and alert, the only irreversible loss in her world that day was of one twin-engined Airspeed Oxford. Much else had gone wrong. There would be an accident investigation and report. She would have to answer questions. It would be a story. Pauline Gower, for one, would ask whatever had induced her to take off that morning, and in truth it would be difficult to tell her. Pride? Boredom? Sullen arrogance? A secret conviction of invincibility, annealed in the homicidal Taurus Mountains and somewhere over Nova Scotia one terrifying night in 1932?

When she descended through the cloud she saw for the first time that she was over water. Her parachuting nightmare was now coming true. The cold was about to intensify in a way she could not imagine, or endure for long. But even in the few seconds between appearing over the Thames estuary and plunging into it there were, suddenly, new reasons to hope. By pure chance there were ships everywhere, some close enough to help if only they spotted her and she could get clear of the parachute.

They had certainly spotted her. An entire convoy, numbered CE21, consisting of seventeen merchant ships, two destroyers, four minesweepers, four motor launches and five cross-Channel ferries converted to deploy barrage balloons, was steaming up the estuary. One of the balloon ships, HMS Haslemere, was closest to Johnson. From its bridge a Lieutenant Henry O’Dea actually saw her drop gently into the water at a distance of perhaps half a mile. His captain, Lieutenant Commander Walter Fletcher, ordered the Haslemere to head for her at full speed. Johnson was still alive when it reached her, and was heard to shout the words, ‘Hurry, please hurry’. But she failed to grab hold of any of the lines thrown in her direction.

In its dash to pick her up, the Haslemere ran aground in mud beneath the shallow waters of the estuary’s southern edge. Fletcher ordered the engines to slow astern but they took ten precious minutes to work the vessel free. By this time Johnson had drifted towards the ship’s stern and was helpless with cold. As Captain Fletcher pulled off his outer clothes to dive in for her, a wave lifted the Haslemere and pushed Johnson under its propellers. As they fell, they crushed her. ‘She did not come into view again,’ seaman Nicholas Roberts, who was watching from the ship’s bulwark, wrote later in an affidavit. Indeed, her body was never found.

Fourteen months later, They Flew Alone received its première at Leicester Square. In attendance, besides Pauline Gower, Jackie Cochran and Anna Neagle, was Lord Wakefield, Amy Johnson’s faithful oiler. In the film, shaking his head in something like bewilderment, the Wakefield character tells a white-tied friend: ‘She’s driven a coach and four through centuries of custom and convention.’

‘She’s opened a great gap in the fence that’s been surrounding our young women for generations,’ the friend replies. ‘And now the rest of the devils will come pouring through after her. I can’t quite see the end of it.’

‘There isn’t any end to it. What that young woman has done is the sort of thing that goes on forever,’ says Wakefield.

After a final image of Anna Neagle’s character dissolving into a montage of uniformed women marching purposefully in all directions, the film ends with the dedication:

‘To all the Amy Johnsons of today’.