Free Spitfire Girls by Carol Gould

there is one.’
    â€˜If there is what, Raine?’
    â€˜A war.’
    â€˜Oh, I thought you meant we might be allies if there were a three-ring circus.’ The sarcasm in Edith’s voice was palpable.
    â€˜Valerie Cobb lives in a circus,’ Raine observed, as Edith familiarized herself with the streamlined controls that resembled a Jules Verne prophecy. Its twin engines purred into life at a touch of the American’s hand.
    As the little plane, laden with ingeniously injected fuel, made a surprising roar and veered out over a giant new oil drum, an ice-cream man prepared his van and thought he could see a gloved hand waving and a lipsticked mouth smiling from the cockpit soaring out towards Heimat.

10
    For years Sir Henry Cobb had had to stave off rude remarks about his daughter’s desire to cohabit with another girl. Until 1934 his life had been satisfactory because his wedded union had been perfect – during his wife’s life he had often wondered if all men his age, let alone MPs his age, found sex the most exalting of human experiences. Now Julia was dead, and he had become irritable. Other men in the House sought satisfaction in peculiar ways amidst the fog and rain of London’s back streets while his needs had disappeared with her ashes. In recent years he had become obsessed with the affairs of the most adventurous of his daughters, principally her business ventures.
    From the time she was a small girl Valerie’s interests had been far from the norm: her arms became strong in the pursuit of archery, and constant battles with her mother were the result. A sister, Annabel, had remained in the background, thinking her sibling mad and dangerous. When Valerie reached her first teenage year she had wanted to be blooded like the boys and it was no help when other Sirs began to find her figure enticing when she rode to hounds. As Lady Cobb became iller and frailer, so did her husband’s cronies increase their imaginings of comfort with his attractive child.
    At fourteen Valerie was excelling at lawn tennis and on one afternoon when she had beaten all the village she decided she would go to the most beautiful room in the house and stretch out on the ancient bed. She wondered,some years later, how many previous generations of village fathers had entered that room and ravished other people’s girl and boy children on that same bed after the boys had been secretly playing with dolls and the girls had been secretly beating men at their own games.
    After Sir Henry’s chums had had their way with his daughter she shunned anything to do with tennis and the people in the village lamented the loss of a potential Helen Wills. Valerie decided she would take up a sport in which she would not be wearing enticing gear – a sport which took place out of the reach of her village and her father’s hunt warriors … She had told her mother about her weird post-match encounters and shortly afterwards the wasted woman died. Valerie tried to recall some things she knew about her mother, but she could not. Having already seen a great deal of life at the age of seventeen she could recall far more about herself. Indeed, she regarded her mother’s childbearing an irrelevant achievement if it meant having had to submit to the strange man on the ancient bed who at other times was Sir Henry Cobb M P.
    Her father.
    Time passed.
    On this day in 1937 Cobb was reading a confidential government report on the Hindenburg Disaster and on the build-up of arms and aircraft in Hitler’s territories. Valerie was due to arrive at any moment. Tightness in his chest was the symptom he suffered whenever he had to face his unruly daughter. Others saw her as charming and even stunning, but he could see her only as an imagined ex-lover of hordes of huntsmen, a fiendishly attractive goddess to whom he had also given the gift of life. When she was inhis presence his imaginings drifted in and out and he