Free Spitfire Girls by Carol Gould Page A

wondered if it was any easier for fathers of adopted girls.
    His other daughter, Annabel, had fallen in love with an Oxford undergraduate as obsessed with the Spanish conflict as his sister Angelique was with flying aeroplanes. Though Zack Florian’s anti-fascist ravings had alarmed the elder Cobb, Annabel had seemed destined for a conventional life. When her man turned his rage into actuality and left for a rebel cell in Zumaya with his brother Paul, she had been inspired to do the same by following them a week after their departure. Unfortunately, she had gone about her mission so clumsily that no-one knew she had left England until one of the Cobbs had been missed at a dinnerparty; furthermore the rampaging fiancé had had not an inkling of her unusual travel plans and was not expecting her arrival. He joined others in Spain and they embarked on the road to solidarity, while Annabel Cobb entered the same convulsing country and several hours later disappeared.
    Sir Henry could never fathom his odd lot in life: scores of daughters across the British Isles fitted so comfortably into the landscape. Why not his own?
    â€˜Haydon has been snooping around again, Henry.’ Valerie had arrived. Her libertarian habit of calling him by his Christian name vexed him to an unusual degree today, but he knew he needed to be alert in her energetic presence.
    â€˜You had a visitor from Germany. In East Anglia news travels faster than passion, my girl.’
    â€˜What’s that supposed to mean?’
    â€˜Tim has always had his eye on you and Shirley, and now he’s pinning his frustration on the presence of a Germanspy. He knows you’re more interested in the spy than in him, so he has got a bit jealous. That’s all.’
    Valerie bit her lip, something she had done since childhood whenever there was talk of boys. Suddenly she felt a kind of protective affection for her father.
    â€˜The man Haydon saw, Dad, was not German. He is an Austrian. How did your dear fellow get his incorrect information?’
    â€˜You know jolly well he loves to watch you from afar, as the saying goes.’ Sir Henry had become more subdued – it was an occasion on which he had been called Dad.
    â€˜I do wish he could get over his infatuation. Anyway, Shirley and I aren’t having an unmentionable sort of relationship, if that is what he wants so much to see through a peephole.’
    Sir Henry Cobb bristled. It was the one subject which made his orderly brain feel shipwrecked.
    â€˜In his position as MP for an adjoining constituency, he is concerned about aliens wanting to do business in this area. What did this Jew ask you?’
    â€˜I like to think of him as an Austrian industrialist, rather elegant, who wants to set up an aircraft firm in the county. Hopefully he will not wish to build on the fox’s covert.’
    â€˜That’s no joke, Val – Haydon Senior is Master of the Hounds.’
    They both smiled and for a rare moment father and daughter shared the slight contempt that at times they held gleefully for their own class and for its ignorance of catastrophes pending.
    â€˜You should meet him, Dad. He needs support. The stories he tells from over there might worry you – if notChurchill.’ She went to the old mahogany sideboard and poured herself a small sherry. ‘Frankly, we think he’s either mad or a prophet.’
    â€˜Jews have been known to manufacture such stories on odd occasions. When are you going to stop your nonsense and live like a human being?’
    His harshness had started its usual journey into Valerie’s gut. She drank.
    He continued:
    â€˜Everything you two do is under scrutiny, my dear girl. I’m hearing about this Austrian chap because Haydon and his chums have nothing better to do than be voyeurs.’
    Valerie downed the liquid in one gulp, with a premonition of worse to come.
    â€˜What galls me more than anything, however, is that you