Free Spitfire Women of World War II by Giles Whittell

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’sfaithful 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.’
    â€˜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.’
    â€˜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