Free Spitfire Women of World War II by Giles Whittell Page B

old. The weather has been so unusually Arctic that by reaction the censors’ hearts were thawed enough to permit disclosure of the fact that this region shivered since past several weeks in the coldest spell since 1894, with the mercury dropping almost to zero and a damp knife edge wind piercing the marrow.
    The reference to zero was in Fahrenheit. It was the worst weather imaginable to be flying around in open planes. Small wonder that when the ‘First Eight’ attended a mid-winter photo shoot to mark their arrival at Hatfield, they looked happier in Sidcot suits than in their Austin Reed skirts.
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    Though not in Amy Johnson’s league, Pauline Gower had been newsworthy in her own right for several years by the outbreak of war. Like Rosemary Rees she was the daughter of a senior Tory and smitten with flying. Unlike Rees, she had flown for a living. She started in 1931 as a freelance ‘joyrider’ flying from a field in Kent, and moved on to contract circus flying for the British Hospitals’ Air Pageant. This was a less charitable outfit than the name implied, but the steady work helped make the payments on her £300, two-seater Simmonds Spartan, bought on an instalment plan. By 1936 she was operating a profitable air taxi service across the Wash from Hunstanton to Skegness. ‘And now,’ she told a BBC reporter at the start of 1940, ‘I can claim to have carried over 30,000 passengers in the air.’ Given that she had never flown anything bigger than a three-seater, it was no idle boast.
    The flying had toughened her. Performing one summer evening in 1933 at Harrogate with the Hospitals’ Air Pageant, Gower landed shortly before dusk to watch one of the show’s most reliable crowd-pleasers with the rest of the spectators – the parachute jump. ‘We had several parachutists, one of whom was named Evans,’ she wrote. ‘He was extremely clever at his job andcould judge his descents so well that he often landed between two machines parked on the ground right in front of the public enclosure.’
    There was a stiff breeze that evening, and plenty of visibility. Evans was taken up to 1,000 feet. He jumped and pulled his ripcord in the normal way, but he was drifting fast on account of the breeze. The performer in him still wanted to get down in front of the crowd, so he spilled air from the parachute by pulling on the shroud lines. The idea was to come down faster than usual to minimise the drift, releasing the shroud lines with a few seconds to go to allow the canopy to refill and soften his landing. Evans had done it scores of times before, but this time the parachute collapsed completely. The crowd watched, horror struck, as he accelerated into the ground unchecked by the twisted sausage of silk above him. He was killed instantly.
    â€˜Fortunately, the light was already beginning to fail,’ Gower recalled. The performance was terminated immediately, and the shocked crowds went home. ‘It was a blow for all of us. Evans was extremely popular … but in the air circus business there is no time for sentiment.’ Next day the Pageant moved on to Redcar. There, ‘although the thoughts of many of us were at Harrogate with the still, dark form we had left crumpled up on the field the night before, the show went on as usual’.
    Later, in the ATA ferry pools, the phrase adopted to describe the routine business of embroidering a close shave to make it sound closer still was to ‘line-shoot’. It was used in the mess at the all-female No. 15 Ferry Pool at Hamble, in particular, to stop the chattier young pilots making fools of themselves. But no-one ever accused Gower of ‘line-shooting’.
    The toughening of this deceptively sunny convent girl with the bright laugh and a resolute smile had begun thirteen years earlier, on what her Mother Superior had feared would be her deathbed. Struck down in her late teens with a