Spitfire Women of World War II by Giles Whittell Read Free Book Online

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 hadfailed 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 definitivelythan 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.)
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