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

Constantinople, Johnson had to find a way through Anatolia’s forbidding Taurus Mountains, and this is where her straight line became sinuous. As she approached the mountains around lunchtime on 7 May, they were covered by cloud. She climbed to stay in clear air, as she would years later with much less reason to be scared. But at 11,000 feet her ‘engine started an ominous coughing and spitting’, she wrote afterwards:
    I descended to 10,000 feet and decided to try to follow the railway through its winding gorges … I had one very unpleasant moment when threading my way through an exceptionally narrow gorge with the mountains rising sheer on either side of me only a few feet from my wings and towering high above. Rounding a corner I ran straight into a bank of low clouds, and for an awful minute could see nothing at all. In desperation I pushed down the nose of the machine to try to dive below them, and in half a minute – which seemed to me an eternity – I emerged from the cloud at a speed of 120 with one wing down and aiming for a wall of rock. Once I could see where I was going it was easy to straighten the machine, but I was rather badly shaken.
    Johnson’s passage through the Taurus Mountains was undoubtedly terrifying and it marked her graduation from suburban dilettante to Shackletonian adventurer.
    From Aleppo she flew to Baghdad, with only one forced landing in the desert, then down the Tigris, over Basra and on to Bandar Abbas at the eastern end of the Persian Gulf, her journey advanced across the Middle East like a line on a map in a movie. It was followed with quietly mounting interest in newsrooms the length of Fleet Street.
    On 10 May, Johnson flew clear over Baluchistan and into aviation legend. Landing that evening at Drigh Road aerodrome outside Karachi, she had beaten Hinkler’s Croydon-to-India record by two days and handed the papers an exquisitely constructed rolling news story. The tale of Britain’s lone girl flyer had been germinating nicely ever since a reporter for the London Evening News had chanced on her at the Stag Lane Flying Club’s hangar in North London five months earlier. He had written a prominent exclusive about a twenty-two-year-old blonde from the Midlands that was inaccurate in every detail except the headline: ‘Girl To Fly Alone To Australia’. The scoop was widely followed up. Then interest slumped. It began to return when she took off, and when she smashed her first record she was considerate enough to do so a short drive from a major node of the British Empire. Karachi had reliable telegraphic links to London and a surfeit of hungry stringers. Best of all, it was at least ten days from Australia, even in a Gipsy Moth. If this Johnson lass could only keep flying, her story had legs.
    She obliged. She pressed on despite crash-landing on a playingfield near Rangoon, impaling her wings on bamboo shoots on a sugar plantation in Java, going missing for twenty-four hours over the shark-infested waters of the Balinese archipelago and shuddering to a halt in the half-light among six-foot anthills near the Portuguese colonial outpost of Atamboea. Every night she threw herself on the mercy of those she found. Every day she fought fatigue, rain, heat, volcanic dust storms and a private catalogue of terrors including, but not limited to, cannibals, engine failure and death by corkscrew dive into the sea.
    It made terrific copy. The News of the World wanted exclusive rights and opened the bidding at £500 while Johnson was in the air between Calcutta and Rangoon. Before she took off again, the Daily Mail had won the auction (which was handled by her father) for four times as much.
    When she landed in Darwin on Empire Day, solid servants of that empire cried with joy from Hull to Canberra. One who confessed to tears was a retired naval rating who wrote to Johnson’s parents that ‘in all a long, adventurous life’ he’d seen