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

nothing to compare with their daughter’s flight. ‘I was down the Java coast in 1858; you see I have been all that long journey myself and so have just a little idea of what it means. But then to do it alone, and in the air; it is more than wonderful, it is marvellous.’
    The use of ‘wonderful’ was a reference to ‘Wonderful Amy’, an instant, cloying hit that played in music halls from Clapham to Llandudno all that summer. Not to be outdone, the pseudonymous Wilhelmina Stitch divided her ‘Fragrant Minute’ column in the Daily Sketch into four breathlessly worshipful stanzas, ending:
    Amy! For ever more your name will stand synonymous with pluck ;
    And when we weary of
life’s
game, or when we whine and blame ‘our luck’ ;
    We’ll
think of your immortal plane and spread our wings and try again .
    Johnson’s flight to Australia was a singular achievement: pure in conception, pure in execution and perfectly encapsulating theescapist yearnings of a nation ground down by the Depression. But it was conjured from a complicated life.
    As a teenager Amy had been a tomboy and a rebel. When she ‘grew up’, which she never really did, she combined soaring ambition with morbid self-doubt, vanity with shyness and outward prudishness with a serious libido. At the Boulevard School in Hull she was the only girl who could bowl overarm in cricket, and she led two mutinies. One of these involved wearing soft straw Panamas instead of hard straw boaters because she hated straw boaters and because her more vivacious sister, Irene, had moved to the more exclusive Hull High School – where they wore Panamas.
    Constance Babington Smith, Johnson’s first biographer, insists that the ‘Revolt of the Straw Hat Brigade’ ended up a humiliating solo effort. (The evidence from Johnson herself tends to support this: ‘The majority of schoolgirls have no gumption at all,’ she wrote later to her younger sister, Molly.) But there was no place for solitary gumption in They Flew Alone , shot in wartime as a propagandist piece. Everybody needed it. So everyone at the school shows up in Panamas and Amy is the Boulevard’s Boadicea.
    In fact she was a loner, quick to brood and slow to smile, especially after losing her two front teeth to a cricket ball and having them inexpertly replaced. As a teenager she may have been shy, though this was not the same as being afraid of boys – or men. On the contrary, by the time she was sixteen she was infatuated with one of the more exotic creatures to have graced Hull society before the war. Babington Smith, writing in the 1960s, spared his blushes by referring to him as ‘Franz’. His real name was Hans Arreger. He was Swiss, sarcastic, rather squat, full in the lips and twenty-four years old. Johnson’s aunt Evelyn had met him at her tennis club and invited them both to one of her parties. She was his ticket to better English and, eventually, to furtive encounters in London hotels. He was her Rudolph Valentino.
    By later, wartime, standards their affair was not wildly adventurous. But for years it teetered on the brink of scandal, and it didnot end happily. In the summer of 1928, seven years after the party at Aunt Evelyn’s and almost as many since Johnson had made plain her wish to marry him, Arreger turned up unexpectedly at the London flat she was sharing with a girlfriend, to tell her he had married someone else – a BBC researcher based in Manchester. She flung herself on her bed and sobbed her heart out.
    Part of her anguish was over having ceded the initiative at the last moment to someone she insisted she no longer loved. That spring she had sent him a devastating 2,000-word sign-off letter chiding him for stringing her along, chiding herself for her naivety and chiding men in general for their ‘staring, desiring eyes’. ‘I no longer want you, sexually or any other way,’ she