The Missing Pilot

Author note: This is my entry for the Valentine's Day Story Contest 2024.

Sunday, 14th February 1943

Day of St. Valentine, Martyr at Rome, c.269

"Are you okay, hen?" a Georgie voice asked me, sympathetically tugging gently at the corner of my woollen blanket. It belonged to a girl called Jennifer, although everyone called her Tooley for some reason which had never been explained and might possibly have been forgotten. She was waif-thin and when she sat on the corner of my bed there was barely a protest from the mattress.

I sniffed, hard, and dabbed my eyes with the opposite corner of the blanket. "Yes, I'm okay," I lied, rolling onto my side to look at Tooley through blurry lids. "Just rereading an old letter."

Tooley's tiny arm reached out and patted where she thought my knee was through the blanket, but which was really more like the middle of my thigh. "Today is a tough day for quite a few of us, love." Tooley said with a thin smile. "We need to stick together, us girls."

I nodded, sniffed again and then rooted around in the sleeve of my nightgown for my handkerchief, which I pretended to daintily wipe my eyes with but really I was wiping my nose. I felt a little ridiculous, crying like a child in front of Tooley. She was in her mid-thirties and had lost her husband of fifteen years at Tobruk eighteen months ago. They had never been able to have children, but that only added to her sadness, and through still-wet eyes I watched her changing out of her nightdress and into her Sunday best with renewed admiration for her tough spirit.

Johnny Young, officially missing in action in the North Atlantic, had only been my boyfriend for about six months. He'd finished his pilot training in the summer and we'd begun going steady in the two weeks we'd had together before his posting to HMS Swan. Since then, we'd exchanged letters and met twice, when he was on leave, but in the period between Christmas and New Year his parents had received a telegram notifying them of his disappearance. I knew these telegrams were being received up and down Britain and the women's programme on the wireless was constantly reminding us to have a stiff lip and keep on going, no matter what the bad news was. But somehow, six weeks later, the loss of Johnny felt just as raw as the day the telegram arrived. I fervently and frequently wished we'd transacted one of those impulsive war marriages (after all, I was twenty-one and he would have been almost twenty-two, we weren't teenagers) since being a war widow like Tooley seemed more respectable than merely being the moping girlfriend of a dead man.

I had made the mistake, this Valentine's morning, of re-reading Johnny's final letter to me. It felt unbelievable that this would have been our first Valentine's Day together, and I just wanted to feel close to him, lying there in the thin light of the morning before everyone got up, and seeing the words he wrote on the paper.

Darling Ava...

...There's something about the dawn, the icy darkness thawing to an unsteady blue, all manner of shades, which leaves me thinking of you. I know that one of those shades of the sky must match your eyes exactly...

...I've been doing plenty of flying and the captain of the Swan always gets me back down safely. I think the crew have a soft spot for my aircraft because in it I keep those two swan feathers we found in the park by the Dragonfly lake. Do you remember? Whenever I see them I secretly remember that kiss you gave me that day...

...I've got to wrap up, I'm 'on readiness' in ten minutes. Give my love to your parents and I'll let you know about my next leave. All of my love and kisses from

Johnny.

But of course, I just started weeping before I'd read two words, and I'd blotched part of his signature by dropping a tear on it. Stupid.

"Let's keep it moving, ladies," bawled Mrs Lawson, the section head of the Women's Land Army. She was one of those institutional types who come crawling out of the woodwork whenever there's a war on, and then seem to disappear just as quickly afterwards. The wife of a local landowner, she dedicated all of her energy into turning her group of twenty soft, city-living urban girls into a fighting-fit labour force feeding the nation. She stuck her head into our room, her grey curls already jammed into her cap. "Church at eight and then we're over at Mr. Linton's farm, digging drainage."

There was a low, collective groan from the girls. Digging was the worst of all jobs, and after the unbelievably wet January we'd had, everything was soaking, muddy and cold.

"No complaints!" Mrs Lawson went on, moving on to the next room. "There's roast lunch, or whatever we can put together out of the rations, to cheer you up."

"Won't cheer me up, much. You just can't make a decent Yorkshire pudding out of a powdered egg," sniffed Lucy, a brunette girl from Bradford who'd worked in a factory before the war and had a boyfriend away in the Middle East somewhere. Something about the dour way she said it made me smile for the first time that day.

Finally finding the energy in me, I stopped thinking about Johnny, climbed out of bed and set my feet down on the icy cold floor, shivering. Kelmingsdale Hall, where we were billeted, was grand-sounding but was in fact a crumbling Victorian pile that had belonged to some old country squire. It was draughty, perpetually cold, and when the wind blew from the east any room with a fire burning would have smoke belched back out of the flues. And in this part of Northumberland, five miles from the coast, the wind was almost always blowing from the east.

"Lend me some stockings, Lucy," said the final occupant of the room, a Glaswegian named Dolly who'd grown up in a tenement with four siblings and chain-smoked whenever she could find a free moment. "Can't find mine." Her accent was so thick that Lucy had to squint for a moment and decipher it in her head.

"Mine will be loose on you," Lucy pointed out. "Ava, can you lend her? You're almost the same size."

This was a little bit unfair. Dolly was a great big girl, almost six feet tall and broad. She ate every scrap of food she could get her hands on and wore a men's set of overalls. Most of us girls had joined the Land Army to feel useful and earn a bit of a living, whereas Dolly was so strong that she'd practically been conscripted. I, on the other hand, was merely on the tall side at five feet seven inches. My figure, which I'd inherited from my mother along with my blonde curls, was like an hourglass, with wide hips and great big breasts which I hated. My legs were nowhere near the size of Dolly's, but Lucy and Tooley shared the narrow, boyish figures that were so popular and clearly Dolly would never fit into their clothes. I'd recently read with great interest of an American innovation, whereby women's breasts were measured by volume and categorised into letter grades: A being the smallest and D being the largest. I dreamed of the day I could walk into a department store in my hometown of Birmingham and buy a 'D-cup' brassiere which would actually fit, instead of endlessly forcing my bust into the assortment of ill-fitting corsets and girdles I'd wrestled with since I had started to develop.

I handed my oldest and most hated pair of stockings over to Dolly with pleasure. They'd belonged to my mother, first, and were desperately uncomfortable. But beggars can't be choosers and Dolly was just grateful not to be late for breakfast.

Technically, Sunday morning church was optional. My father had been a committed Methodist his whole life, but Mother was indifferent to religion and I'd followed her path. However, Mrs Lawson was a force of nature and, to be honest, spending a couple of hours in the company of the kindly Reverend Hawkswell and then being plied with tea by the church ladies afterwards wasn't a bad way to spend the morning. The alternative, free time at Kelmingsdale Hall, usually just depressed me, especially as other girls used it to read or write love letters. This was a popular option this morning of Valentine's Day, so it was a reduced cohort of us who walked the half mile along a footpath from the Hall to the church, a picturesque country edifice with mediaeval stonework and sheep grazing in the churchyard, which was the absolute opposite of the sturdy brick non--conformist building Father always went to in Castle Bromwich.

"Ava," Rev. Hawkswell said gently, putting his teacup down in his saucer and gently taking my elbow after the service. "So lovely to see you again this morning."

"Hello, vicar," I replied, putting on a cheerful attitude. "Thank you for your sermon."

The vicar smiled. "Well, with a congregation full of women it was just too tempting to expand upon poor old martyred Valentine this morning. In any case, I was wondering whether I might call upon you to assist the flower guild in preparing the Easter flowers for church this year? Mrs Lawson thought you might be interested."

I had no idea where Mrs Lawson had got the notion that I knew anything about flowers from.

The vicar noticed my hesitation. "There's, ahem, usually a lunch provided for those ladies doing the flowers..." He dropped his voice. "Some of which may not strictly be on the ration."

We only ate government-approved food as Land Girls at the Hall, but in such a rural area black-market food was not uncommon, and farmer's wives were usually the keepers of the keys to those supplies. My hesitant expression switched to a smile.

"I'd love to," I said, trying not to sound too enthusiastic at the idea of thick-cut bacon or fresh eggs.

"Wonderful, I'll pass your name on," Hawkswell said, sounding delighted. "I'll drop by the Hall later today and give you the schedule."

Despite the fine weather which had developed as the day had gone on, there was a general sense of dejection amongst the girls as we changed back into work clothes after lunch. Ditch-digging at Farmer Linton's was going to be tough work no matter how you looked at it, and although we were supposed to be buoyed up by having had our roast lunch before going out, all it really meant was that we had nothing to look forward to when we got back except cold sandwiches and tea.

On the other hand, there was nothing like hard work to keep your mind off things. Dolly stood knee-deep in cold, muddy water in the bottom of a ditch, waders up to her waist, repeatedly driving a metal shovel under the water and coming up with a dripping load of mud. I crouched on the level ground nearby, holding tightly to a wheelbarrow as Dolly dumped the mud into it until it was almost too heavy to lift. Then I wheeled it off to a pile of earth in the corner of the field, dumped it, came back, and repeated the process. My hands ached in the cold and the low sun cast our long shadows across the field next to us, a tableau of Land Girls hard at work. I couldn't think about anything beyond the next barrowload, which was why I was bewildered when Mrs Lawson suddenly shouted for me.

"Sandfield, let someone else take over," Mrs Lawson said, fussing around until she found Tooley at a loose end. Tooley looked daggers at me as she picked up my wheelbarrow and I smiled sweetly in return.

"You've got a visitor. He's waiting for you at the Hall," Mrs Lawson went on, shooing Tooley away. "It's irregular but I'll give you an hour. Don't be late back, we're already behind."

"Thank you, Mrs Lawson," I said. I didn't have a wristwatch so I'd have to check the time when I was back at the hall, but then again, neither did Mrs Lawson, so I doubted if she'd know how long I'd been gone anyway. In any case, it was the vicar dropping in to talk about the Easter flowers, so I'd milk it for as much of a break as I could. I might risk a lecture on how my laziness was endangering the war effort, but I was happy to take that chance.

The farm was a fifteen minute walk from the hall, but it was cold so I moved briskly and got it down to a little over ten. I could hear the nails in my boots ringing on the metalled surface of the road, which twisted and turned between the field boundaries. There wasn't much visibility in case a car came the other way, but with petrol rationing not many cars were around on roads like these so I didn't worry overly much. I enjoyed the peace and quiet and the fact that I wasn't hauling a heavy wheelbarrow around.

The vicar's usual bicycle was leaning against the front of the hall when I walked up the driveway, and I stooped down to scrape the last of the cloying mud off my boots, then unlaced them and swapped to carpet slippers so I wouldn't track dirt into the house. The men of the house could clomp wherever they wanted in boots, of course, but we ladies were expected to be more careful. Once my boots were off I stretched my toes out, feeling the relief of not having them constricted inside the hard leather of the boot. My early blisters from when I'd first come to Kelmingsdale Hall had turned into tough skin on the outsides of my feet, hardly a feminine characteristic but invaluable for working outdoors in all weathers. But for about the hundred thousandth time since the war began, as I rubbed my foot with my hand and felt the rough skin through my woollen sock, I cursed the fact that I was twenty one years old and digging ditches in the middle of nowhere, rather than sitting in a warm typing pool in an office in Birmingham, gossiping and drinking sweet tea like I would have been if the war hadn't intervened.

Visitors to the Hall waited in what had once been the drawing room, just inside the front door and to the left, which was now a reception room with Mrs Lawson's office partitioned off in one corner. It wasn't much more than a desk and a typewriter she inexpertly used, often with the assistance of one of the girls who knew typing, but she jealously guarded it as her personal space. Especially as it was close to the main fireplace, a marble Victorian monstrosity, which was one of the few really warm places in the hall as it was far too big for the size of the room. A small fire was burning in the grate as I walked in and I was grateful for the warmth, deliberately taking an extra pace towards the hearth before I turned to talk to the vicar, who was sitting in one of the old wing-backed armchairs.

Except it wasn't the vicar.

I turned and looked straight into a familiar face, with large, smiling brown eyes which sought mine and made my heart stop instantly.

"Ava," Johnny said, simply, getting to his feet from the armchair. He was dressed in his dark blue uniform, gold pilot's wings sparkling on his left breast, and his hat tucked under his arm. "Aren't you a sight for sore eyes."

I instantly burst into tears. He looked just as he did on the last day we'd been together and I'd seen him onto his train at New Street station, except for the fact that instead of being clean shaven, as was his habit, he had a day or two's growth of stubble on his cheeks. I sobbed, looking at him through unbelieving wet eyes and scrabbling to extract my handkerchief from the sleeve of my work overalls. He stared at me for a few moments, amusement playing on his lips, as if he wasn't quite sure what to do with me. Then he stepped forward and took my arm, and I put my other arm around him and cried noisily into his tunic, my fingernails digging into him as if I couldn't believe he was real and not a ghost. In a way I couldn't.

"Ava," he repeated gently, patting the back of my head affectionately. I sniffed, lifting my head up to look at him again, and he helped me into the armchair he had just vacated. With the help of his handkerchief as well as mine, I wiped my face and tried to look presentable while he pulled over the other armchair and sat down in it, looking at me and insisting I finished the half-cup of tea he had been drinking.

"How?" I asked, hoarsely. He grinned, looking around the room to make sure he wasn't going to be overheard, understanding me immediately.

"It's top secret, all very hush-hush," he said, and with a little rush of affection I heard the warmth and familiarity of his Brummie accent. "The government doesn't really want the public to know." He had a mischievous smile that told me he wasn't being entirely serious.

"If it's secret, you shouldn't tell me," I scolded him gently.

He laughed. "Why, are you a German spy now? I'm gone for a few weeks and you're ready to go over to the other side?"

I reached out to slap his arm playfully, giggling even as I gulped back more sobs.

"Swan went down in the Atlantic, I don't really know what happened to her, torpedoes from a U-boat most likely. By a stroke of luck I was up in the air at the time, doing reconnaissance. One moment I was talking on the R/T with the ship, the next, chaos."

I looked at him. We were holding hands, now, my fingers digging into his palms. "How awful," I said, sadly.

"You're right, it was a bloody mess," Johnny said, and for a moment I could see emotion in his face. He mastered it, though, and gave me another grin, an expression I felt like I hadn't seen in an age. "In any case, there I am, flying about like a damned fool with nowhere to land. I haven't got the fuel to get back to Blighty or go onward to Canada, but I reckoned I might have enough to get to Ireland if I took care. But, either my gauges were wrong or more likely I miscalculated, you know what my arithmetic's like, and there's no land in sight when I'm starting to get windy about how much is left in the tanks."

I was on the edge of my seat, both literally and figuratively. Johnny had always loved being the purveyor of a good tale and he could tell them as well as anybody.

"A crash landing in the sea in midwinter meant certain death, of course," he went on, insouciantly. "So, I thought, what the hell, in for a penny. I put out a radio call, plain as you like, saying I'm a Hurricane pilot stranded over the sea with nothing for it but to ditch. Anyone could hear it and if the Germans had overheard, well, I was throwing myself on their mercy anyway. Nothing happens for a minute and I'm starting to think a nice fast and hard impact into the sea might be better than a soft landing and being at the mercy of the waves. All of a sudden I get this crackling in my ears and, would you believe it, I'm talking to the skipper of a merchant freighter who reckons he's spotted me off his port side! I bank the Hurricane and there he is, on the horizon, just where he said he was."

I relaxed my grip on Johnny's hands, relieved that the story had a happy ending. I should have known it would, of course, since he was sitting there in front of me, alive and kicking. But Johnny wasn't done.

"Now I just had the small matter of ditching the plane close to this freighter in the Atlantic waves, getting out and somehow or other staying afloat until they could fish me out. Bailing out wasn't an option, the parachute would sink in all probability and drag me down, and I'd likely miss the boat by miles anyway. I picked a nice, slow approach in a wide circle, getting in front of her so she'd steam towards me, at which point the fuel gave out and I had no power for anything but a short, unpleasantly quiet glide smack into the sea, freighter nowhere in sight."

My fingers were digging into him again.

"I'd opened the cockpit already, in preparation, so I was out like a hare out of his burrow. My lifejacket kept me from sinking straight to the seabed, but up close those ripples I had been watching, thousands of feet below me, were more like six foot swells. The water was freezing and I reckoned I might only have a few minutes before a wave engulfed me for good. But then this dirty great hook smacks me on the back of the head, making my ears ring, before on the second try it gets under my lifejacket and I'm hauled out of the sea like a drowned rat, onto the deck of the freighter. Turns out, in my panic at running out of fuel, I'd turned a bit too hard and damn near smacked straight into the ship - the skipper was telling the crew to prepare for impact! Luckily I'd just missed, but in the end that probably saved my life, because if I'd flown another three hundred yards or so I don't think I'd have lasted long enough for them to get me."