Spitfire Girl: My Life in the Sky
Jackie Moggridge
Language: English
Pages: 256
ISBN: 1781859892
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Soviet Lend-Lease Fighter Aces of World War 2
To Hell and Back: The Last Train from Hiroshima (Asia/Pacific/Perspectives)
Savage Continent: Europe in the Aftermath of World War II
During the closing months of summer. It had been a full day with a touch of tension that lifted it out of routine. In the morning I ferried a replacement bomber uneventfully from Dunsfold to Kirkbride in Scotland. Over lunch in the mess I met the engineer who was to accompany me on the return ferry-flight in a dilapidated aircraft, a Mitchell, destined for the graveyard. The ferry-chit was endorsed in red ink with the curt statement: ONE LANDING ONLY, the laconic warning used in the A.T.A. when a.
Doubled in the last two years.’ ‘What does ‘‘Shalom’’ mean?’ I asked. ‘Peace be with you.’ Shalom. Shalom. I liked it and tried it out on the chauffeur, a German Jew. He was delighted and insisted that I sit next to him on the drive through eucalyptus and citrus groves to Tel Aviv. The six-figure number tattooed on his arm, he explained, was a concentration camp number. During the drive he told me about Israel. Its conception was simple. A stroke of the pen by the British Government of 1917.
With us before deciding to concur. The following morning, after a firm promise of clear skies and favourable winds, we took off on the long leg for Kermanshah and spiralled steeply to 20,000 feet before heading due east over the gaunt mountain range where, traditionally, Noah’s Ark rests. As with the sea, so the peaks brought unease. Rising to 14,000 feet and spreading to Kermanshah and beyond, they waited. Waited. In a spurious attempt to ignore what lay beneath, we chatted inanely over the.
Unfortunate announcement over the radio, made without my knowledge or consent, forced her compliance. She appreciated that I could not draw back now. The next morning my mother drove me to the aerodrome. Under a thin cheerless drizzle the pavements glistened drably in the half-light of approaching dawn. The windscreen wiper clicked thumpily in unison with my heart. As daybreak lifted the pallor of the low unseasonable clouds it revealed the airport road unusually heavy with traffic. The.
Landing clearance.’ ‘There are two aircraft ahead of you. Stand by,’ they answered. ‘I can’t stand by,’ I answered urgently. ‘I want to spend a penny.’ There was a stunned silence over the R/T before an aircraft replied: ‘After you, madam.’ ‘You are clear to land number one,’ ordered Karachi Tower dryly. I landed, taxied to the tarmac and had to sit, fuming, for three interminable minutes whilst the health authorities let off a D.D.T. bomb inside the cockpit. Officers standing on the Control.