Page 2 (2/2)

Unthinkingly, Maddie broke into applause Beryl grabbed her hands and sht be hurt! Oh, what shall we do!’

Maddie hadn’tI can picture her, blowing the curling black hair out of her eyes, with her lower lip jutting out before she jureen tussocks to the downed plane

There were no flaet at the cockpit and put one of her hobnailed shoes through the fabric that covered the fuselage (I think that’s what the body of the plane is called) and I bet she cringed; she hadn’tvery hot and bothered by the ti a lecture from the aircraft’s owner, and was sha upside-down in half-undone harness straps and clearly stone-cold unconscious Maddie glanced over the alien engine controls No oil pressure (she told led the harness and let the pilot slither to the ground

Beryl was there to catch the dragging weight of the pilot’s senseless body It was easier for Maddie to get down off the plane than it had been for her to get up, just a light hop to the ground Maddie unbuckled the pilot’s helles; she and Beryl had both done First Aid in Girl Guides, for all that’s worth, and knew enough to an to giggle

‘Who’s the gorirl!’ Beryl laughed ‘It’s a girl!’

--

Beryl stayed with the unconscious girl pilot while Maddie rode her Silent Superb to the fare shovelling cow dung, and the far a cotillion of girls ere doing a huge jigsaw on the old stone kitchen floor (it was Sunday, or they’d have been boiling laundry) A rescue squad was despatched Maddie was sent further down the lane on her bike to the bottom of the hill where there was a pub and a phone box

‘She’ll need an ambulance, tha knows, love,’ the faro to hospital if she’s been flying an aeroplane’

The words rattled around in Maddie’s head all the way to the telephone Not ‘She’ll need to go to hospital if she’s been injured,’ but ‘She’ll need to go to hospital if she’s been flying an aeroplane’

A flying girl! thought Maddie A girl flying an aeroplane!

No, she corrected herself; a girl not flying a plane A girl tipping up a plane in a sheep field

But she flew it first She had to be able to fly it in order to land it (or crash it)

The leap seeical to Maddie

I’ve never crashed ht I could fly an aeroplane

There are a few more types of aircraft that I know, but what comes towhen she dropped me here She was actually supposed to land the plane, not duot fired at on the way in and for a while the tail was in flames and she couldn’t control it properly, and she made me bail out before she tried to land I didn’t see her come down But you showed me the photos you took at the site, so I know that she has crashed an aeroplane by now Still, you can hardly blaets hit by anti-aircraft fire

Some British Support for Anti-Semitism

The Puss Moth crash was on Sunday Beryl was back to work at the mill in Ladderal the next day My heart twists up and shrivels with envy so black and painful that I spoiled half this page with tears before I realised they were falling, to think of Beryl’s long life of loading shuttles and raising snotty babies with a beery lad in an industrial suburb of Manchester Of course that was in 1938 and they have all been bombed to bits since, so perhaps Beryl and her kiddies are dead already, in which case my tears of envy are very selfish I a over my shoulder as I write and tells ies

Over the next week Maddie pieced together the pilot’s story in a stors with the mental wolfishness of Lady Macbeth The pilot’s name was Dympna Wythenshawe (I remember her nahter of Sir Somebody-or-other Wythenshawe On Friday there was a flurry of outrage in the evening paper because as soon as she was released fro joyrides in her other aeroplane (a Dragon Rapide – how clever a randdad’s shed next to her beloved Silent Superb, which needed a lot of tinkering to keep it in a fit state for weekend outings, and fought with the newspaper There were pages and pages of gloom about the irowing likelihood of war in Europe The nose-down Puss Moth in the farh; there were no pictures of the plane on Friday, only a grinninghappy and windblown and much, much prettier than that idiot Fascist Oswald Mosley, whose sneering face glared out at Maddie froe Maddie covered hiht about the quickest way to get to Catton Park Aerodroain

Maddie was sorry, the next , that she hadn’t paid more attention to the Oswald Mosley story He was there, there in Stockport, speaking in front of St Mary’s on the edge of the Saturdaytheir ownup at St Mary’s, causing traffic and human mayhem They had by then toned down their anti-Semitism a bit and this rally was supposed to be in the na to convince everybody that it would be a good idea to keep things cordial with the idiot Fascists in Gerer allowed to wear their tastelessly symbolic black shirts – there was now a law in place about publicin political unifor riots like the ones they started with their hbourhoods in London But they were going along to cheer for Mosley anyway There was a happy crowd of his lovers and an angry crowd of his haters There o done at the Saturday market There were policemen There was livestock – some of the police shunted through also on the way to market, and a horse-drawn s Probably there were cats and rabbits and chickens and ducks too