Of anxiety for what was to come there was none, though I was never any braver than the next person, and am in a funk when it comes to climbing ladders or riding bicycles.
Strangely, although I realised that my family would feel my loss, there was no feeling that I was leaving them. The grimness of any sudden severance from a normal routine, a passing regret – you may laugh if you like, but it’s true – that my NAAFI cigarettes and chocolate rations would be wasted, and a deeper regret that I could not leave a message to tell my mother how easy death had been.
My first coherent thought was, “I’ve muffed it for the last time – better me than most people, but I wish it hadn’t happened!” It was at this moment of realisation that fear left me. I had no hold other than that of three fingers which I had managed to get round the cutaway portion of the tailplane, there was no possibility of attracting the attention of either the pilot or anyone on the ground, and it seemed so certain that I must roll off the fuselage the first time the aircraft banked that I did not even trouble to wriggle farther across it to balance the weight of my heavy boots. I was, to all practical purposes, already dead. Newbolt knew what he was writing about when he described the traveller, doomed to certain death from the brigands into whose hands he had fallen, as spending his last hours “in a dream untroubled of hope.” At that moment I was not merely in great danger. I was unable to move it.Įvents move fast with a Spitfire, and there seemed only a panic-stricken moment before the cessation of the rushing sensation of travelling along the runway told me that we were airborne. The violently increased rate at which we were taxiing first told me that something was wrong, and I flung myself across the fuselage and grasped the elevator in an attempt to attract the pilot’s attention. On this occasion my pilot did not receive the order ‘Rough Weather Procedure,’ which was issued from flying control, and, not having seen me jump on the tailplane while the other mechanics were removing the chocks, he took straight off instead of waiting for me to descend upon reaching the runway. “She always brings ‘em back alive,” I said reassuringly one day to a pilot who had heard of the old kite’s jinx, little realising how strikingly I was to be called upon to demonstrate my statement.Īt Hibaldstowe, where I was working as a WAAF flight mechanic in 1945, it was a flight order for one of the ground staff to sit on the tail of each Spitfire as it taxied from the dispersal to the distant runway in rough weather, to prevent the wind from tipping the machine over on its nose. But I knew there was no real malice in the creature she reminded me of one of those wicked old horses that delight in putting their rider in the ditch, but stop at breaking his neck.
In her case it took the unfortunate form of indulging in every misadventure a perverse imagination could devise for the bedevilment of her unfortunate ground crew. There was nothing wrong with the old kite but a perverted sense of humour, a characteristic that had led others than a Spitfire into a ditch. In 1952, former Leading Aircraftwoman Margaret Horton recounted a terrifying war-time experience to Air Mail magazine: clinging to the tailplane of a Spitfire as it took to the skies during WW2.Īnyone who worked on the flights at RAF Hibaldstowe – a satellite of Kirton Lindsey in Lincolnshire – in February 1945 would tell you that it was no more than was to be expected of ‘T for Trouble’ – officially AB929.
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