Firebirds Soaring (57 page)

Theo did not know what to do with Kim’s books and papers. She went home and began to file things in the pigeonholes of his desk, as though he might come looking for them soon. Lying open beneath a lump of flint shaped like a dove’s head, which Kim had found on the beach at St. Catherine’s Bay and used as a paperweight, was the letter from the RAF explaining the details of where and when he was to report for his initial training.

It was her own name that drew her eye to the letter: T. Kimball Lyons. She and her brother had shared Kimball as a second name because it was their mother’s maiden name. No one had ever called Kim by his biblical Christian name, Titus, for obvious reasons.

I’ve got Kim’s name as well as his face, Theo thought suddenly. If I turned up with this letter at the Flight Training School by Little Cherwell, would anyone know the difference? Kim’s already been through the selection board and the medical. And he passed his exams.

She thought, maybe Kim can apply himself to something after all.

Theo made a quiet cull of her brother’s wardrobe, and skimmed off his mail when it arrived. She unearthed her brother’s birth certificate and took possession of it. She told her parents: “I’m going to join the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force. I said I’d do it, and I will. I start in May.”

Theo had not told her parents about being turned down by the WAAF. Only Kim had known that.

Theo said good-bye a day before Kim’s training was to begin and spent the night in an inn in the village of Little Cherwell, five miles from the airfield. It was May now: the night was warm, and the whole village smelled of lilac. Theo stood in front of a narrow, tilted dressing table mirror in her very small guestroom and surveyed her profile critically. She was tall and broad-shouldered and, taped tidily into a roller bandage and hidden by a sleeveless undershirt, flat-chested. The riding and horse work of the past year had tightened the muscles across her arms into strings and knots. She had hacked her dark brown hair convincingly short.

She looked so much like Kim at seventeen that it made her collapse in tears. She sat on the worn cushion of the vanity stool with her head in her hands, pulling at her short hair with tense fingers, and sobbed for a long time.

 

The Chief Ground Instructor frowned over Kim’s exam results. “You’ve done the reading, I suppose?”

“Yes, sir.” Theo had never worked so hard at anything in her life. To be kicked out because she was carrying on an insane masquerade was one thing, but she could not redeem Kim’s memory if she was kicked out for failure.

“Well, you’ll be tested again, anyway. Never mind. Lyons, is it? Eighteen on the eighteenth?”

Theo hesitated. She would be twenty in November.

“Yes, sir.”

“We’ll have you solo before your birthday.”

Theo kept her head down. She forced herself awake half an hour before any of the other cadets, before the sun rose, and managed to keep out of their way in the bathrooms. They were housed in the dormitories of a school that had been requisitioned because it was so close to the airfield; Theo had a scared-looking roommate with whom she exchanged polite remarks about the weather and the work. Two young men came in once while she was taking a bath, and Theo sat bent over in the water, her knees drawn up to her ears, studiously rinsing her hair while her messmates brushed their teeth.

“Nice place, isn’t it?” said one, conversationally. “I sure didn’t expect the luxury of Edwardian bathtubs during training.”

“Very nice,” Theo muttered. The boys left. Theo let out her breath slowly and continued to rinse her hair. She did not even jump when one of them came back for his toothbrush. But she learned to dress and undress with demonic speed.

It was worth it. To hear her brother’s name and see it in the rosters, to wear her brother’s familiar jacket and tie when they dressed for dinner, to see Kim’s reflection in the mirror, gave her the faint illusion that he was still alive. It did not occur to her that if she were found out she might be thrown into prison or accused of being a German spy. She only knew that she could not bear the world to tell her again, definitively, that her brother had died senselessly at seventeen with nothing done and nothing to be remembered for. For two days Theo lived cautiously from hour to hour, paying deep attention to the lectures, being outfitted with flying suit and goggles, playing by the rules, and quietly keeping her mournful, peculiar secret safe.

Then they put her in the pilot seat of a Tiger Moth biplane.

There were no brakes. She and her veteran instructor waited, with the control stick held back to dig the tail skid into the ground, while another brave soul swung the propeller and got rid of the wheel chocks. Her instructor sat in front of her—Theo as pilot behind her passenger, but fortunately the controls were all in duplicate—and began to work Theo through the checklist. Theo became absorbed. Even her stomach calmed down. There was no room in her mind for fear, either of discovery or of what she was about to do; there were only her hands and her eyes and the instrument panel, and Flight Sergeant Wethered’s distorted voice shouting through the speaking tube and reminding her to set the altimeter.

“Want to take off?” the disembodied voice offered casually.

“Isn’t this an observation flight?”

“I’ll talk you through it. Taxiing this old lady is harder work than flying her,” said the instructor. “She’ll do anything you tell her, in the air.”

Theo stuck out her lower jaw. “Sure.”

Theo fought the “old lady” across the airfield, legs working the rudder pedals in a battle of will to keep the aircraft straight against the backwash of its own propeller. And then suddenly the fight was over, and they were in the
air
, now, five hundred feet above the trees according to the altimeter, and climbing, and how did you get yourself back down?

Theo laughed aloud.

“That was a nice takeoff,” came Wethered’s voice.

“Beginner’s luck!”

“Think you can find your way to Oxford?”

Theo looked down, frowning in concentration. She was in an entirely different England from the one she thought she had left behind; she felt like Alice finding herself in Looking-Glass land. The landscape below bore no resemblance to the tidy outlines of a map. Theo could not tell the difference between a hedgerow and a tree-lined road. She could not see the undulation of the plain below her. She could not even tell the surrounding meadows from the grass airfield she had lifted off from, minutes earlier.

“Is that the Thames?”

“Spot on.”

Then it all came together: Theo’s perspective changed. She could picture it whole, suddenly, all the great heartland from above, with the Chiltern Hills to her right and the Cotswolds hiding in the haze far to her eleven o’clock, and the Thames Valley spread before her.

“Well, if that’s the river, I reckon I
could
find my way to Oxford.”

“Try it. Give me a heading. I’ll fly, you navigate.”

They were in the air for three quarters of an hour. Theo did not touch the controls again after the takeoff, yet by the time she successfully relocated the airfield she was as worn out as if she had been riding all day.

“Want to do a loop?” asked the casual, distorted voice of the instructor.

“Go on, then.”

He plunged straight into a dive that made Theo’s teeth go bare and cold. It was better than skiing full tilt down the slopes above Zermatt; better than any helter-skelter she had ever known; but like it, like the first swoop of a fairground ride, when you top the crest of the rails and your heart rises into your throat. The little biplane roared through the dive and started to climb, up, up, and up until finally there was no view of anything but sky. Then suddenly the horizon came back, only it was upside down. The engine cut and they fell in silence, the wind etching Theo’s face.

“How did you like that?” Flight Sergeant Wethered shouted, looking back over his shoulder with a wide grin as he studied his student’s reaction.

Theo could not speak. She gave him a thumbs-up, flourishing both gauntleted hands for emphasis.

She had never wanted
anything
as badly as she wanted to learn to do that herself.

 

Theo fell into routine. She did not pay much attention to the terrible things that were going on in Europe, as the Allied forces were beaten back to the beaches of France and evacuated. It never occurred to her that she might be sent there herself, one day, or be called upon to defend Britain from invasion if she scraped through her training; the possibility of lasting that long without being discovered seemed laughable. She concentrated on learning to fly. She kept her place in formation. She dropped paper parcels filled with chalk dust over a target mown in the grass beside the airfield. Theo was a good shot; her father had indulged her along with her brother, and her wasted girlhood of clay pigeon shooting and stumping after pheasants through wet woods and fields seemed suddenly worthwhile, even a natural and obvious means to an end. How could she have carried on the illusion otherwise?

She took occasional telling insults. In an impromptu soccer game on a Sunday afternoon:

“Jesus, Lyons, you kick like a girl!”

“Never bothered playing,” she muttered. “Wet vicar’s offspring. More interested in horses.” She could not actually bring herself, aloud, to say that she was someone’s “son.”

But fortunately, not being able to kick straight did not matter, because she flew better than anyone on her course. The little Tiger Moth seemed to her as alive and responsive as a horse. She could feel it tugging at the control column the way a horse might tug at its reins, telling her which way the wind was blowing and how hard, and it gave Theo untold satisfaction to feel the machine fighting her less and less, then not at all, as she settled it into trim. She liked the hairline precision of being at the edge of her abilities and the aircraft’s limits: turning so tightly the horizon seemed vertical, so that her own slipstream knocked the wings about when she met it again; the wires screaming and her body pressed into its seat in the high speed dive you made when you pretended your engine was aflame and you were alone in the sky with only the wind and your wits to put it out. Before long she got in the habit of closing her eyes when she kicked the plane into a spin. It was bliss.

She struggled through the ground school exams, and was sent to Bristol for two weeks of officer training, which was not bliss. It would have been her downfall if they had not billeted everyone in private rooms in a boarding house at the last minute. Sheer determination got her through the endless drills, and Theo came back to Little Cherwell to put her infant pilot’s skills to work in something more advanced than Tiger Moths, namely Harvards, American-built single-engined training aircraft, monoplanes with wing flaps and retractable landing gear. It became Theo’s role to play the terrible Luftwaffe gunner on everyone else’s tail. She could not run as fast as they did on the ground, but she could chase them out of the sky.

She scarcely spoke to anyone. She governed her body like a prison warden, forcing its functions into a strict and secret routine. She could not allow herself more than one cup of tea a day; she had a deep fear of being caught behind one of the mechanics sheds with her pants down. The toilet cubicles were private, at least, but she could not spend too much time there. She washed her underthings in the dark. There was an airing cupboard where she was able to dry out linens quickly, draped hidden over the back of the water boiler.

Her navigation was first-rate, her knowledge of engines and aerodynamics average. She won the right to wear the coveted wings of a pilot.

“Well done, Kim,” she whispered to herself as she followed the other successes, young and sharp and proud in their smart blue uniforms, to the formal dinner congratulating them.

So passed June and July, and on came the end of August. Beyond Theo’s lonely, solitary world of sky and study, the Battle of Britain raged. Desperate and alone at the edge of Europe, British forces and civilians beat off invasion as Hitler’s preparations for Operation Sea Lion rained fire from the air on them in the effort to break their strength and will. The wireless crackled daily with the evil news, and with the prime minister’s gravelly voice repeating the defiance he had made in the aftermath of May’s retreat:

“We shall defend our island whatever the cost may be. . . . We shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills;
we shall never surrender
.”

During the last week of August Theo was transferred to an operational squadron of Spitfire pilots, at Maidsend, inland from Hastings. It was so unexpected Theo thought it must be a mistake; could the RAF really be so desperate for fresh pilots? She stood before her new commanding officer, Leland North, as he turned the pages of Kim’s log book. There lay the record of all the flying Theo had done in her brother’s name.

The CO finally shut the book and tossed it across his desk toward Theo. He cast his head into his hands and muttered, “Seventy-seven hours in the air! Dear God, please tell me this is a bad dream and I’m going to wake up in a minute.”

This outburst did not seem to require an answer. Theo waited. After a minute North raised his head. He was probably ten years older than she was, but looked haggard and ancient, eyes red with lack of sleep and sandy hair thinning.

“I’ve lost two or three pilots every day this week,” he told her. “And two or three planes with them. Where am I supposed to come up with a training plan for you?” He sighed and flourished a piece of paper at Theo. “Your last CO gives you a very good recommendation, anyway. Says you’re a daredevil in the air, without being a troublemaker or suicidal. Attentive with your checklists, and a good navigator. Go talk to the ground crew. Here, I’ll write you a pass. They’ll get you into a plane. You’ve got a week to figure out how to fly it.”