Flashback

Remembering Jackie Moggridge, one of the few female pilots to fly in the Second World War

When war broke out, her mother said, ‘Come straight home!’ My mum replied, ‘I’ve already written to the RAF’

THIS WAS TAKEN IN 1949 when my mother, Jackie Moggridge, was in the RAF volunteer reserve at Filton Aerodrome in Bristol. She would later become one of only five women to be been given their RAF wings (Jean Lennox Bird, Benedetta Willis, Joan Hughes and Freydis Leaf were the other four).

Some years after the war, Jean Lennox Bird said, ‘Come on now, it’s time we got our RAF wings.’ [Up until this point, women hadn’t been allowed to take the course.] Mummy found being a housewife dull, so they did the course – and were much more advanced than the other cadets, because they had thousands of flying hours already logged in different war planes.

That’s my older sister, Veronica, running towards her. She was three then – she used to be plonked in the doorway of the plane between the cockpit and the passengers and told to keep quiet. She became the squadron talisman, and was left to explore the hangars and cockpits or to sit in the control tower.

After I was born, 15 years after Veronica, we would sit in bed together before school and Mum would say, ‘Come on, let’s fly – pretend we’re in a Spitfire and the duvet can be the clouds. Hold the joy stick – it’s very sensitive, you’ve got to line it up with the horizon like you’re balancing on the point of a knitting needle.’

Mum was born in South Africa and came to England to study to be a commercial pilot at Witney Flying Club, Oxford, when war broke out. Her mother said, ‘Come straight back home on the boat!’ and my mum replied, ‘I’ve already written to the RAF, to offer my services for flying.’ She was only 18.

The RAF told her they didn’t accept women so she became a WAAF [Women’s Auxiliary Air Force] and then worked on radar, watching the Battle of Britain on a screen with green dots. She said it was so sad to watch the green dots come together and then see one of them drop – and if the other one headed back to Germany, you’d know you’d lost an English pilot.

Eventually the call came from Air Transport Auxiliary and she began ferrying aircraft. On 6 June 1944, she delivered a Spitfire from the factory to Johnnie Arthur Houlton, the pilot who shot the first plane down on D-day.

Fifty years after D-day, when Mummy was 74, a woman named Carolyn Grace got in touch. She had renovated a Spitfire and looked in the plane’s logbook and realised that it was the one that Mum had flown, all those years ago. So they asked her to re-enact it, with Johnnie too. Carolyn said Mum flew it lower and faster than she would have ever dared.

When Mum died in 2004, we used the Spitfire to scatter her ashes over Dunkeswell airfield. The day before, Carolyn took me up for a ride – I’d never learnt how to fly, it was always too close to home. She said, ‘Go on, you take control.’ And I remembered those flying lessons in bed and what Mummy had said about balancing it on the horizon. Carolyn said, ‘Oh my God, you really are your mother’s daughter.’ — Interview by Jessica Carpani The Hurricane Girls, by Jo Wheeler, is published by Penguin (£7.99). Spitfire Girl: My Life in the Sky, by Jackie Moggridge, is published by Head of Zeus (£7.99)

Candy Adkins’ sister, Veronica, is greeted by their mother after a flight