The House of Flowers Read online

  ‘There has to be some mistake,’ Poppy said over the wind that was fast turning into a gale when Trafford arrived beside her dressed in full flying rig, as indeed was Poppy. ‘Shouldn’t that have two seats?’

  ‘Life of me can’t see why!’ Trafford roared with laughter. ‘Two people can’t fly one of those things!’

  ‘Why ever not?’ Poppy wondered, falling straight into the trap.

  ‘’Cos it’s only got one blotting seat, ducky! That’s why!’

  Poppy wondered, not without good reason, how anyone could learn to fly without an instructor on board. She was about to find out.

  ‘It’s OK, little one!’ Trafford led Poppy back towards the hangar behind them. ‘That’s for later.’

  ‘I have to say I’m relieved to hear it.’

  ‘Not much later, duck – only a bit. The boys have been working on the two-seater.’

  Inside the hangar stood a bright red Tiger Moth, this time a twin-seater biplane. The gang of Australian flyers had been fine-tuning it, to judge from the amount of grease on them, and now they wheeled it out on to the one serviceable runway they had left.

  ‘All aboard!’ Trafford cried, getting a leg-up from a couple of her pupils, followed a little too quickly for her liking by Poppy.

  The handsome blond Australian swung the propeller over, the engine kicked into life, and even more quickly, much to Poppy’s consternation, they were airborne.

  ‘Bit choppy today!’ Trafford yelled at Poppy from behind her. ‘Good for the old equilibrium!’

  For the next two hours Trafford kept up a non-stop tutorial at the top of her voice on how to fly a small aircraft. Poppy had always been lost in admiration for Trafford’s ability to talk without apparently drawing breath, but this was a tour de force to cap all her previous tours de force. On top of that there was a howling gale blowing around them, buffeting the small aeroplane all over the sky but none the less and blithely Trafford demonstrated spins, stalls, twirls, tips, plunges, climbs, glides, tumbles and finally – and not before time, Poppy thought to herself – landings. But that wasn’t the end. Having touched down, Trafford immediately accelerated and took off again to show Poppy how to land another three times, coming in from different angles and from different heights, each time making a perfect three-pointer, regardless of the gale.

  ‘See?’ Trafford shouted, as they taxied in towards the hangar. ‘Nothing to it! Log falling off time!’

  ‘I’d prefer to be standing on a twig actually!’ Poppy called back, taking off her goggles and trying to come back to earth in a more metaphysical way. ‘Even so,’ she said, once they had alighted from the plane, ‘I must say I’m looking forward to my next lesson, because I have to admit that was pretty damn’ exciting.’

  ‘Next lesson?’ Trafford guffawed, searching for her cheroots. ‘Next lesson be budgered! I only ever give one, and one’s all you’re getting, too! Ask the boys here!’

  Poppy had no need to ask them. She could see by the grins on their faces that the truth had been told, just as she could see the looks of absolute disbelief that she, a mere girl, was going to be able to do what they had done, namely fly a Tiger Moth after one lesson at the hands of Ace Perkins – and a week with the manual, a book that Poppy now knew off by heart.

  ‘Remind me of what you’re staring at,’ she said, putting her hands slowly on her hips. ‘I’ve forgotten.’

  ‘Nothing, Sheila,’ Blond Ace No. 1 smiled back. ‘Just we got a little book going on how long before we see you in the skies. Solo.’

  ‘What do you reckon? Bruce?’ Poppy asked pointedly. ‘I’d love to hear.’

  ‘Certainly not within twenty-four hours, if that’s a clue, sweetheart.’

  ‘That’s a very big clue,’ Poppy replied. ‘See you boys later.’

  The good thing, as Poppy saw, sweating over the manual in the top room of the control tower while George chased his long tail, was that at least the gale had blown itself well and truly out, leaving skies so clear that it would be no surprise if frost followed shortly. The bad thing was her blood was up, and as Poppy knew that was not always the best state to be in when meeting a new challenge.

  Even so, she had picked up the gauntlet, and having done so, being Poppy, she was going to run with it and see the challenge through, if it was the last thing she did.

  ‘Which I sincerely hope, George, will not prove to be the case,’ she said to her little dog as, reluctantly, she closed the manual for the last time and prepared to leave the building. As she went out of the door she changed her mind and hurried back to pick up the manual.

  ‘Just in case,’ she said to George again, stuffing the book inside her flying jacket. ‘You never know.’

  The boys were waiting around the hangar, idly smoking and chatting as if they hadn’t a care in the world. What they were really doing, as Poppy well knew, was waiting for her, to see if she was going to take up their dare.

  ‘Don’t you boys have anything to do?’ she wondered. ‘Worthwhile, that is.’

  ‘Tomorrow we’re going off to collect some new Spits and deliver ’em out to Sicily. That do you?’ her tall blond friend remarked.

  ‘What really will do me is if you boys would be good enough to wheel that yellow plane out for me – that is if she’s ready to go up.’

  ‘She is, Sheila. Are you?’

  ‘Absolutely, Bruce. Ready as I’ll ever be. And if one of you would be kind enough to hold George and keep him safe till I land. Thank you.’

  She smiled at a very tall, rather shy young man who came forward to take George from her.

  ‘I hope you like dogs,’ she said.

  ‘We’ve got four of the tykes at home,’ he confessed. ‘I love ’em.’

  ‘Good. Then wagons roll, as I believe they say.’

  The gang of young men, except for the one holding George, pushed the yellow Tiger Moth on to the hard standing outside the hangar and prepared to help Poppy aboard.

  ‘Sure you know what you’re doing?’ the blond one asked, trying to keep any trace of anxiety out of his voice.

  ‘Let’s hope so,’ Poppy replied, buttoning up her flying jacket and helmet. ‘The name’s Poppy, by the way. Not Sheila.’

  ‘Mine’s Derek,’ he replied. ‘Not Bruce. You don’t have to do this, you know,’ he added quietly. ‘We were only joshing you.’

  ‘I do have to do it, Derek. And not only do I have to, I actually quite want to do it. OK?’

  ‘Whatever you say, Poppy. Just take care.’

  ‘I fully intend to.’

  ‘You aren’t wearing a ’chute,’ he said suddenly. ‘That really is just plum daft.’

  Before Poppy could reply, Derek had ordered one of his mates to collect a parachute from inside the hangar. He then helped Poppy strap it on.

  ‘That’s the ripcord,’ he said, indicating the ring hanging down on the front of the harness. ‘If you have to – which pray God you don’t – jump, count to five, and pull. Remember – wait to pull. Don’t panic. If you pull it too soon you could get tangled in your machine, and you don’t want that.’

  ‘Heavens no.’ Poppy laughed. ‘I’ve got to come back in one piece. George hasn’t had his dinner yet.’

  With a final shrug and a lot of good luck wishes, Derek gave her a leg-up on to a wing and Poppy scrambled into the cockpit. She spent a good moment adjusting her goggles and familiarising herself with the array of instruments and switches in front of her before sticking one arm in the air.

  ‘Chocks away!’ she yelled, as they spun the propeller and the engine roared into life. ‘Don’t go away now!’

  ‘You neither, Poppy!’ Derek yelled back. ‘I’ll have a stiff drink ready on the bar!’

  She taxied the plane gingerly to the end of the runway, facing a very slight headwind of not more than eight knots. Ahead of her lay the long strip of concrete, its potholes repaired as best the boys could manage with a mix of sand, earth and what little cement they could scrounge. It was plenty long enoug
h, big enough in fact for a heavy bomber to take off, for which fact Poppy was deeply grateful as she sat preparing to throttle up for take-off, since she considered she might need every inch. She also considered simply turning the plane to the left, taxiing back to the hangar, disembarking and giving the boys best – except they weren’t the reason for her undertaking this crazy, foolish, mad, exhilarating challenge. Poppy was doing this for herself. Not to prove anything, but to see whether she was really capable of stretching herself and becoming a singular individual, or whether she would just have to settle finally for being the Poppy her mother had so despised, a fundamentally decent but obviously dull girl with little ambition and precious little ability or talent.

  She was allowing herself to be driven this far because of something else as well – a disturbing suspicion that she had exaggerated the importance of her part in the Churchill plot. That in fact it had been Scott and Eugene who had made all the running and she had really only been a passenger. Her infiltration of the British Fascists had been brave enough, she realised that, just as she realised that anyone in her section would have been capable of doing the same thing, with a few of them no doubt carrying it off even better than she had. So she had to do this. She had to find out whether or not the Poppy she hoped and believed existed underneath all the veneer she had so carefully built up since her disastrous meeting and marriage to Basil Tetherington really did live, or whether in fact there was no other Poppy than the unexceptional and untalented daughter to whom her mother was so convinced she had given birth.

  That was why she was now taxiing down the runway, increasing her speed towards the number of knots required to achieve take-off. So far she had held the little plane absolutely steady, accelerating smoothly and finally reaching the required sixty-five knots, and still – she was happy to see – with plenty of runway left, enough in fact even to abort in perfect safety.

  But abort she did not. Instead – pulling a face of the grimmest determination and half closing her eyes – she injected even more speed, gently eased the joystick back, checked her trim, and found herself airborne – and climbing.

  She felt she could hear cheers in her head as she rose higher and higher in the clear sky. Certainly she was cheering herself for having got over what she considered one of the worst two bits of the entire exercise: taking off and landing. The actual flying, she had decided in advance, was the easy bit, or rather the easier bit. Once she had levelled the plane out, she was determined to stick to her game plan, which was to reach a sane and sensible height of no more than a thousand feet, and simply to circle the airfield half a dozen times at a speed no greater than a hundred and five knots, not trying to do anything fancy, in fact not trying to do anything other than hold her steady and level, and then – hopefully – bring her in to land.

  That was the bit she was dreading. She had almost taken the take-off for granted, knowing that if she hit the right speed with the aircraft steady, as long as she lifted the nose at the right moment, aeronautical science would take over after that. She’d read her manual of flying carefully, that was for sure, and one thing her studies had taught her was that provided an aeroplane was travelling with sufficient impetus to fly, once the nose was lifted and even more thrust applied, the air pressure under the craft’s wings would simply lift it sky-wards. Then all you had to do was keep climbing until you reached the required height, in no circumstances allowing your airspeed to dip or the craft to become unstable. There were waves in the air that kept you afloat, Poppy realised as she studied the diagrams and drawings, just like a boat on the sea. You were buoyant and airborne, rather than afloat, but in a way the principle of flying was the same as that of sailing. Launch your plane on to the waves and keep it riding them.

  She had now reached nearly one thousand feet according to her altimeter, so carefully and gingerly she nudged the joystick away from her until she thought she was level – only to discover to her sudden horror that she was not. The nose of the plane was dipping sharply, Poppy having eased the stick a little too far forward. At once she tried to adjust it, but in her sudden anxiety she had obviously pulled the joystick too hard since the plane bucked under her almost like a horse, its nose going from dive position to climb. The Moth’s engine began to scream its own protest at being asked all at once to climb out of what had been just about to be a dive, and for one heart-stopping moment Poppy thought she had stalled, the engine choking, spluttering, and actually it seemed dying on her, only to cough itself back into life, urged on by Poppy’s increasing the airspeed and mercifully finding the exact right spot for the joystick. After reaching an all but upright position in the sky, the Moth was now flying absolutely level, albeit with its right wing tipping dangerously low, causing the little yellow aircraft to bank and circle in a much tighter loop than Poppy had intended. For a moment she thought about pulling the manual out from her skeepskin-lined flying jacket in order to remind herself of what to do in such a situation, but thought better of doing so when she realised that what with her thick flying gloves, and not exactly crystal clear goggles, she wouldn’t be able to make out much of what the manual said anyway, even if she could keep the plane steady enough for long enough to give her sufficient time to swot up the facts.

  Instead, she held steady and simply put her brain on recall. In front of her eyes appeared chapter and verse from the manual, her intense study paying life-saving dividends. It was all there: how to trim the plane out of too steep a bank if the occasion should arise, adjusting flaps and rudder with her feet while keeping the aircraft absolutely level by the lightest of adjustments on the stick. Don’t ever snatch! she heard Trafford yelling at her as they spun round the sky on her one flying lesson. Don’t ever snatch, grab or do anything fast! Think slow – and act slow! One wrong yank and you’re down, sweetie! And you ain’t going to be hot enough to pull out of a spin!

  So slowly did it, easily did it, and moments later the boys on the ground, shading their eyes against the sun, were relieved to see the bright yellow Tiger Moth above them flying steadily on an even keel with a perfect and healthy engine note.

  ‘Now all the poor darling has to do is bloomin’ land,’ Derek observed. ‘So, everyone – cross fingers!’

  Poppy, having mastered the trick of circling steadily and evenly, was now loath to break the pattern, wishing she could stay up there for ever, even contemplating baling out and dropping safely to land, until she realised the plane might crash on an inhabited part of the countryside below her with terrible consequences. She found herself also idly wondering to whom the plane actually belonged, concluding that whoever was the rightful owner would not be best pleased to find it had been wilfully jettisoned by an unlicensed woman who had no right to be flying it. With a relectant burst of laughter, Poppy realised she would probably end up in court not to mention having her name splashed all over the papers for perpetrating an act of such idiocy. She could also certainly kiss goodbye to any future work for the Intelligence service and most likely Scott too.

  ‘You certainly don’t want that, Poppy!’ she shouted at herself as she began to straighten the plane out preparatory to making her descent. ‘That is not what you are up here doing this for! To make an idiot of yourself! So get a grip and pull yourself together!’

  Far below her, once she had straightened the aircraft, she could see the airfield, the landing strip and a tiny group of men looking up at the sky. Once again panic gripped her, freezing her into inaction, the plane flying by itself for a moment without any help from its young pilot. Then the next thing Poppy knew was that the Tiger Moth was descending slowly but surely towards the airstrip, guided by her own hands, both of which were lightly on the joystick as all of a sudden she was filled with the joy of flying. It seemed impossible, at that moment, that a fragile little single-engine winged vehicle should be able to defy the elements and stay airborne, still less be made to fly, least of all by a tyro such as herself. Yet here it was, and here she was, flying now at five hundred feet and maki
ng what seemed like a perfect approach.

  Back came the relevant pages of the manual in her mind’s eye – angle of descent and speed, the moment to raise the nose, throttle back hard, let the nose back down as the wheels hit the strip – bounce! Once! Twice! Keep it cool, keep it slow, throttle back – back – all three wheels down, tail level, nose level – slower, slower – reverse throttle – more! More – once more – that’s all, swing to the right, kill the engine, slow it down nicely, slowly now – and stop. Down!

  Poppy hardly dared to open the eyes she had closed once she had swung the aircraft round to taxi it slowly back towards the hangar. Not until the plane had stopped completely did she open them, looking around in absolute wonder and then up to the skies where she had only moments ago been flying – she, Poppy! She had defied the element of air and flown a craft made of wood and canvas up to over one thousand feet and stayed aloft for twenty minutes before bringing the little plane down to make what felt – but probably only felt – like a perfect three-pointer.

  Then she heard the shouts – and saw the gang of them running towards her, the tall shy one holding George safely aloft, the lot of them led by Derek who was waving his flying helmet round and round his head in triumph like a flag.

  ‘Fantastic, Poppy baby! Just bloomin’ well fantastic!’ Derek yelled, a paean of praise picked up at once by the rest of them, who whooped and hollered, yelled and cheered themselves hoarse.

  Poppy was hardly aware she was being carried shoulder high from the moment she stepped on to the wing of the plane prior to disembarking, but she was. Derek and one of his colleagues were chairing her back to the hangar, her hands holding tight to their shoulders as the rest of the gang circled their heroine, still cheering and jumping up and down with excitement.

  ‘Not only was your lift-off a beaut, hon!’ Derek cried. ‘But what about that for a landing!’