‘And a handsome old lady, dressed from head to foot in the smartest flying kit of black leather, advanced to meet the astounded party. Her hands were stretched out in welcome.

“’Tes Aunt Ada! ’Tes Aunt Ada Doom!”

“Goodness … It’s nothing but people going off in aeroplanes,” said Flora, rather crossly.

… She smiled up at Elfine’s lovely little face framed by the black flying-cap, and Elfine blew her a tender kiss. The roar of the engines swelled to a triumphant thunder. They were gone!’

Cold Comfort Farm, BY STELLA GIBBONS, 1932

HER name tunes in her era. She scrawled it brashly and bravely across the thirties sky—her blue heaven—Amy Johnson. The dole queues lifting up their eyes unto the hills, since they had given up all hope of lifting them in any other direction, saw her just missing them. She crackled over continents like a rather chic seraphim in her soft leather helmet, enormous astrakhan collar, khaki shorts, puttees and gauntlet gloves. She was true-blue and ‘a brick’. She had a pretty, heart-shaped face with a fresh clear skin, eyes stretched wide by tremendous horizons, dreamily plucked eyebrows, a slightly hard, gamin little mouth, neat useful hands like a mechanic and an accent which Beverley Nichols described as ‘pure Wapping’ but which was in fact impure Yorkshire. Her entrance and her exit were as perfectly timed as anything invented by Ethel M. Dell. On May 5th, 1930, she put the cover on her typewriter in a solicitor’s office, locked up her bed-sitter in Maida Vale and went to Croydon Aerodrome. There were no crowds, only her father and a few chaps from the London Aeroplane Club, where she had learned to fly. Her father called her Amy and the chaps called her Johnnie, which is what she preferred. The aeroplane was called Jason after the trademark of her father’s fish business at Hull. At 7.45 that morning she left the ground and for the remainder of her brief story-book life she never quite managed to return to it.

It took 1940 to bring her to earth. ‘A brave, naïve, déracinée,’2 said Lord Vansittart, ‘she came to my room in the Foreign Office eager for some dangerous mission in Secret Service, eager above all to die for Britain…. She found the means but not the end. I wished that I could have helped her….’

Eventually Amy joined the Air Transport Auxiliary as a ferry pilot. For a few months it looked as if the Girls’ Own Paper heroine was lined up for another decade of dazzling adventures in which she would beat the Luftwaffe single-handed. After all, she had faced great hazards before—the Timor Sea, the Daily Mail’s patronage, the Arabian Desert and her marriage to Jim Mollison, so why should she hesitate now? She did her bit, though in a silence and anonymity which was frightening after ten years of jolly noises winging up to her from a hundred asphalt aerodromes from Heston to Calcutta. And the silence was scarcely broken when she crashed on a bitter January day in 1941. In December, 1943, her death was presumed by the Probate Court and when her name appeared in the flimsy wartime papers it seemed to possess little more substance than an evocative number from a Jack Buchanan musical. It was the price she paid for being the sublimation symbol of a nation’s light romance. It wasn’t brightness which fell from the air; it was only poor old Johnnie, the girl next door.

Amy was born in Hull in 1903. Her grandfather was a Dane who at the age of sixteen had sailed away from Denmark all on his own to seek his fortune in England. His name was Anders Jorgensen and when he settled in Yorkshire he anglicized it to Anders Johnson. The sixteen-year-old Danish adventurer and her grandfather Johnson were never fully integrated in Amy’s mind. They both undoubtedly belonged to her but they didn’t seem to belong to each other. The boy Jorgensen was continually urging her to run away and find a fairy kingdom, while grandfather Johnson insisted that she should settle down in the ugly house in the ugly Hull side-road and tot up the fish profits. These conflicting influences converged on the teenage Amy as the war ended and the twenties began their frenetic progress. But like nearly all young people of the period she could only express her spirit and rebelliousness in surface antics round the gramophone. If she jumped further than this she would land in the dreaded economic mess of the times. The meanest office or shop job was scarce and it was nothing to write twenty applications before one succeeded. Lower middle-class people—the class to which Amy belonged—were particularly canny when it came to taking an action which might jeopardize or dislodge even a fragment of their precious ‘security’ and any individual in a family who showed signs of instability where an honest job was concerned could cause quite a disproportionate amount of neurotic bickering and worry.

Presumably Amy began to not fit in as soon as she could walk and talk, for at the age of three she trotted up the dreary Hull street announcing to the neighbours, ‘I’se run away to be a queen.’ It was her first memory. It was not surprising that it should have been connected with running away for this was to be, curiously, the recurring motif of her whole life. She had almost no need for courage in the sense in which it was popularly attributed to her. It was always easier for her to go off into the unknown, be it jobs, digs or deserts, than to face the uncongenial certainties of life. Her intense conviction that these were not for her, that she was an exception to the rule and in a sense ‘privileged’ began to make itself felt in earliest childhood. She had the same driving egotism of the writer, painter or actress but none of their outlets for it. Her actions and her attitude seemed inexcusably conceited to others, though not to herself, for from the very first time she began to notice them she successfully coated the ordinary irritants of life with solid romance, so that what the world saw and what she saw rarely had the vaguest connection. Before she became a flyer the chief reason for the trail of fractured friendships and false starts which followed her everywhere was that she was already absorbed and even dazzled by something very special in her nature which nobody else had the least reason to believe existed. Given the gift to see herself as others saw her, Amy would have been blankly incredulous, and had some early psychologist managed to divest her of her emotional finery it is doubtful if she would ever have got off the ground, so to speak.

She was taken to and then abruptly taken away from a number of little private schools. The schoolma’ams and the fish merchant’s pretty daughter faced each other in mutual incomprehension which quickly developed into mutual disgust. When it became obvious that the teacher and the class were not going to acknowledge her royalty Amy would do things to draw attention to it. ‘Headstrong, and probably spoilt, with an insatiable desire to know everything, I seem to have pushed my way through each school in turn, enlivening the hours spent amongst girls twice and three times my age by pranks of incredible foolishness. It was, perhaps, my tomboy spirit which saved me from the danger of becoming a blue-stocking. I brought homework home with me for the sheer love of doing it. I learned a queer mixture of elementary and advanced subjects….’ The cleverness and the bossiness combined were not appealing. The truth would dawn on Amy, there would be ructions and then a clean break and a fresh start somewhere else.

When she was eleven she was sent to the Boulevard Secondary School, Hull, a co-educational place where for a while she was startlingly happy. She associated more with the boys than with the girls and was the only girl in the school who could bowl over-arm. She spent hours and hours in the gymnasium, where the trapeze fascinated her. In the evenings there was more trapezing at the Young People’s Institute. She led rebellions against what she believed to be injustices which in turn led to, what was for Amy, a particularly terrifying form of revenge.

‘Punishments at our school were meted out on a most peculiar system, reminiscent to some slight extent of the methods of the police in modern Russia when dealing with political prisoners…. To prevent them appearing as heroes, or even being allowed to face death with any semblance of heroic dignity, they are shot in their underclothes. Nothing of this kind exactly happened at school, but the method of punishment seemed specially calculated to strip one of all the trappings of a heroine….’

She now began to take great care to preserve these ‘trappings’, and for the only time in her life. Later, she was simply to walk away from any situation which refused to allow for her natural superiority without her doing anything to force people to realize that she possessed it. But at the Boulevard Secondary she went out of her way to impress the boys and she might have continued to do so had it not been for one of those trivial mishaps which in retrospect are seen to have so much to do with destiny. A cricket ball broke one of Amy’s front teeth, establishing a lisp. When the boys heard this lisp their eyes were opened and Amy was dropped. To make up for the way in which she had almost convinced them that she was one of themselves, they mocked her. And, of course, Amy ran away.

Sometimes she ran away from home and had to be brought back to the Johnsons, who were becoming increasingly bewildered by her. Sometimes she escaped on a bicycle, pedalling long distances through the Yorkshire countryside and hugging her dreams to herself in a delicious orgy of self-pity. She was already beginning to realize that it was better to travel than to arrive. A journey was always the most exquisite form of unreality and while it was taking place the absurd romantic platitudes which served Amy as a philosophy even during very real dangers could not be challenged. If her talents had been literary and her convictions plotted she could have made a fortune in the Ruby M. Ayres market. She could tell Lady Oxford, ‘I tend to look at life through rose-coloured glasses. I always see the light before the shade, the good before the bad and I expect a happy ending. Disillusionment has been hard and bitter, but it has never been complete, for the habit formed in childhood always in the end transforms the toad … into a prince.’

There was an aeroplane factory on the outskirts of Hull and Amy often bicycled to it in the part-hope, part-dread that she might see an aeroplane close to. At this period she began to half live in the local cinema where the unique Schwärmerei of the early silent films suited her mood exactly and if, on the mildly coruscating screen, an aeroplane should pass, she would sit the entire programme round a second time. Her emotions were now those of Wendy who was compelled to soar out of the window and leave the dinginess below, and to leave Mummy and Daddy, too, in spite of the fact that they were Darlings. Only soar where? Amy didn’t know. All she knew now was that Jorgensen was in full control.

It was the hey-day of the five-bob flip. The armistice had unloaded a great many ramshackle flying machines and a lot of experienced flyers on to the market. Nobody wanted either. Quite a few young pilots sank their gratuities into war surplus de Havillands and Faireys and entered this extension of the circus business, and thousands of customers had an unforgettable glimpse of the gasworks from a few hundred feet up. Such a plane came to Hull and established itself in a big field outside the town. Amy, aged just seventeen and clutching her birthday money, approached it in a mood of mystical fatalism. She and her sister took off together, she waiting for, and tremblingly prepared for, the supreme experience.

‘There was no sensation. Just a lot of noise and wind, smell of burnt oil and escaping petrol. My hair was blown into a tangled mess which could not be combed out for days and I was almost cured of flying for ever.’

The only thing that happened after this anti-climax was that Amy cut off her masses of long, curled hair. It was the most obvious declaration of independence she had so far made and her father met it with suitable harshness. She would stay on at the secondary school, he said, until it had all grown again. This meant that she was at a secondary school until she was nineteen, enjoying a position of false privilege in the upper sixth and becoming such a big fish in her little pond that the disasters she met with at Sheffield University were inevitable.

In the first place, in spite of all this extra schooling, she fluffed the ordinary entrance and was only allowed a place through the kindness of the dean, who said she could take Economics or Logic. She chose Economics. The second shock was to discover that nobody liked her. She tried to make friends but barely succeeded in making acquaintances. She shared her rooms with other girls and was nonplussed when they ignored her ‘specialness’ and furious when they swept aside her natural leadership. ‘Within a few short weeks I had decided to run a lone course, so I gave in my notice and chose other lodgings…. I changed again and again and again. In my three years at Sheffield I changed probably thirty times.’ Eventually, of course, she ran away. She rented a remote and beetle-ridden cottage in the Peak District and she only came to Sheffield when she absolutely had to. She got into debt—£50, a huge sum for her—and she had to forego her fourth year at the university in order to get a job and repay it. She worked in a Hull advertising agency, where the other typists laughed at her B.A. degree and her pretensions. She was so unhappy in this job that she left it the very same day as she paid back the last pound of her debt. Her egotism and all the normal pleasant poise of youth were now severely lacerated and her father made a great effort to interpret her problem. The restlessness was strange but not so strange as all that—after all, his father had been Jorgensen and he had a brother who had gone off to Klondyke. So he offered to pay Amy’s fare to Canada, that Siberia or Shangri-la of all English misfits at the time. The offer tempted Amy but something told her that running away and being paid to go away were two very different things, so she refused it. Instead, she fled to London.

It was the first time she had been away from the North and she was bewildered. She was quite alone. Work was almost non-existent. She wandered in and out of bed-sitters and 25s.-a-week jobs, as well as in and out of a whole series of forced little friendships. She worked in a West End draper’s which cashed in smartly on the slump by advertising that it only employed shop assistants who held degrees or who were gentlefolk. Amy as a B.A. was allowed to pack up the ribbon boxes when the customer had left. She stuck the vulgar dreariness of this for a month and then she became ill. Then came what she would have called—for she never used an original phrase where a cliché would do—the first glimpse of a silver lining. A distant cousin introduced her to a solicitor, who gave her a job at £3 a week. Immediately after this she met an ex-Sheffield University girl who accepted Amy’s conditions for friendship and who trailed after her from digs to digs quite uncomplainingly, like a dog.

One day Amy found a garden room in a huge dull house in Maida Vale and once more they moved. Above the garden, crackling and throbbing all day long, and loathed by the rest of Maida Vale, were aeroplanes. They came from Stag Lane Aerodrome, which was nearby. Amy was transfixed, transported. To her it was as good as living on the direct route to Elysium. ‘I longed for the freedom and detachment it seemed they must enjoy…. I became more and more absorbed. In some intuitive way I felt that there was a link, as yet to be forged, between the planes flying over that Maida Vale house and myself.’

She wrote, half in fun, to the de Havilland Company asking how much they charged for tuition and was told £5 an hour. As she earned £3 a week and had to live on it this was hopeless. Then, ‘One fine Saturday afternoon, drawn irresistibly by those tiny darting planes, I climbed on top of a bus going to Stag Lane. As I drew near the planes came lower and lower until they seemed to be landing almost on my head…. Wild with excitement, I jumped off the bus and ran up Stag Lane, to find at the end a notice “London Aeroplane Club, Private”. My keenness to explore outweighed my natural shyness and, disregarding the notice, I walked on until the green of the aerodrome itself came into view. Two yellow aeroplanes were lined up ready to fly and caught my interest. There was a small club-house, in front of which people were seated on deck-chairs. No one took the slightest notice of me as I nervously approached an unoccupied chair and sat down. Every minute I expected to be challenged. Nothing happened. For half an hour or so I sat enthralled….’ The yellow planes flew away and Amy walked in a trance towards the instructor. ‘How much?’ she asked. ‘Two pounds an hour,’ said the instructor. It was thirty shillings an hour solo, three guineas entrance fee, three guineas subscription and it took from between eight to twelve hours to learn. Amy was twenty-five and had a pound in her purse. These figures were the first small investment of the slight sum which was to bring her a tidy fortune and a kind of immortality.

In September, 1928, Amy began her lessons at the London Aeroplane Club. Every minute of her spare time, every ounce of her energy went into them. She had the rapt serenity of all totally committed novitiates. It soon became obvious that she was a natural so far as aeronautics were concerned and that she couldn’t have used her wings more easily if she had grown them. She learnt to fly in record time and followed up her aviator’s certificate with a ground engineer’s licence. But the real triumph of Stag Lane was her unquestioned re-entrance into the acceptance masculine world. The brash, cheerful and informal atmosphere suited her exactly. The mateyness purged away the insolence of offices. She was openly admired, not because she was a pretty girl but because she was a jolly good mechanic. Her hands were oily and her short hair flopped across her brow. As in all communities where there is over-dedication and not much sense of proportion, at Stag Lane there was more fun than feeling. Amy was ‘Johnnie’, a dab hand at maintenance, a wizard with a joystick and a sister where she wasn’t an actual chum. She flew the little yellow planes over London, pleased to be where she was, though now faintly and uncomfortably aware that if she stayed there she would be just a fragment of the looping-the-loop individualism of her epoch. If this was all she might as well have crossed the Thames on a tightrope or walked from Land’s End to John o’ Groats. It had all been too easy and having got so far she was again thrust against the dreaded line of limitation which so far had halted all her ventures. In the past she relied on her over-developed dream equipment to get her past such barriers but now she had to turn fantasies into facts. The trouble here was that countless other people were doing the same thing.

In 1929 the air was full of noises. Aviation was at its amateur zenith. The fashionable and somewhat deliberately non-professional flying of young Edwardians like Moore-Brabazon, the Hon. C. S. Rolls and S. F. Cody had naturally lapsed during the war when it was disciplined by the service conditions of the R.F.C. but no sooner was the armistice signed than it broke out again with an intensity which was spectacular, and which the Press took every care to keep spectacular. On the circus side there were air weddings and air christenings, aerobatics and songs like ‘Airman, Airman, don’t put the wind up me’, and on what might be called the get-there-first side there were long queues of prospective leather-wrapped heroes and heroines, each with a route and a time schedule to which they intended to pin their names for ever.

On May 1st, 1919, civil flying was authorized in Britain and it was in effect the starter’s pistol. The first to get off was a flying-boat which crossed from Newfoundland to Devonshire. A month later John Alcock and Arthur Brown flew non-stop across the Atlantic for the very first time, taking just over sixteen hours, and were, to their very slight embarrassment, knighted for doing so. In November of the same year two brothers named Ross and Keith Smith flew a Vickers Vimy from Hounslow to Darwin, taking about a month to do it and weren’t knighted. In September, 1922, James Doolittle flew across the United States in a single day and the same year the first King’s Cup Air Race was held between Croydon and Glasgow.

From this point the development of flying rushed ahead in a romantic whirl of competitive anarchy. The great thing was to be first. Alan Cobham was the first man to fly to Australia and back, so he, too, was knighted. There were first airships over the North Pole, first flights to Cape Town, first wings over Hawaii, over Karachi, Tokyo. The world was so crowded with places that it looked as though it would take ages to use them all up in aeroplane records and that the Daily Mail’s £10,000 and King George V’s accolade would continue to rustle and fall respectively for many years. But after a while the public itself became bored with the automatic nature of many flying achievements. It was becoming obvious that anyone who could fly, could fly to Timbuctoo, given a certain amount of time and petrol, and although it was brave or even good to do so, it wasn’t miraculous. So interest grew in the personalities of the flyers themselves.

The Press were quick to sense this change in public taste and began to blow up the hitherto conventionally bashful airmen to film-star proportions. The personality cult amongst flyers rose suddenly and brilliantly to its glittering climax on May 20th, 1927, when a handsome, humourless American youth called Charles Lindbergh flew solo from Long Island to Paris in a monoplane. Lindbergh’s flight and achievement were extraordinary, though scarcely less extraordinary than the behaviour of his country in its greed for a hero. When he returned he was met with a kind of hyperbole with which the Romans kept their emperors sweet. Some people weren’t at all certain that he hadn’t been deified and there were later indications to show that Lindbergh wasn’t absolutely sure on the point himself. Chilly as dead mutton though he was, he loped neatly into the niche made for the All-American Boy and shared with Valentino’s ghost and Babe Ruth the patriotic ululation of his native land. It is doubtful if any man in history was ever rewarded as Lindbergh was rewarded for a career which lasted precisely thirty-three hours and twenty-nine minutes.

The effect of Lindbergh on what might be termed ‘personal flying’ was profound, though unintentionally so. Aviation up to the moment when this lanky young man extricated himself from the cockpit of ‘The Spirit of St. Louis’ on Le Bourget airfield had been a pleasant, somewhat bumbling business indulged in by noticeably diffident people. Now it became mannered and tense. There was a rush by the newspapers, the Daily Mail in particular, to put back all the heroic stuff shrugged off by men like Alcock and Brown, and to keep the ‘marvellous’ element intact. The results were bathetic. People who very often were performing miracles of courage had their unique deeds vulgarized by the full razzle-dazzle treatment and were pushed into the ranks of silly-season entertainers by reporters and ad men. Presumably Jim Mollison, a temperamental young Scot, was suffering from this when he tried to stem the broohaha surrounding his overwrought person with an autobiography called Death Cometh Sooner or Late. As the title suggests, it was Hamlet in goggles but the author, not being a Saint-Exupéry, failed to convince the reviewers, who seemed to have gone out of their way to misunderstand it. ‘Mr. Mollison tacitly announces the arrival of a new type of public figure, presumed to have a personal following similar to that which fame has assembled at the skirts of other performers …’ remarked The Times sardonically.

As the twenties drew to a close flying became more and more the preserve of smart rich women who, had they lived a bit earlier, would have been called ‘indomitable’ from having crossed China in a crinoline, broken windows for Mrs. Pankhurst or raced four-in-hands like Lady Warwick. On May 17th, 1928, Lady Heath made the first female solo flight from the Cape to Croydon and a month later Lady Bailey, the wife of the South African millionaire Sir Abe Bailey, established another ‘first’ by flying alone to the Cape and back again. Aviation was stylish and had been ever since Vera Butler took off in a balloon called ‘The City of York’ from the Crystal Palace in 1901, though the first woman to venture into an actual aeroplane was a Mrs. Hart O. Berg, who went up with Wilbur Wright at Le Mans in 1908. The first woman pilot, disconcertingly enough, was the wife of Maurice Hewlett, an inventor of exquisite Arcadian romances which were like jewelled footnotes to Greensleeves. Mrs. Hewlett learned to fly at Brooklands in 1911. After the war, thrown dizzily aloft by the same great wave of emancipation which did away with their skirts and breasts and hair, the sky became so full of ladies that their names read like an astral presentation party. Mrs. Dulcibella Atkey, the Hon. Elsie Mackay, Lady Anne Saville, Mrs. Elliot Lynn, Miss O’Brian, the Hon. Mrs. Victor Bruce and the redoubtable old Duchess of Bedford who was sixty—some said seventy—before she ever set foot in an aeroplane. For ten years her Moth raced up through the trees of Woburn while the world and the Russells held their breath. She possessed a rare brand of fatalism which was the combined result of being a country clergyman’s daughter, a duke’s wife and, for most of her life, a surgeon’s assistant in an operating theatre. On a fine March day in 1937 when she was seventy-one—some said eighty-one—she took off in her Moth from Woburn park as usual, zoomed out over the Wash and was never seen again. Evelyn Waugh never succeeded in inventing a character more bizarre or more gallant.

Although flying clubs and aerodromes were springing up everywhere and the Royal Air Force had been created, to the ordinary person aeroplanes and airships still retained an extraordinary glamour. Flyers, looking down over the edge of their machines when they passed over markets or playgrounds, would be met with the massed, faintly rapturous stare of hundreds of uptilted faces, while the whole nation would follow each new record attempt with the same bated interest that it later followed the four-minute mile. It was the grand epoch of ‘trophy’ flying. There was the Schneider Trophy, the Gordon Bennett Aviation Cup, the Aerial Derby, the Britannia and Segrave Trophies, the King’s Cup Race and any number of lesser inter-club events which gave to flying a sporting ethic which was as strong and individual during the thirties as anything emanating from the Turf or the wicket, but which seemed to fade round about the time of Munich, never to flower again.

Such was the scene when Amy, now a fully fledged pilot and mechanic, though still a solicitor’s typist, flew into it and seized the astral crown. She had no money, no real leisure—only evenings and week-ends—and, except for a few flips over London and one long ride to Hull and back, no flying experiences to speak of. What she did have, however, were her dreams and her unquestionable belief that the sky was her right, as it were. These assets tended to make her ten-year monopoly of air fame natural and acceptable both to herself and to others. When she was famous her favourite fan communication was a photograph of a huge negro with a cobra round his waist on which was written, ‘From Johannes, King of the Snakes to Amy, Queen of the Skies’. It stood on her dressing-table and when she saw it Amy would smile to herself and say, ‘Well, I always said I would be a queen.’

In 1930, although air activity was intense, it might almost have not existed so far as she was concerned. She had learned to fly and now all she had to do was to go on and on for ever in the blissful barrierless blue of her kingdom. Below her would float the wonderful red bits of the British Empire, where sometimes she would have to come down and chaps would rush out of the sugar and rubber plantations in neat drill shorts shouting: ‘Hurrah! It’s Johnnie! Put the kettle on!’ Her petrol tank would be like the widow’s cruse and when she passed over countries which hadn’t the good fortune to be painted red in atlases, sheiks and Indians and cannibals would have second thoughts about their conduct. There would be no more offices, no more bed-sitters. She would run away and run away, and one day she would simply fly through the blue into the Great Unknown where Grace Darling, Nurse Cavell, Boadicea and a whole heaven of heroines would meet her.

Not the least curious thing about Amy was the practical way in which she always set about realizing her fantasies. She treated the attainment of dreams as other people treated applications for jobs. She saw to it that she was fully qualified for the appointment before she put in for it. She pored over maps. Her Yorkshire common-sense told her that she must convince everybody at the very first go if she was to gain her freedom, and this was all she really wanted to gain, not cups, not fame. The shorter routes were by now all bespoke and to try and shorten Amelia Earhart’s Atlantic record or Bert Hinkler’s African time would not do her any lasting good. The most she could do would be to cross the world. ‘I expect,’ remarked a guest to the hero of a record flight at the inevitable newspaper luncheon which followed it, ‘that you find the world a very small place.’ ‘On the contrary,’ said the airman, ‘I am constantly surprised by how enormous it is.’ Amy thought hard about the world and finally decided the best thing to do would be to fly right over it. As a pal said to her, ‘Well, you’ve always been a woman of extremes—Australia and all that!’ But to Amy ‘the sequence of events seemed natural and inevitable’ and all she really had to do was to find the means to set them in motion.

She wrote to the Director of Civil Aviation, Sir Sefton Brancker, himself a record-breaker. The letter, oddly enough, wasn’t signed but Amy’s mountain-moving artlessness impregnated every line of it and Sir Sefton, after tracking her down, introduced her to Lord Wakefield, with the result that he promised to back her. With heaven almost literally in her grasp Amy went off to shop for a second-hand aeroplane. She bought an old green Gipsy Moth from a firm called Air Taxis Ltd. Before it had become a taxi it had belonged to a Captain Wally Hope, who had used it to follow the Prince of Wales during his African tour. Altogether it had done something in the region of 35,000 miles. It was a two-seater but the back seat had been taken out and tanks put in its place, which meant that it could carry seventy-nine gallons of petrol—Lord Wakefield’s never-ending supply of petrol. Amy took her aeroplane to Stag Lane and then took it to bits. When she had overhauled every nut and bolt of it with her own useful hands she had a friend paint the word Jason on its nose.

All through the winter and spring of 1930 she prepared herself. She studied map-reading and meteorology. She learned ju-jitsu just in case she was forced to come down in some place where men were swine. Her body was spare, lithe and well muscled like a boy’s and now that the great adventure was so near her face had the faintly polished sexless good looks of all true-blue heroines. Her blissful serenity became infectious. Her father came up from Hull and stood about in the May sunshine with the small groups of waiting airmen on the Stag Lane grass while in the distance the Edgware buses rumbled by. On Sunday May 4th she flew Jason from Stag Lane to Croydon Aerodrome, solemnly escorted on this little journey by five of the planes she had so recently stared up at from her Maida Vale garden. At a quarter to eight on the Monday morning, with the minimum of fuss and farewells, she took Jason up over the Surrey hills and headed for Vienna, where she arrived, looking very neat and tidy, just in time for tea. The clean, confident freshness of this 800-mile flight settled any faint remaining doubts her friends and backers had, while her ‘ordinariness’ after the surfeit of airborne ladies was immediately recognized by the popular Press, which lost no time in exploiting it.

Amy knew nothing of this at first. She woke up at the Aspern aerodrome on the outskirts of Vienna with a full heart and brimming tanks, and flew off in Jason to Constantinople, again arriving on the dot of 5.15. She travelled at a height somewhere between 3,000 and 5,000 feet and for twelve hours at a stretch. Her entire food consisted of a packet of sandwiches and a thermos of tea. As at Vienna, she spent from three to four hours overhauling Jason before turning in for the night. Between Aleppo and Baghdad she ran into a sandstorm and had to come down in the desert for two hours, where she braced herself for the unpleasant possibility of passing sheiks. The next 1,600 miles to Karachi were lapped up with superb self-confidence and when Amy landed in India it was to find that she had beaten Bert Hinkler’s record by two whole days and that she was famous. She was garlanded and received by the Chief Officer of the Karachi Municipality and the next morning she was escorted for some miles by an R.A.F. plane and by a Moth flown by the local de Havilland agent.

Amy was neither overwhelmed nor surprised by these favours; they were all part of the dream. It seemed quite natural that a certain amount of protocol should surround her arrivals and departures, for she had never doubted, not even during her dog days in the mean bed-sitters, that she was a very special person. She had flown 4,140 miles in six days by herself in a little second-hand machine. It was brave, epic, glorious—all the things the world was busy saying it was—yet in what way was it unique among all the record-breaking which had been going on for the past ten years? At the very moment when Amy was leaving Baghdad an Indian pilot was taking off from Karachi for London with the Aga Khan’s prize carrot of £500 to spur him on. So why should her flight in particular have caught the imagination of mankind, pushed all the rest of the news into small type, monopolized conversation and set reception committees in action wherever she touched down? The answer must remain hypothetical.

In the first place she was not so much an amateur flyer as a professional heroine. She had a brilliant and intuitive understanding of her rôle and played it, for as long as the world allowed her to play it, faultlessly. In the second place, aviation during the whole of the twenties had necessarily been a rich man’s sport and was associated in the depressed proletarian mind with ‘them’. Being somewhat dim about the comfortably solid backing Amy had been given by ‘them’, the great British public saw her as a plucky working girl who had reached the heights without any of the usual advantages. Amy never liked this humble picture of herself. Humility in this sense was unknown to her. She treated those who pressed the point with a decided hauteur. Her efforts to change her Yorkshire accent were entirely unsuccessful and caused a lot of malicious amusement among the middle and upper classes which still lapped up Punch’s jokes about h-less, malaproprian charwomen with insatiable enjoyment. One of the many enigmas of Amy’s career was the strong dislike she engendered in certain sophisticated quarters.

Amy was vague about money. The Lord would provide—she meant Lord Northcliffe or Lord Wakefield—and the Lord would take his cut. Flying stunts had contributed much to the circulation figures of the Daily Mail, and no sooner had Amy reached Karachi than huge ads appeared declaring, ‘Am delighted with the Wakefield Organization and Castrol XXL Motor Oil gave magnificent and faultless lubrication—Amy Johnson.’ So nobody could call it altruism, and nobody ever did.

Amy came into her kingdom at Karachi. At Calcutta she reached an unreal pinnacle of exhilaration where any lessening of the heady pace she was making, romantically as well as geographically, became unimaginable. She told everybody that she was not only going to fly to Australia, but back again and all in a month. Now that she was half-way there the Australians began to worry about how they should receive her and gala-like plans were set in motion. The Secretary of State for Air, Lord Thompson, who was to perish on a French hillside six months later when the airship R101 crashed on its maiden flight, had sent Amy a congratulatory telegram which was in effect the official recognition of her feat, and this was interpreted as a sign that she was to be given the full celebrity treatment. The quick stepping-up of publicity bothered Amy for a moment or two and she insisted that she was making just an ordinary flight, except that it was longer. ‘Every woman will be doing this in five years’ time,’ she added, a prophecy which made a lot of people extremely gloomy.

On and on she pressed, drinking tea from her thermos, dreaming her dream and sleeping an average of three hours a night. In Sydney the Evening News opened a subscription fund for her and at home the Daily Mail began to behave as though it had invented her, which some critics later declared that it had, though this was untrue. If anyone had invented Amy it was Angela Brazil. She made a perfect landing at Rangoon but taxied into a ditch and did some damage to her wings, wheels and propeller. ‘Here’s luck to Miss Amy Johnson!’ shouted ten thousand posters. ‘We are proud that she relies upon Summer Shell.’

Meanwhile, Amy had lost so much time through minor accidents and a bad weather patch that there was no hope at all of beating Bert Hinkler’s Australia record, though strangely enough this no longer mattered. In fact the elimination of the time factor was a great help to her because it let the public see her journey in noble non-competitive terms of unrelenting distances and girlish endurance. At Singapore, where she was received like a princess by Flight-Commander Cave-Brown-Cave, there were hundreds of telegrams waiting for her. This was on May 18th, when the aeronautical obsession of the period was felt to be reaching its climax. In Australia six lady pilots were waiting to escort Amy to Melbourne in a kind of helmeted maiden homage. Feminist feeling was running dangerously high in this man’s own country. Letters and telegrams were accumulating in such vast piles that the Minister for Home and Territories ordered the Government Resident to order a private secretary to look after them, and three thousand women and girls who worked at Myer’s Emporium in Melbourne made a joint statement which said, ‘We thrill with pride at your glorious achievement. Welcome to Australia.’ The Shell Company was now billing Amy on the hoardings as ‘the 22-year-old Lady Pilot’, though in fact she was twenty-seven.

While all this was going on Amy was making an emergency landing on a sugar estate in Java, where bamboo made holes in her wings, though these were soon patched up with sticking plaster. On May 22nd she flew to Atamba, which is on the coast of the shark-filled Timor Sea. Two days later she landed at Darwin, gracefully and efficiently. The huge Australian crowd watched as she extricated her stiff body from the cockpit. She was wearing khaki shorts, puttees and a green sun helmet and looked the part so perfectly that everybody was slightly nonplussed. Then somebody called out, ‘Three cheers for Amy!’ and the immense applause began. At the Town Hall she told them, ‘Don’t call me Miss Johnson, just plain Johnnie will do, that’s what my English friends call me.’ The Australians were enchanted by this. A song called ‘Johnnie’s in Town’ was instantly composed and sung in the streets. A telegram came from the King and Queen to let her know how thankful they were that she had arrived safely and in Hull all the ships flew their flags in her honour and the Lord Mayor opened a fund to buy her a present. A quite extraordinary number of people who had made fleeting and on the whole highly unsatisfactory contacts with Amy during her wilderness days of tin-pot jobs and ephemeral digs cashed in by giving the newspapers details about her private life, though they proved highly disappointing since all they were plumbing was a quite prodigious innocence.

She was the first woman to fly solo to Australia and although she was four days short of Bert Hinkler’s record in 1928 and was in danger of being, like her namesake Doctor Johnson, encumbered with patronage, her deed had been one of unquestionable valour and audacity. None knew of the other, greater triumph, the breakthrough into dreamland. She did it from a real love of flying, said The Times. Nobody said, flying from what?

She sent a telegram to Lord Wakefield: ‘Hurrah! Hurrah! Arrived Darwin and feel proud that my flight is all-British achievement. I realize that it was only possible through your generous support, paying for my petrol and contributing the required amount to complete purchase of Jason’s Quest—A.J.’ She followed this up with another message which trusted that ‘I will be able to emulate your true British sportsmanship’.

She made lots of impromptu speeches which enraptured the Australians. ‘When I saw the shores of Australia I shouted with joy … you met me with love and friendship in your hearts.’ Mounted police protected her wherever she went; governors and mayors received her. Her doughtiness, linked as it was with the authentic accent of Wilhelmina Stitch, touched woolly Australian hearts. She told the Brisbane Women’s Christian Temperance conference that each day she had prayed for guidance and once, when she thought all was lost, a double rainbow appeared round Jason and an opening was seen through the clouds. At a mayoral reception she was drawn to defend her long frock as against the familiar public image of a brown-faced lass in tan top-boots, shorts and stiletto down her sock, with, ‘I am just as feminine as anyone here. It is lovely to wear beautiful clothes again. I feel like Cinderella and wonder whether I shall wake up and find black people round me….’

On June 3rd there were photographs in all the papers of Amy and Annie S. Swan. They had both been awarded the C.B.E., though neither could have possibly understood how much they had in common.

The Australian triumph ended in a torrent of publicity and then Amy sailed home, quietly and comfortably, in a liner—her ticket a present from the steamship company, for now it was being made impossible for her to pay for anything. Lord Thompson received her when she arrived and then Lord Northcliffe sent her along the Strand and up Fleet Street in an open motor-car. It wasn’t the papery apotheosis of Fifth Avenue but it was something. The procession was followed by a banquet and the banquet by a cheque for £10,000.

The pace was set, the pattern fixed. The uproar around Amy grew and grew, and soon it was as necessary to take to the air to escape the din of recognition as it had once been to fly away and find fame. Amy flew a lot during 1931. So did Amelia Earhart but the personalities of the two girls were so different that it seemed as if they had some tacit arrangement with regard to the competitive side of their adventures.

While Amy was being ferried from Brisbane in a National Airways plane during her triumphal tour of Australia, its good-looking but highly strung young pilot had suggested that she might care to take over the controls for a bit. Amy had—for about two hours. The pilot was the son of a Glasgow engineer. His name was James Alan Mollison and two years later he and Amy were married. It was all a terrible mistake. The public, however, thought otherwise and was so entranced by a romance at this altitude that it steadfastly refused to believe anything against it. The Mollisons, as they were called—rather as though they were a music-hall act—were the very latest line in lovers. Their connubiality was stressed and emphasized in every paragraph written about them and in thousands of photographs. The fact that they were each quite idiosyncratically ‘solo’, as it were, was dismissed by the gossip writers and by those who should have known better. When Amy and Jim landed anywhere it was now, not only de rigueur that they emerged from their twin cockpits like heroes, but with blissful grins like the winners of the Dunmow Flitch. They were the Mollisons!

Amy was a better flyer than Jim, which meant that she was expected to be generous and share triumphs which were hers by rights. She was generous, fortunately. Her code made every provision for slapping the back of the chap who had done his best. Jim shrank from this—even when recognizing its decency. He was intellectually superior to Amy and far more sensitive. Both had taken to the air for complex personal reasons which had scarcely anything in common. And each, like the late Gilbert Harding in a future entertainment medium, had become trapped unwittingly in a bogus situation which they were forced to go on pretending had real values.

Amy made several flights on her own immediately after her marriage. On November 14th, 1932, she flew solo to the Cape in a Puss Moth, taking four days and seven hours, and about a month later she flew home again. In July 1933 Colonel and Mrs. Lindbergh flew from New York to Copenhagen and when Mr. and Mrs. James Mollison flew from Wales to Connecticut a fortnight later, everybody was delighted by the propriety which had entered aviation. The Lindberghs continued to fly about together and so did Jim and Amy, while Jean Batten, who was still single and solo, was thought brave but rather old hat. Some newspapers went so far as to hope that soon there would be a proper air family of mother, father and little ones looping-the-loop and setting up a whole new set of records.

Jim and Amy continued to play the ‘first there’ game. They were the first husband and wife to fly the Atlantic together. Grounded, however, their lives immediately soared off in opposite directions. Jim, when he wasn’t flying, enjoyed the social round and was made much of by society. Amy, when she wasn’t flying, tended to be gauche and rather at a loss. Her transparent nature with its mixture of girlish eagerness and mechanic’s practicality irritated sophisticated people and made them vaguely uncomfortable, and eventually the qualities which entranced Australia in 1930 were the very ones which bored London in 1935. She was patronized and even snubbed in some quarters. Her answer was the old one—she ran away. She went on flying and flying without her husband and in 1938 they were divorced. The popular Press was really very angry about this as it had spent a lot of time and a small fortune boosting the marriage. Those whom Fleet Street has put together oughtn’t to have the face to come asunder.

Something else was also breaking up—the brief and adventurous extravaganza of the lone aviator. The rickety, amateur, exciting carelessness of the open cockpit, the creaking, swaying struts and all the charm of the string-and-sticks light aeroplane had had its day—a mayfly’s day. So had Amy, whose private fantasy of ‘Johnnie the Wonder Girl’ fitted so exactly into it. Her serial ran out with her decade and she was killed off as neatly as both herself and her great reading public could have wished. They put Jason in the South Kensington Science Museum, where it rests like an old toy. But as Amy said, ‘the sequence of events is natural and inevitable’.