‘EEZZY.’
The voice was familiar. She turned. At first she didn’t recognise the face behind the voice. It was the moustache that threw her. When she’d known him, Wanda the Wonder had been clean-shaven. Naturally.
‘Remember me?’ he said.
‘Wanda!’ Izzy threw her arms wide. ‘This is wonderful.’
A friend, a familiar face among the sea of strange faces she saw every day. The joy of it.
He took her to him, kissed her, first on the right cheek, then on the left, and lifted her from the ground, twirled her round. ‘Look at you, a lady pilot.’
‘I know, and look at you flying with the Free French.’
‘I’m plain old Jean-Louis now. Wanda has gone for ever, I’m afraid.’
‘Pity,’ said Izzy. ‘I liked old Wanda.’
She was in Yorkshire again, at Elvington, the Free French airbase. As she’d been approaching the runway, she’d seen a group of men lounging in the grass, smoking, idly watching planes land. She knew what they were up to – betting on the landing skills of pilots, betting on who would bounce on hitting the ground. She’d vowed to do a perfect three-point landing, and had.
‘You lost me two shillings,’ said Jean-Louis. ‘When I saw it was a lady pilot, I put money on the bounce. If I’d known it was you . . . ’
‘You’d have bet ten shillings.’
‘True. I remember Izzy the bouncer of Betty Stokes Flying Show.’
‘I’ve improved,’ said Izzy. ‘Hardly ever bounce. My bosses don’t like it.’ She thought a moment. ‘Still if I’d known you were betting on me, I’d have bounced. We could have split the winnings.’
They walked together towards the office where Izzy would get her delivery chit signed. She linked her arm in his. ‘How is Betty these days?’
‘She died,’ he told her. ‘In the Blitz. She tried to join your lot, the ATA, but they wouldn’t have her. Told her she was too old. She was fifty-eight. But a woman of passion, and a good pilot.’
Izzy said she knew that. ‘She was also a bit of a bitch.’
In the ops office, busy at the moment, planning the night’s raid over Germany, they found an officer who signed the chit. After that, they went to the mess for a cup of tea. It was four o’clock, the evening meals started at five, still there were buns to eat with their tea.
‘I miss coffee,’ said Jean-Louis.
‘You can still get coffee,’ said Izzy.
He shook his head. ‘That’s not coffee.’
They found a seat at the far end of the room.
‘Betty went back to London to stay with her mother,’ Jean-Louis said. ‘One night, when the bombing started, she didn’t go to the shelter. She and her mother crawled under the kitchen table. The house took a direct hit.’
‘That’s awful,’ said Izzy. ‘Betty was a one-off. Does anybody here know you used to be Wanda the Wonder?’
He held his finger to his lips. ‘Not a word.’
Unable to find a woman who could perform the feats she needed for her flying circus, Betty Stokes had hired Jean-Louis, given him a long blonde wig and told him to walk daintily. After performing his death-defying routine – loops, rolls, a long twirling, speedy plunge to the ground from eight hundred feet up, pulling level at crowd height, skimming upside down only feet from the ground – he would climb from his plane, arms aloft, beaming, curtsying, before mincing, tiny steps, one hand on his hip, to the tent where he’d whip off his wig and refresh himself with a cup of tea heavily laced with cognac, and a cigar.
Betty had often criticised the walk and the way he’d blow kisses at the crowd. ‘No woman walks like that. Only Rita Hayworth blows kisses. Stop it.’
But Jean-Louis claimed that the trouble with women was that they didn’t know how to be women. ‘They should all wear big hats and lacy things. They should show off what they’ve got.’ He did a demonstration wiggle across the tent. Betty had said, ‘Pah.’ Izzy had giggled.
Not that Jean-Louis had any doubts about his sexuality. He slept in Betty’s bed, and told everyone that if they thought she was bad-tempered, they should see what she was like when she didn’t have him to keep her sweet. He’d also bedded both the girls who stood, hair streaming behind them, on the wings of the plane Betty flew at the start of the show, the daring wing-walkers.
But Izzy had resisted his charms. ‘Oh, Izzy, I can take you to the heights of ecstasy. The reason I make a good woman is I know women, I know their secret places, I know how to make them smile.’
Izzy was sure he did. ‘Just not this woman,’ she’d said. The man was very attractive. But his skill at impersonating a woman put Izzy off. Besides, at the time, she was still trying to be her father’s good daughter. She only had to think about being naughty and images of his heaving eyebrows and pursed lips floated into her mind.
‘You always resisted me,’ he said.
‘I know. And you so irresistible. Like a teapot, you told me.’
He took her hand. ‘Small with a bit spout. That’s me. We can always make up for lost time.’
Izzy didn’t think so.
He smiled. ‘What a time that was, touring the country with Betty and two old planes.’
‘Yes,’ said Izzy, she got quite misty-eyed remembering. ‘God, all that tatty bunting and those tents – all rips and holes. And those poor girls standing on the wings, waving. Betty told them to dance. I used to have to wrap them in blankets soon as they got into the tent. Goosebumps bigger than watermelons.’
‘Yes, and Brigit fell off. Broke her arm and leg and two ribs. She was lucky at that.’
‘I know,’ said Izzy. ‘And that cracked recording of the “Toreador Song” that she played when you were doing the stunts, remember that? And the little wooden planes she sold as souvenirs that broke as soon as you touched them. And the places we used to stay. I think she deliberately hunted out the worse bed and breakfast in town.’
‘Bedbugs, lumpy porridge, one bathroom two floors down from our rooms, no baths after eight o’clock, creaky beds.’
‘Did you ever get paid?’ asked Izzy.
He shook his head. ‘And I had to provide services above and beyond the call of duty. Betty was a passionate woman.’
‘Happy days,’ sighed Izzy.
He raised his mug of tea to that. ‘Happy days.’
They drifted into silent memories.
Izzy said, ‘That’s the thing about happiness, you don’t know it when you’ve got it. It’s only when it’s gone, when you look back, that you realise you’d been having a good time.’
He nodded. ‘Never mind. This war will be over one day. Then I’ll go home.’
‘To France?’
‘To France. I’ll sit in the sun, a pavement café. Gitanes, a glass of wine and a good omelette. You?’
She shrugged. ‘I don’t know. I’m saving as much money as I can, so I’ll have something to live on while I look around. Don’t know where I’ll go or what I’ll do. I’ve got used to this, this war, this way of living.’
Thirteen days on, two days off, life had become a blur, filled with weather reports, maps, the slam of locker doors, roads, railways, rivers, woods and towns viewed from above, windswept airfields and chits and chatter and bad food. And, all the while, she felt that if she wasn’t flying, she was running. And if she wasn’t doing that, she was sleeping. At RAF bases faces, once strange, had become familiar. In her private life, precious loved faces were becoming distant.
She hadn’t seen her mother since spring. And she had promised Elspeth she’d visit once a month if she could, but that hadn’t happened. She spent most of her free time with Jimmy. She wrote to Elspeth apologising, saying how hard it was to get away. ‘Time,’ she wrote, ‘is just hurtling past.’
Meantime, Izzy had bought a motorbike. She’d spotted it in the cluttered forecourt of Eddie Hicks’ garage and decided it was just the thing for her. It was old, noisy, had canvas grips on the handlebars and wasn’t happy travelling at more than thirty miles per hour, but it was cheap, and didn’t use as much petrol as a car. Apart from the bike, it was the first vehicle she had owned. So she loved it. Claire had said, ‘What were you thinking, buying that? I think you’ve been done.’ Julia called it ‘The Beast’ on account of the clunking roar it made as it trudged along. But Izzy didn’t care. On her days off it took her out of Skimpton and into the arms of Captain Jimmy.
Izzy was in love. This surprised her. It had come upon her slowly, this love. She had no former knowledge of this condition, it had never happened to her before. So she had always thought that being in love would be like floating on a silken cloud arms spread open to the breeze, heart filled with song. A person in love would be in a constant state of happiness.
Nobody had told her about the anxiety, the sighing, the loneliness when they were apart. There ought to be lessons in love at school, she thought. Someone should prepare you for this. They could get rid of maths and hockey and replace them with basic instructions on how to deal with matters of the heart.
She worried a lot. She longed for the phone to ring, she watched for the postman hoping for a letter from him. They exchanged letters once or twice a week, but only recently had she put ‘Love, Izzy’ and a kiss at the bottom of hers. He just put his name, Jim. And he still called her Pork Chops.
On his days off, he drove over to see her in his new MG. ‘Got to have a Brit car when I’m over here.’ On her days off, she steamed over to see him on The Beast.
Still believing she’d saved his life (though she’d told him often this was not true), Eddie supplied her with his behind-the-counter, black-market, secret, touch-the-side-of-the-nose, don’t-tell-a-soul, unrationed petrol. It was the last dribblings, sneaked into a can at the end of every fill-up. Only a special few got this privileged fuel.
Izzy drained the last of her tea, shrugged, and asked Jean-Louis, ‘Do you ever get scared?’
‘All the time.’ He thought everybody got scared. ‘I cope,’ he said. ‘I’ve got used to being afraid. Wouldn’t feel right if I wasn’t.’
Izzy said, ‘I’m really scared of the war ending. What will I do? I can’t go back to my old life, not now.’ She put her hand over Jean-Louis’. ‘Different planes, different places, different faces everyday. Sometimes I feel like a stranger in my own life.’
‘You’ll be fine.’
She looked at her watch. ‘I should go. The taxi’s coming for me.’
They saw it coming in to land as they walked towards the runway. Izzy turned, kissed him. ‘It’s been lovely to see you. An old familiar face.’
He told her to take care. ‘And when this is over, you come see me in France. We’ll raise a glass to Betty Stokes.’
As Izzy walked towards the Anson, he shouted, ‘Hey, Eezzy! Ordinary steps, that’s no way to walk. Do it like Wanda.’
In flying suit, helmet and boots, Izzy minced, wiggled hand on hip. It was slow going, she preferred her ordinary walk. The girls on the plane whistled and clapped. ‘It’s Mae West.’
Claire, sitting reading The Times asked what all that was about.
‘Just being silly, met an old friend,’ said Izzy. ‘He used to be Wanda the Wonder.’
‘Wanda the Wonder was a man?’ said Claire.
‘Yes.’
‘Did anybody ever guess?’
The plane rushed along the runway, heaved into the air. The ground, and Jean-Louis, slipped away.
Izzy said, ‘No, nobody ever guessed.’ She waved to the figure below, now a speck, waving wildly. ‘Isn’t it odd the people you meet, get close to, then lose. I travelled the country with that man, stayed in the same boarding houses, made him cups of tea, shared jokes and, perhaps, I’ll never see him again.’