Tuesday, May 06, 2008
RANDOM COOL POST
She flew Spitfires and was the first woman to break the sound barrier - the very racy life of the original fast ladyindeed.
Should a girl ever be born to live fast, it would have to be Diana Barnato.
From her childhood in the 1930s, she remembered the crunch of spinning tyres on the gravel at her father's country home in Surrey as he and his Croesus-rich friends accelerated their open-top, longnosed racing Bentleys up the drive.
They would come to a skidding halt in the pits he'd had built there, like the ones at the Brooklands racing track, where he was often seen taking the chequered flag.
The 'Bentley Boys', as this coterie of glamorous men was known, would then spill out from their cars, with the giggling, chattering 'Bentley Girls', the upper-class types who travelled everywhere with them. Then the champagne corks would pop and the fun would begin.
This was the inter-war age of indulgence when, if you had the means - and Captain 'Babe' Barnato, who had inherited a diamond mine, certainly did - then, as Cole Porter put it, 'anything goes'.
It was easy to fall into the trap of what another contemporary song-writer, Hoagy Carmichael, characterised as "jangled morals and wild weekends".
But the millionaire's daughter had a different destiny. True, she did the debutante thing and curtsied in front of King George VI like other girls of her wealth and class, and she could party with the best of them.
But she would be no 'Bentley Girl', no hanger-on. She would be her own woman, and a brave one at that.
War gave her a purpose. From 1941, she was one of a handful of women who ferried Spitfires and Hurricanes, Wellingtons and Lancasters from factories and servicing depots to front-line squadrons.
Known as ATA-girls after the name of their unit, the Air Transport Auxiliary, they braved all weathers, flew without guns or armour-plating, radio, radar and navigation aids, piloting aircraft they knew little about.
They were prey to storms and marauding German Messerschmitts looking for an easy kill. Diana, had an additional problem - just 5ft tall, she had to perch on a cushion to reach the pedals.
Yet, in three years, she flew 260 Spitfires and mastered dozens of other warplanes, including a huge, lumbering Walrus flying boat that most male pilots balked at. She was shot at, hammered by storms, stricken by engine failures, but she never lost a plane.
She died this week, aged 90, one of the last of an exceptional breed of women who, in World War II, took on men's jobs and did them brilliantly, without complaining. They laughed off the put- downs of outraged men and were unfazed by workplace ribaldry.
Diana and her kind encountered striking opposition. The editor of a magazine called Aeroplane spoke of "the menace of the woman who thinks that she ought to be flying a high-speed bomber when she really has not the intelligence to scrub the floor properly".
Women, he went on, suffered from "too much self-confidence, an over-load of conceit, a dislike of taking orders and not enough experience".
But needs must in wartime, and women like Diana were eventually welcomed.
She had learned how to fly before the war in a Tiger Moth, passed fit after just six hours' training. For further tests she had to join the ATA, she practised landing and take-off speeds by driving down the Egham bypass in the silver-grey Bentley her father had given her for her 21st birthday.
Diana was glamorous in her sheepskin flying jacket and pilot's cap, and could create a stir among the astonished airmen at whatever airfield this "very, very pretty girl" landed. They had seen nothing like her before.
She was equally magnetic in the fashionable clubs in London - Embassy or 400 - where she played just as hard as she worked.
For all the manliness of her duties, she kept her femininity. Once, while trying some (forbidden) aerobatics in a delivery plane, the silver make-up compact she always carried, fell from her pocket, danced round the cockpit canopy and covered her face with powder.
When she got to her destination and stepped out of the plane, she was as white-faced as a circus clown.
Another time, when she was lost and disorientated in thick cloud, and should have baled out to safety, she stayed put. "With the parachute straps," she explained, "my skirt would have ridden up and anyone who happened to be below would have seen my knickers!"
By skill - though she would insist it was just luck - she edged the Spitfire downwards until it broke through the cloud and she could see where she was. . . skimming the treetops and seconds from disaster.
She hurled the plane to one side to narrowly miss a clump that could have killed her. Then, in heavy rain and on a tiny grass airstrip to which she had never flown before, she made a perfect landing.
Her love life, however, was never smooth. There, her good fortune deserted her. In 1941, she fell madly for a handsome squadron leader and after just three weeks, they got engaged. A quick wedding was planned.
It never happened. Her fiancĂ died in the wreck of his Spitfire. Only later did she discover the cause of his death - he had a WAAF from the base on his knee at the time, taking her for a joy ride in the single-seater, and the weight meant he lost control.
When I met Diana a few years ago and she told me this, she chuckled. But her lover's fatal indiscretion must have compounded her hurt at the time.
Yet, she did marry, another RAF pilot, all stunning blue eyes and youthful looks. The courtship with Wing Commander Derek Walker was just as quick and impatient. They married in May 1944.
Then in November 1945, the day after they were able to begin life together in married quarters at his station, his plane failed to return from a routine operation. His Mustang crashed in bad weather.
After the blow of his death, she resolved to be a woman of independence. She took as a lover a rich American living in England, Whitney Straight, who had been, like her father, a champion racing driver.
He WAS a charismatic, daredevil figure, who flew Spitfires for the RAF, had been shot down and escaped from captivity in France and spirited out by an underground escape line. After the war, he was the boss of BOAC, the precursor of British Airways.
In fast cars and flying, they had much in common. But this 30-year affair was not one she talked about, though the evidence was obvious - she gave birth to his son in 1947. All she would say was that she never asked Straight to leave his wife. "I was perfectly content. I had my own identity."
She was a single mother when such things were not the norm. She was a pilot when such things were not the norm. Quietly, she broke barriers, glass or otherwise, all her extraordinary life.
And in 1963, with a bang. One of her many friends in the RAF offered her the chance to fly one of the new supersonic Lightning fighter planes.
She persuaded the Ministry of Defence to agree, undertook all the rigorous medical tests required of modern pilots, then made her attempt on the women's speed record.
As the after-burners of the two-seater Lightning roared behind her, she crashed through the sound barrier, the first woman to do so, and reached an amazing 1,262mph, Mach1.65. She had always been a fast lady, now she was the fastest one in the world.
Her generation of women, though their achievements are often overlooked, were indefatigable, and Diana Barnato Walker was one of the very best.
