“Do you know how to fly on instruments?”
“Nope,” Ruth said cheerily, “but I’m planning to be safe, not brave. Anyway, look at Amy Johnson. She knew what she was doing, and she still packed it in.”
Marian was skeptical of this logic. They were standing at the little wrought-iron gate to Ruth’s billet. “I could teach you some things,” Marian said. “Just in case.”
“Only if we have our lessons at the pub. I’m getting enough school.”
“You won’t listen there.”
“Then we’ll reward ourselves after with trips to the pub.”
“Twist my arm,” Marian said, waving goodbye.
After a few hours up with an instructor in plodding Tiger Moths and Miles Magisters, open to the wind and rain, Marian soloed. Funny to “solo” after years of flying alone, but she refrained from smirking or complaining, dutifully entered the occasion in her new logbook. After soloing, the next step was twenty-five cross-country flights around Britain, navigating by compass and paper map, following railroads and rivers and Roman roads. Quick hops. The mosaic landscape droned by below, grouted with hedges. On good-weather days she could knock off three or four flights （she was still adjusting to the smallness of this country, which could fit in Alaska’s pocket）， but fine days were interspersed with more that hung low and gray, sometimes turning flyable only after the pilots had been told to clear off home. Even when the weather was passable, a dirty miasma hung over Luton, stinging Marian’s eyes as she passed through in her open biplane. After Dunkirk, the Vauxhall auto factory there had been converted to produce Churchill tanks and army trucks, and the smoke from its chimneys mingled in a dense, acrid soup with smoke from houses and from the smudge pots intended to shield the factory from German bombers. Elsewhere （everywhere, it seemed） she had to worry about barrage balloons tethered on chains around airfields and factories to ensnare or at least deter German planes.
Both Marian and Ruth had Monday as their day off and adopted a routine of going to London on Sunday evenings. They usually saw a movie or a play and spent the night at the Red Cross Club, which was cheaper than a hotel and more fun. There was a penny jukebox and a good snack bar and central heat, and American soldiers and nurses were always around and sometimes pilots they knew. At the PX, they bought salted peanuts and Nestlé bars and cans of beer. Several times they were obliged to go for uniform fittings at Austin Reed. They were to have a skirt, a pair of trousers, two tunics, a jacket, and a greatcoat, all in RAF blue, cut uncomfortably tight for Marian’s taste, not tight enough for Ruth’s.
Some of the more sophisticated girls, ones like Zip who’d gone to fancy colleges or who were especially beautiful like Sylvie, got invited to cocktails at the embassy or for dinner at Jackie Cochran’s flat in Knightsbridge, but Ruth and Marian were happy enough to spend most of their time as a solitary pair or with the transient acquaintances Ruth was always picking up.
“I’m surprised you’re not Jackie’s favorite,” Marian said to Ruth once after they’d run into Sylvie on the street, who’d let slip that Jackie had served real blueberries the night before. “You’d think she’d want you around to charm all her impressive friends.”
“No,” Ruth had said, drawing on her cigarette and squinting in contemplation. “I’m too brassy. No one can say Jackie’s not remarkable, but she’s not really fun, deep down. She tries, but you can see the strain. Just as well. I’m glad not to have any more obligations.”
“If you don’t mind, then I don’t,” said Marian. “I’d be sorry to be left out if you were invited, and she’d never invite me. She probably thinks I’d show up in a burlap sack.”
“No, it’s the opposite. You’re the one she’d have if we weren’t thick as thieves. She’d like to improve you.” Ruth linked her arm through Marian’s and rested her head against her shoulder. “Silly goose doesn’t see there’s nothing that could possibly be improved.”
But in September Jackie was gone, back to America, to head up an all-female domestic version of the ATA, the WASP. No more cocktails in Knightsbridge. Helen Richey, famous for being the first female commercial pilot in the United States, was put in charge of the American contingent. But by then Jackie’s girls were deep into their training, with little need for a den mother.
Everyone in London seemed to drink a lot, to never sleep enough, to be ravenous for fun. The mood in the nightclubs and dance halls was deliriously defiant, and Ruth led Marian into the thick of things. Ruth was a flirt but never let any of the men even kiss her, so far as Marian knew. She always talked about her husband on nights out, more than she did other times. Marian, though, if the hour was late, might let a man kiss her in a shadowy corner of a dance floor, or she might let her knees part as someone ran his hand up her leg in a dark taxi. If there had been an opportunity, she might have done more, but always Ruth appeared and laughingly but firmly extricated her, shepherded her back to the chaste dormitory rooms of the Red Cross.