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A three-year course with Air Service Training would have cost you over a thousand pounds. I don’t know what Maddie’s granddad would have earned in a year back then. He did fairly well with his motorbike business, as I have said, not so well during the Depression, but still, by our standards then, anyone would have considered his a good living. At any rate it would have cost him most of his year’s earnings to buy Maddie one year of flying lessons. She got her first flight free, an hour’s excursion in Dympna’s restored Puss Moth on a glorious clear summer evening of crisp wind and long light, and saw the Pennines from above for the first time. Beryl got to come along for the ride, since she had been as much involved in Dympna’s rescue as Maddie had, but Beryl had to sit in the very back and couldn’t see so well and was sick into her handbag. She thanked Dympna but never went for another flight.

And of course that was a joyride, not a lesson. Maddie couldn’t afford lessons. But she made Oakway Aerodrome her own. Oakway came into being in parallel with Maddie’s crush on aeroplanes – I want bigger toys, she’d wished, and hey presto, a week later, there was Oakway. It was only a fifteen-minute motorbike ride. It was so spanking new that the mechanics there were happy to have an extra pair of capable hands around. Maddie was out every Saturday that summer tinkering with engines and doping fabric wings and making friends. Then in October her persistence suddenly, unexpectedly paid off. That is when we started the Civil Air Guard.

I say we – I mean Britain. Just about every flying club in the kingdom joined in, and so many thousands of people applied – free flight training! – that they could only take about a tenth of them. And only one in 20 of those were women. But Maddie got lucky again because all the engineers and mechanics and instructors at Oakway knew and liked her now, and she got glowing recommendations for being quick and committed and knowing all about oil levels. She wasn’t straight away any better than any other pilot who trained at Oakway with the Civil Air Guard. But she wasn’t any worse either. She made her first solo flight in the first week of the new year, between snow flurries.