Is it ever acceptable to stalk elderly women to the ends of the earth and plunder their most precious memories? I do hope so.

You could say it started with a kiss – an innocent one with my wife on our wedding day 11 years ago. But immediately after the ceremony my love affair with a particular type of older woman started when one of them, a tall, angular lady in her seventies, strode up and introduced herself as “ATA”.

This turned out to be shorthand for what she’d done in the war; flown Spitfires and dozens of other aeroplanes, sometimes legally, occasionally not, for the Air Transport Auxiliary.

Her craziest story of illegal flying involved two passes under the Severn railway bridge in Spitfires in 1943. The first time she was following two male pilots at low tide. Then she did it alone, at high tide with 30ft less clearance. Which, as she mused later, “just shows what kind of head I didn’t use”.

I became mildly obsessed with the women of the ATA. When one told me another was still alive, I’d bunk off work to find her, and not just for an hour or two. I went to Warsaw to meet a beautiful 80-something Spitfire ace called Jadwiga, whose father founded modern Poland; to South Africa, to meet the only woman to survive ditching in the Firth of Forth; and Chile, where Margot Duhalde described a row she had with a fellow Spitfire pilot in 1944. “When the war’s over, I’ll knock your teeth out,” Margot told her. Just the sort to have on your side in a fight.

— Spitfire Women of World War II by Giles Whittell is published by HarperPress

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