Worrals in the making?
Since I was a little boy, I have been fascinated with aircraft, mostly aircraft from WWI and WWII. When I was younger, I built nerdily-painted plastic model aircraft - P-51 Mustangs and Focke Wulf FW-190s - and read W.E. Johns’ Biggles stories, replete with stiff upper lips, engine coolant, and the satisfying comfort that natives knew their place.
Not that I’ve tried to foist it on her, but Tiggy quite likes aircraft too. And if my daughter wanted to be a pilot, astronaut or engineer, she’d have my blessing.
And there’s a long history of women in aviation, from the much-feared Nachthexen (well, among the Germans, anyway, for whom anything that menstruated and flew was self-evidently diabolical and quite probably dangerous); Russian all-female biplane bomber crew who terrorised the German army along the Eastern Front during WWII, to Amelia Earhart, the amazing navigator and long-distance flier Amy Johnson and Pauline Gower, who set up the Air Transport Auxiliary in Britain during WWII.
But best of all? I recently discovered that W.E. Johns contributed as much to the damaging of young women as young men with a yearning for the skies in a series of novels for girls, featuring the dashing pluck of that irrepressible heroine, Joan ‘Worrals‘ Worralson. Now if only I can find them for Tiggy to read…
Tags: aircraft, Biggles, boys, careers, girls, hobbies, pilots, W.E. Johns, World War I, World War II, Worrals
Monday, 28 April 2008 at 11:10 pm
Ha! I’m already trying to imagine what sort of dashing adventures Ms Worrals would have found herself in. She has such sensible trouser pockets, too! She looks fab.
I read an article about another female pilot from the 1930s recently- Lores Bonney from Oz. She doesn’t seem to have been showered with the same amount of attention as Ms Earhardt, though… She was the first pilot to fly from the Australian east coast to South Africa, and the first female pilot to fly from Oz to England. Which are all bloody scary feats when you think about her flying solo in a tiny plane with an engine the size of a couple of lawn-mowers…