Itwas very peaceful at ten thousand feet, with the clear blue sky above and the patchwork quilt of England below. The only sounds were the rush of the wind past the canopy of the sleek Harridan fighter, the thrumming of the airscrew and the occasional creak of the massive spring beneath the cockpit releasing its tension. It was one of the reasons why Aviator Sergeant Gwen Stone loved flying so much; the freedom she felt was incomparable to anything she had ever felt on the ground.

It was almost enough to make her forget there was a war on, especially since in the month that the squadron had been formed and begun to operate she hadn’t seen a single enemy aircraft. There had been scattered reports of enemy machines making incursions over the last couple of days and a few of the other squadrons had seen minor engagements with no losses on either side, but Gwen’s squadron, number 145, based out of Didchurch, a small town just north of London, had yet to see any action whatsoever.

It was a situation that had the government and military leaders in Whitehall perplexed; because of the ease with which the forces of Kaiser Wilhelm III had crushed the forces of one country after another, then swept the British Exploration Force into the sea, it had seemed inevitable that the Kingdom of Britain would be next and indeed there were rumours of an invasion force gathering along the coasts of conquered France and Belgium, only twenty miles or so from the south of England. However, the expected and feared all-out assault on the British Isles hadn’t materialised and instead Kaiser Bill had been keeping his aircraft at home, seemingly consolidating his forces on the continent. Consequently it had been a very quiet couple of weeks and that, combined with the surprisingly lovely summer weather, was making a lot of people complacent, pilots included.

Everybody agreed that it was only a matter of time before the attack came, though, and many people saw those recent aerial engagements as a sign that perhaps it was finally on its way.

Gwen agreed with that assessment and for her the fight couldn’t come soon enough; she had business with the Prussians.

However, it was such a nice day that she was sorely tempted to let herself relax slightly and enjoy the flight for once. Flying in the Royal Aviator Corps wasn’t like flying for fun back home on her parents’ estate; added to the task of just keeping a finicky fighter in the air was the fact that she was constantly having to remain disciplined in her scan of the sky for enemies that were never there, but which might well be the next time she looked. She also had to worry about a damaged spring as well - the creaking that made her seat vibrate every couple of minutes was not only extremely distracting, it was also very worrying.

She’d been having problems with slippage for a week and under the RAC’s own regulations the spring should have been repaired or replaced, but she had been forced to make do; it was impossible to open the case of an “Ozzy”, an Ozymandias-type spring, outside of a specially-built facility (unless of course you wanted to have several miles of extremely sharp six inch wide brass uncoiling at high speed in every direction) and all the new ones that were being produced were needed for the fighters that the factories were turning out as quickly as they could.

Dealing with aircraft that weren’t quite perfect was par for the course in wartime, though, and wouldn’t have interfered with her enjoyment of the sortie too much, but she also had to deal with her flight leader’s insistence on a far too tight formation, which meant she was having to keep almost half her attention focussed on her wing just to avoid a collision.

Needing fighter pilots desperately in the face of overwhelming Prussian numbers and after having lost so many in France, the bigwigs in Whitehall had brought dozens of pilots with experience from the First Great War, like Squadron Leader Albert “Berty” Withers, out of retirement when their army had been forced out of France. He insisted on maintaining an extremely tight formation, with wingtips almost overlapping (following regulations that were as out of date as his pilot’s qualification) which had been fine in the Great War where airspeeds had been far more sedentary and you could almost have a break for tea while you waited for the enemy to close with you, but the advent of spring-power had revolutionised aircraft and they had become much more aerodynamic and a hell of a lot faster. The sleek spring-powered Harridans and Spitsteams that comprised the majority of the fighters of the Royal Aviator Corps were much different beasts to the old steam-powered Sapworth Dromedaries and such that the “flynosaurs”, as they were not so affectionately known by the new breed of pilots, were used to. Even near the end of the war when designs became more efficient after British scientists worked out how to put automatic coal feeders in aircraft without risk of them catching fire, getting rid of the need to have space for an extra man, they were still extremely heavy, making them unwieldy and slow and not much faster than the zeppelin bombers that they had been designed to escort. In this war the enemy could be on you in an instant and every second spent checking your place in the formation was a second less spent scanning the sky, but most of the old pilots didn’t seem to understand that and still went with the old theory that it was harder to pick aircraft off if they were bunched up together nice and neatly.

There was another ominous creak from below her seat, but much louder than the others had been, and she snarled as the needle on the tension indicator lurched closer to nought - it looked like her spring was getting worse which meant that today’s flying time was going to be seriously curtailed, more so than other days.

With a sigh she keyed her microphone. ‘Patin Leader, this is Three.’

‘Go ahead, Patin Three.’

‘I’m getting more slippage, Leader. Down to one-quarter tension.’

‘Roger, Three. Damn that spring! Don’t worry, we’ll be turning for home in a couple of minutes anyway; there’s no trade to be had today.’

‘Acknowledged, Leader.’

Not for the first time Gwen cursed the spring; it had taken too much flying time in perfect conditions away from her, and that was something that neither she nor the rest of her squadron could afford - when the enemy, Die Fliegertruppe of the Prussian Empire, or the Fleas as they were derogatorily known in the British press, came across the channel, she and her colleagues would need as much experience as possible to withstand their superior numbers.

During each of the missions that she’d flown over the last couple of months Gwen had had various reasons to curse: the spring for slipping, her squadron leader for the formation, the war for ruining her life, the bright sun for potentially hiding the enemy, but she never cursed her aircraft; she would never do that. Despite its many shortcomings, the Hawking Harridan was a fine machine and, along with the Supranaval Spitsteam, it was the best that the Kingdom of Britain could rapidly mass-produce.

Gwen resumed her scan of the sky, moving her eyes along the horizon from one side to the other, then completing the circuit by lifting her head to look overhead, avoiding the sun so as not to blind herself. The movement was not nearly as automatic as it should have been yet, she still had to tell herself to do it, but she knew that it would come, if she survived long enough; the more experienced pilots said as much.

In the middle of a scan she hesitated, blinking, as her mind tried to tell her something. Had she seen something? She retraced her scan, going back the opposite way. There! Was that a dot or just a speck of dust on her canopy?

She was about to slide a magnification lens down over her goggles to take a better look when she was interrupted by a call over the radio.

‘Close formation, please, Patin Three.’

A quick glance to the side showed that while she had been searching for the dot in the sky she had let a gap open up between herself and the squadron leader’s aircraft, in turn forcing “Patin Four” to move over with her.

A few soft nudges on her rudder pedals was all it took to put her aircraft back into formation and she cursed Berty Withers silently before keying her microphone. ‘Apologies, Leader.’

Gwen’s attention had been elsewhere for less than ten seconds, but when she lifted her eyes to seek out the dot overhead it had grown into an aircraft and spouted fire.

‘Break!’ She threw her spring into maximum unwind, simultaneously pulled back on the stick to try to get out from between the two Harridans flanking her.

Her warning came far too late as tracer rounds were already penetrating the small formation.

The effect was instantaneous as the armour piercing ammunition of the Prussians ripped half of the squadron leader’s wing off and he spun and went into a dive, narrowly missing Patin Two. Her own aircraft didn’t come through unscathed either and it shuddered as at least two rounds struck it, opening up gaping holes in the metal of her left wing and damaging the frame beneath.

She had no idea how the other two aircraft in her flight fared, though, and she had no time to look for them as she threw her machine onto its wing and turned sharply after the Fleas.

There were four of them, Muhlenberg MU9’s, agile fighters that had accounted for far too many pilots and aircraft over France.

Gwen had a few of seconds before they closed back into range and she used one to glance over her shoulder and look for the rest of her flight - there was no sign of them, but she thought she saw a flash of white far below, possibly from a glidewing.

She had no time to keep searching for them, though, because the MU9’s were fast approaching.

Instead of climbing back into the sky they had banked and were coming around to get another shot at their victims, obviously supremely confident in their advantage and intending to turn fight.

Gwen grimaced; the Harridan was a wonderful gun platform, stable and capable of accurately delivering a weight of metal that rivalled the Frigates of the Napoleonic Conflict and was more than enough to take down bombers and heavy fighters. It was also fairly manoeuvrable and could out turn even a Spitsteam under certain conditions, but the MU9’s were reportedly far more nimble and under normal circumstances she couldn’t possibly hope to take on four of them.

Fortunately, though, she had an ace up her sleeve - she reached under her seat to a hidden panel, feeling the four switches there and flicked the one on the far right, praying that the modifications she had secretly made to the wings in the dead of the night over four long weeks hadn’t been damaged by the two hits her machine had taken.

She was relieved to hear a high-pitched whirring sound as the small springs uncoiled, extending panels from the wings and altering their configuration. Now she just had to hope that having the odds in their favour and better machines would make the Fleas so sure of their victory that they would become complacent and make a mistake.

Whether they hadn’t been expecting such a quick reaction on her part or they were just as inexperienced as she was, the enemy pilots had already made their first mistake by turning the way they had; instead of banking to come around behind her they had turned the other way and her increased rate of turn meant that she was inside them.

One by one the four aircraft came into range. She was unable to get all of them in her sights because they were at different altitudes, but two of them lazily crossed through her sights and she thumbed the button on her stick, holding it down for almost two seconds.

For the first time ever she fired in combat. The first of her rounds passed harmlessly in front of her intended target because she had overcompensated and led her target too far, but then the Flea obliged her by flying into the stream.

The enemy aircraft disintegrated, literally coming apart in the air.

Stunned, Gwen froze.

She had just killed someone.

The rattle of machine guns that weren’t her own brought her crashing back to reality and she realised that she had been flying straight and level for several seconds - far too long.

She threw her machine on its wing and pulled hard back on the stick, stamping on the rudder pedals to stop it from diving straight down, feeling her weight multiply instantly by a factor of at least four, but probably more like six or seven. Black started to crowd in at the edges of her vision and she screamed wordlessly, trying to force some blood back into her brain to keep her awake, to keep her alive.

The forces acting on her lessened as her aircraft slowed and her vision cleared just in time to see of one of the MU9’s beginning to slide under her nose. She held her fire, though, barely needing to think back to the lessons in flight school about leading targets under turning condition to know not to fire until she had come completely inside it.

Perhaps warned by one of his comrades, the fighter flipped onto its back and tried to dive out of her path, but that just made it easier for her and she made a quick adjustment, turning into a slight dive herself to intercept its path.

She watched the stream of tracers reaching out for the MU9, intercepting it and passing through it, but then it was gone, diving directly for the ground, now less than eight thousand feet below.

She let it go, knowing that it wouldn’t be able to get back into the fight even if she hadn’t hit it and swung her wings back to the vertical, returning to her tight turn and searching for the last two enemy machines.

Unable to find them, she frantically swung her head back and forth, positive that they were on her tail and about to open fire, but then, when she swung round on her second turn, she spotted them - they were a couple of thousand feet below her, in a shallow dive, heading for the coastline and home. Either she had scared them badly or, more likely, they were running out of spring tension; their bases were a lot further away than hers was.

She considered following them for a second, but there was another screech from below her seat as the spring slipped again and she blanched when she saw that she was down to less than ten percent tension.

A quick glance at the chalkboard with her notes of the flight’s movements attached to her right thigh and a few quick calculations gave her an approximate heading for home and she turned the Harridan onto it.

The dogfight had lasted for less than a minute, but she had felt truly alive for the first time in her life; set free from the absurd constraints of formation flying she had finally been able to use her machine the way it was supposed to be used and it had been exhilarating.

Keeping half an eye on the two fighters in case their retreat was a ruse, she put her left hand on the stick and flexed her right; it was aching from the death grip she had been maintaining and was shaking slightly, which she hoped was more from adrenaline than from fear. She took a deep breath and rolled shoulders that had been up around her ears, then tilted her head back and forth, trying to release some of the tension that she hadn’t even noticed had built up.

Only now did she replay the fight in her mind and she was amazed to realise that at no point had she even considered running. Fighting had been the correct decision because the MU’s with their superior speed would have chased her down easily, but it hadn’t even crossed her mind and she had gone at them like a terrier after rabbits. It had worked for her this time, but next time she might not be so lucky.

She reached out to touch the photo of a handsome young man attached to the top of her brushed brass instrument panel with clips that she had crudely soldered in place. She smiled and stroked his face with her gloved fingertips. ‘Not yet, darling. Almost, but not quite.’

The enemy fighters had disappeared completely and there was no sign of anyone else in the sky so Gwen turned her attention downwards to the countryside below, looking for landmarks. She soon found a couple - the railway line which stopped at the town near the airfield, which she had used to go up to London on leave last weekend and the old castle on the top of the hill that she had visited once as a child with her parents not so many years ago.

She was only twenty miles from home. At her current speed of a little under three hundred miles an hour that was less than five minutes of flying.

There was another screech from the spring beneath her seat, but this one was far more prolonged and deathlike and the needle on the tension indicator firmly laid itself to rest against the stop that was marked by a red nought.

The Harridan slowed noticeably as the airscrew stopped creating thrust and Gwen cursed. She immediately put the aircraft into a shallow dive to conserve airspeed while she reached between her legs for the large, yellow and black striped lever on the floor - thankfully the Harridan and Spitsteam were both fitted with auxiliary springs, small units in the base of the pilot’s seat. They were very weak, though; designed solely to give a pilot a little bit of control in the case of a complete failure of the main spring and were only capable of keeping an aircraft just above stall speed for three minutes. That on its own wouldn’t be enough to get her home, but she had height to spare and was certain she’d be able to trade it for distance and make it all the way to the airfield.

The lever took a fair amount of tugging before it turned; the auxiliary spring had probably never been used before, or at least not since the fighter had been tested at the factory, and she offered a brief prayer to whoever was listening that the fitters had remembered to keep it wound.

The airscrew whirred into life as the new spring kicked in, but it was an incredibly feeble sound compared to the deep thrum of before.

She tentatively pulled back on the stick until the Harridan was level and was gratified to see the airspeed indicator remain stable at two hundred and fifty miles per hour. She throttled back slightly and put the craft back into a shallow dive, wanting to conserve some tension for landing.

Ten miles. Four thousand feet. It was going to be very close.

As she got lower, the landscape below became clearer and she started to recognise more and more of the local landmarks.

There was the country pub that most of the squadron had gone to one night, following rumours of a particularly good local brew that had turned out to be barely drinkable, but hadn’t prevented them from draining several casks of it before being turfed out in the early hours of the morning to drunkenly drive home.

Up ahead was the church and the graveyard where they had buried one of their own after he had crashed on landing in high winds.

There was the field where another of her squadron had been forced to land when her spring had broken shortly after takeoff, breaking through its case to drape metal into the trees below. She had survived. Barely. But would never fly again.

And there was RAC Didchurch, just beyond the small town that gave it its name, its grass field browned from use and flanked by row upon row of low red brick buildings.

As if it was mocking her, the moment she spotted the airfield was the moment that the auxiliary spring chose to run out of tension.

She cursed for about the tenth time that flight as she reached down to pump the lever backwards and forwards a couple of times in frustration, but nothing happened - the reserve spring had evidently reached its end; months of not being used had most likely caused it to lose some of its tension and it almost certainly hadn’t been checked every week like it should have been.

The airfield was now only a couple of miles away, but her airspeed was dropping fast, along with her altitude. It was not too late to divert and bring the Harridan down in a field, but that was a risky proposition in itself; there would be no way of knowing until she was too close to do anything about it whether the field had drainage channels or tree stumps or furrows from ploughing. Even too-high crops might be enough to catch around her wheels and send her cartwheeling. No, it was better to try for the airfield, so she aimed for it and set the aircraft on its optimal glide angle and speed.

They had practised dead-stick landings at flight school and she had flown gliders before, but she had never had to land under these conditions, with damage to her aircraft and very little altitude to play with.

A quick glance was enough to tell her that she was below the optimal altitude, but she hadn’t taken into account the effect that her modifications had on the aircraft - the same principles that had allowed her to turn faster now gave her more lift and she found that she was able to put the aircraft into a shallower glide.

One hundred feet.

Fifty feet.

Twenty feet.

Ten.

She curled her toes and held her breath as she cleared the hedges at the end of the field by about two feet with the controls becoming less responsive and the stick shaking in her hands as the aircraft reached its stall point and began protesting.

The Harridan all but fell out of the sky and bounced heavily, jolting her and making her teeth snap together as her chin hit her chest. It rolled for less than a hundred feet before her gentle application of the brakes brought it to a halt level with the brick building that contained the messes and the ready rooms.

She sighed and pulled her helmet from her head, careful not to damage the integrated goggles with their array of magnification lenses, then plucked the photo from the panel and put it in her flightsuit pocket. She pulled back the canopy and closed her eyes as the late spring breeze cooled her sweaty brow and ruffled her mousy brown hair.

She looked up as voices carried to her; people were wandering out of the mess building, attracted by her unusual method of arrival - officers and men, aircrew and groundcrew, all coming to see what the fuss was about.

She unstrapped herself, releasing herself from both the aircraft and her glidewings, then struggled to her feet. Her legs and arms were shaking and reluctant to obey her control and it took her three attempts before she managed to clamber out of the cockpit. Then, not trusting herself, she sat on the front of the wing and all but slid down to the ground where she leaned heavily against the machine.

Her eye was drawn to a hole in the wing beside her, the first of three in a line, neatly spaced about two feet apart. It was almost four inches wide and went diagonally all the way through the wing. She bent down and peered through it, following the path of the shot backwards - it had missed the canopy, and her head within, by less than a foot.

She swallowed as she realised what a close call she’d had and her legs buckled beneath her.

She was saved from a tumble by the arms of a medical orderly. ‘Steady, there, luv! You alright? Anything hurt?’

He was a northerner, his accent placing his origins as somewhere around Newcastle. His grey hair also placed him well beyond the age when he should have retired and been spending the rest of his life at home comfortably with his grandchildren, but people had come from all over and from all walks of life to join in the effort of saving their country and men like him with medical training were sorely needed.

She shook her head mutely, unable to speak and he nodded in sympathy. ‘That’s alright, luv, you just take your time.’

‘Aviator Sergeant Stone! What’s this all about? Where are the rest of your flight?’

Gwen gave the orderly a weak smile then forced her legs to straighten so she could stand to attention and face the base commander.

The orderly released her and stepped back, but he remained a presence at her side, ready to catch her if she fell, and she was glad for that as her knees trembled, threatening to pitch her on her face.

‘We were jumped by four MU9’s, ma’am. Squadron Leader Withers went down in the first pass, I think that Echols and Perkins were hit too, but I saw at least one glidewing deploy. I got one definite and another probable before they disengaged to head home.’

The base commander, Group Captain Dorothy Campbell, a Scottish woman in her early fifties, had been a pilot in the Great War, an ace. She had flown with Berty Withers and the news of his death rendered her silent for a few seconds. She stared off into the distance, perhaps commending his soul to whatever old pilots believed in.

The group captain was fresh from the mess, where she had obviously been dining with guests because she was wearing her full-dress uniform. The gold “scrambled egg” on her tall top hat with its purple silk band was gleaming in the sun and her long coat, the blue of the English summer sky just before sunset, with its built in whalebone corset and double row of gold buttons over flaring skirts, was immaculately pressed. She would have looked extremely impressive, but the effect was spoiled somewhat by the fact that she still had her napkin tucked into her high collar. She was accompanied by a wing commander who Gwen didn’t know, but who was equally smartly dressed, although sans napkin and without the egg on her hat, of course.

The wing commander was staring at the wing of the Harridan, but when she felt Gwen’s eyes upon her she turned and her slate grey eyes met Gwen’s green ones. She raised an eyebrow and tilted her head minutely towards the wing and at first Gwen thought she was silently commenting on the holes, but then the blood drained from her face as she realised that she had forgotten to return the wing to its standard, regulation configuration.

The wing commander saw her expression and gave her a barely perceptible nod, then reached out to take the group captain by the arm. ‘Come on, Dot, let’s go raise HQ on the radio, see if anyone has reported your pilots coming down. Perhaps Berty bailed out in time.’

She began to drag the base commander away, but the older woman stopped suddenly, frowning, her eyes on Gwen’s Harridan. She pulled her arm away from the wing commander’s grasp and walked to the fighter, taking in the panels that had extended from the tailing edges and tips of the wings.

She sighed and shook her head, then turned to Gwen. ‘Aviator Sergeant Stone.’

‘Yes, Ma’am.’ Gwen stiffened, knowing what was coming.

The woman checked her pocket watch. ‘You have until four to clean yourself up and eat. At that time you are to report to the detention barracks. Is that clear?’

‘Yes, Ma’am.’

‘Dismissed.’

Gwen drew herself up even more and nodded, then turned and marched towards the building and the non-commissioned officer’s mess. The watching throng of people opened up in front of her and she walked through them with as much dignity as she could, praying all the time that her legs wouldn’t give in and betray her distress.

Thank you so much for reading. ‘The Battle Over Britain’ is Simon Brading's first novel in his ‘Misfit Squadron’ series. More information on where to obtain the book as well as other information about Simon and the series can be found on his website. Also, Simon would love to hear from you about this, or any of his work — please get in touch on Bluesky. Now, we invite you to read Chapter One by clicking the right-arrow below, over there on the right.