The Decision by Penny Vincenzi Page A

with, but it was a bit different if you were dead common and trying to claw your way up. Some of the girls had been quite off with her in the beginning, not unfriendly, but not friendly either.
    Most of them had been to private schools, or at the very least to grammar schools, their fathers worked in banks and in insurance companies; none of them were builders. And their mothers stayed at home and looked after them and gave dinner parties, and had what they called charladies. It had taken Scarlett quite a long time to admit her mother had been a charlady. She knew it was dreadful of her; and when, buoyed up by her own popularity and success, she did announce it one night, nobody turned a hair and said things like ‘good for her’. But she also knew that there was an element of hypocrisy in it, that some of them at least were struggling to show how broad-minded they were, and that if the interviewing board had known it would have been a black mark against her, not an acknowledged one of course, but there, just the same. She hadn’t tried to explain all this to Diana; it would have been pointless.
    Diana, it turned out, was engaged. ‘The trick is to work for a year, and then you get the honeymoon flights free.’
    An old hand now, Scarlett had learnt first aid, among other things how to inject people with morphine (practising on the skin of an orange), and to deal with the inevitable air sickness; she knew about crash survival, about catering, how to work the bar, which was sealed before and after take-off. No one could leave the plane until customs – known as the rummage squad – had visited it and checked the contents of the drinks cupboard which was closed with a lead seal before take-off and after landing.
    And she had swiftly learnt the real lessons in bar work: how to put white wine through the soda-stream in lieu of champagne, how to knock the top off a Rémy Martin bottle, strain the contents through a tea towel into a jug and report it ‘broken in flight’ and then how to smuggle the booty out. Flat whisky bottles were the easiest and could easily be contained inside a pantie-girdle – ‘make sure it’s at least three times too big,’ one of the old hands had told them – along with four packets of cigarettes.
    Scarlett and Diana both flew Comets. The rotas were mostly European, to Rome, Madrid, Paris and occasionally down to Majorca, in the middle of the night with the fast-developing package tourists, the grockles as they called them, who begged them to tell them where they stayed or to join them for drinks. The other airline, BOAC, did the long-haul flights; the Boack girls, as they were known, were irritatingly superior about their job, their passengers – mostly VIPs – and their destinations: America, Canada, India.
    Scarlett loved it; the fun, the glamour, the status of it all. She loved the dizzy excitement of the walk through the terminal, wearing her uniform, the blue-and-white dogtooth suit, the white shirt, the jaunty cap, smiling confidently, being pointed out and stared at admiringly – anyone would think they flew the bloody planes – greeting passengers at the top of the steps, directing them to their places, settling them, flirting very mildly with the men, charming the women, walking up and down slowly, smiling reassuringly, checking they were all safely strapped in. ‘It’s a bit like being a mannequin,’ they’d been told when they were training. ‘Everyone will look at you, you’re the face of the airline, you have to be calm, confident, perfectly groomed every minute of every trip.’
    And they had such fun. The pilots were fantastic, glamorous, dashing figures, made so much more handsome by their uniforms – Scarlett never got over seeing a pilot for the first time without his uniform – without anything actually, but it would have made no difference, he looked smaller, paler, even his teeth seemed less white. The most dashing were the ex-fighter pilots, older, practised