Eleven Hours, by Rosalind Kerr

An original short story extract set in the twentieth century.

‘She’s all yours,’ said Mr Gilchrist, and he climbed out of the front cockpit and walked away across the grass with his hands in his pockets, as though he had simply finished his tea.

Phyllis sat very still in the back of the Moth. The empty seat in front of her looked enormous. For eleven hours of lessons there had been a leather helmet in it, and the back of a large, calm neck, and a voice in the speaking tube saying, ‘Gently, gently, she’ll do it herself if you let her.’ Now there was nothing but a strap hanging loose and the wind fingering it.

Her mouth had gone dry. She went through the checks, and her hands did them while her mind stood a little way off, watching, as if it belonged to someone else. Fuel on. Throttle set. Switches. The mechanic swung the propeller and the engine caught with a bang that went right through her spine, and the whole aeroplane trembled like a dog that wanted to be let off its lead.

She thought: I could stop now. I could switch off, climb down, say I felt unwell. Nobody would say anything. Her brother would say something. Her brother had said, at Christmas, that women had no more business in an aeroplane than a cat had in a bath, and the whole table had laughed, and she had laughed too, which was the part she minded most.

She opened the throttle.

The grass went past faster and faster in a green blur, the tail lifted, the bumping stopped, and suddenly there was nothing underneath her at all. The hedge dropped away. The hangar dropped away. A cow looked up, astonished, and became a small brown stone in a field. Phyllis heard herself make a sound, half a shout and half a laugh, that was snatched from her mouth and flung back over her shoulder by the wind.

She was alone. She was entirely, terrifyingly alone, a thousand feet above Hertfordshire with nobody to tell her what to do, and the terror and the joy were so tangled together that she could not have pulled one out without the other.

Below, by the hangar, a small figure with its hands in its pockets was watching. Somewhere a long way under the roar of the engine, Phyllis thought about landing, and her stomach turned over, and she put the thought away for later.

How does the writer show Phyllis’s thoughts and feelings during her first solo flight?

You should consider:

• what the writer says about Phyllis
• the writer’s use of language to show her thoughts and feelings

You must refer to the text to support your answer, using relevant subject terminology where appropriate.