A Sister’s Courage. Molly Green

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       Copyright

      Published by AVON

      A Division of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd

      1 London Bridge Street

      London SE1 9GF

       www.harpercollins.co.uk

      First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 2019

      Copyright © Molly Green 2019

      Cover design © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2019

      Cover photographs © Rekha Arcangel / Arcangel Images (Women), Stephen Mulcahey / Arcangel Images (Airfield), Shutterstock.com (Sky and planes)

      Molly Green asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

      A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.

      This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

      All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

      Source ISBN: 9780008332440

      Ebook Edition © November 2019 ISBN: 9780008332457

      Version: 2019-11-22

       Dedication

       To all those remarkable women in the Air Transport Auxiliary who risked their lives every day to make sure their male counterparts had the planes they urgently needed for training and combat. There were 168 female pilots including four female engineers who joined the ATA during the war years, along with their male counterparts – sadly, there were a number of fatalities.

       I would like to make a special dedication to Pauline Gower, a qualified pilot before the war with her own aviation business, who successfully fought for the right of female pilots to be allowed to join the Air Transport Auxiliary along with the men, and was appointed Senior Commander of the women’s section.

       Before the war it was unheard of for women to have equal pay in any job whatsoever, but in May 1943 Miss Gower was the first person in any company or organisation to obtain equal pay for the women pilots in the Air Transport Auxiliary. She pushed home the point that her pilots were doing exactly the same job and taking exactly the same risks every day as the men. She refused to take no for an answer – a truly outstanding achievement.

       Unfortunately, after the war, the gap between male and female pilots’ pay was once again firmly in place.

       Tragically, in 1947 Pauline Gower died at only 36 having just given birth to twin sons who thankfully survived. Who knows what more she might have achieved if she’d had a longer life?