There was one feels a certain po-otic fitness in the death of Amy Johnson. One cannot imagine her declining into a humdrum middle age, She did in fact change considerably after her greatest flying feats had been accomplished and especially after her marriage, Her broad Yorkshire accent disappeared, her unkempt hair was fashionably arranged, her untidy frocks were given up for West End smartness, But her friends felt it was all a veneer and that underneath she was still the creature of air and fire that had flown to Australia, America and the Cape, and while waiting to start had fretted herself nearly sick with nervous strain, like a race horse fretting at the post. When the war broke out she took joyfully to the work of flying machines from factory to air squadron, She was not only a supreme pilot but a first-rate mechanic, the first woman to whom the Air Ministry granted a licence as a ground engineer. Presumably she got out of her course and ran out of petrol. So the waters of the Thames Estuary closed over her, Would she have chosen any other death
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.