AN UNSUNG heroine of the Second World War has talked about her time flying Spitfires and Hurricanes.

Ninety-year-old Molly Rose, of Bampton, was part of the Air Transport Auxiliary (ATA), a civilian unit which ferried fighter planes around the UK.

The military was “desperately short” of pilots during the war and any man or woman with a pilot’s licence was drafted in to help, allowing fighter pilots to concentrate on combat.

Mrs Rose was working as an aviation mechanic in Cambridge when she got the ATA call in 1942.

Last week she was at Oxford Airport in Kidlington, where she watched those historic planes fly in to celebrate the airshow Fly To The Past, which takes place on Sunday, August 21.

She said: “It was absolutely great to see the planes in the air again.”

Mrs Rose discovered a love for flying years earlier, when as a child she would watch her brother flying from their family home.

She said: “I was one of a large family, and as a little girl I thought anything my brother did was terrific. He had an aeroplane that was tethered behind our house and he used to take me flying when I was a little girl.

“I very, very much enjoyed going anywhere he was prepared to take his little sister.”

She gained her pilot’s licence when she was 17, but when the ATA called her up she did not have many flying hours under her belt.

She proved herself on Tiger Moths and built her way up to flying Spitfires and Hurricanes.

She flew the planes from factories and repair plants to RAF bases across the country.

She said: “In those days you did not have to keep to flight paths and heights. You just got into the air and had the fun of those powerful machines in the sky.

“I was never challenged, but we all absolutely knew that we had our backs to the wall. If Hitler had cared to do an invasion immediately after Dunkirk he could have walked in.

“But everyone was doing what they could to help. There was tremendous camaraderie.

“We all knew we had to go to war, otherwise we would all be doing the goose step march now.”

Asked if she was ever scared, she said: “At that age you have got tremendous confidence and things like being challenged do not worry you.

“We were lucky enough to have had an extremely interesting and exciting job, but I am just satisfied to have done something useful.”

As reported in the Oxford Mail, garage owner Peter Jewson bought a full-size replica of a Spitfire, which he put on display at Lodge Hill Garage in Oxford Road, Abingdon, earlier this year as a tribute to the ATA. Many of the 166 women died in their missions.

Mr Jewson, who learned to fly himself in 1957, said: “They had no radios, no weather reports and no bullets in the guns. If you met the enemy you were in trouble.”

Mrs Rose worked with the ATA until 1945, when her husband Bernard was released by the Germans from a prisoner of war camp. Mr Rose spent 11 months as a PoW, having been captured by the Germans during the D-Day landings at Arromanche, in France in 1944. He was in one of the first tanks to land.

Mrs Rose said: “When he came back I came out of the ATA. I was much more needed to look after him. I think the war changed both of us, but we were fortunate in that we both liked each other, and we had a very happy marriage of 57 years.”

Mr Rose died 14 years ago.

Fly To The Past, supported by the Oxford Mail, features flyovers from biplanes, Second World War fighter planes and modern jets.

To buy tickets, visit flytothepast.co.uk or call 0844 576 0136.