“Perfume is the key to our memories”

“You'd think they would train these SOE girls better, it's just sloppy.' Hans sipped his cognac. 'She looked the wrong way crossing the road, silly girl.”

“Freya, I killed a man.”

“I am an ordinary woman who did extraordinary things. The first to qualify as a ground engineer. The first to fly to Australia single-handed. A million people lined the streets of London when I came home. I waved to them from an open-topped car like the queen, the queen of the air.”

“Every flight is a gamble. If we don’t smash into a cloud bound hillside, we might be picked off like a defenceless lamb by a lone wolf Messerschmitt with a gaping maw painted on its fuselage.”

“If you ride the bucking peaks and troughs of celebrity long enough you become a national treasure. If you have the sense to die in mysterious circumstances you become a legend”

“That my life has come down to this – luck, is galling, when I have always directed my own fate. Land or water? Heads or tails? Life or death? We’ll see.”