My Lady Alpha

There are women who inspire me with their compassion and determination. British activist Helen Bamber was one, working with young Holocaust survivors at the end of the Second World War, when she was little more than a teenager herself, and once in the UK creating the charity that we now call Freedom From Torture. Leah Tsemel is a more recent example – the Israeli lawyer who battles for the rights of Palestinians again and again, and is defeated again and again, and still keeps going. But I have never met either of these admirable ladies. The dragon I want to talk about is someone who has been with me in body and spirit for over twenty years of my life, and her support has enabled me to stretch out my hand and support others.

My lady Alpha breathed fire and flew at the edge of space – where the sky darkens towards black, and the air is bitterly cold and too thin to breathe. Where the only things above her were satellites, a few spy planes, and the International Space Station. No human could survive in that atmosphere. Yet she carried people in comfort and luxury, as her four Olympus jet engines propelled her faster than a rifle bullet.

My mothers abandoned me. The mother who gave birth to me chose not to be my mother but tortured my mind and soul and left me as prey for my father’s appetites. The mother of my heart – she who had been the air I breathed while I was living through the nightmare of childhood – had her own child, and there was no longer room for me in her world. In my darkness and pain, I found Alpha and her sisters. Their beauty lifted my heart, and I rejoiced to see them poised on the air as they came in to land. Then they were retired, sent away to museums. My Lady Alpha had her wings cut off and was paraded through the centre of London on a barge. She was carried on a long, dark journey and placed in a hangar where she crouches still, with the top of her tail touching the roof.

This cold, hard machine has been my mother, my sister, my friend, the resting place of my heart. A paradox in the male world of aviation, she embodies the quintessential feminine for me. She has shown me how to move with grace and power through a cold and dangerous environment. An airliner designed to carry people in safety, she easily outpaced bombers and fighter jets, and challenged the spy planes in their own realm – the most uplifting demonstration of feminine strength set against male dominance.

And she has been there with me in the quiet moments, in the years when I worked to transmute my own trauma into a source of strength to help others who had suffered in the same way I had. As an adviser on a support helpline, I was the voice in the darkness who comforted those telling of pain that they could not share with anyone else. And, when I looked at my picture of Lady Alpha on my wall, she supported me as I supported them.

She is Sophia, the mystical figure of wisdom. As one ancient Gnostic text has her say, “I am the first and the last; I am the honoured and the scorned …”. Violated like me, then reassembled so she looks perfect at a glance (but, looking closer, you can still see the scars on her wings), she has taught me how to encompass damage and carry on. As a machine, she is pragmatic: she tells me, “It is what it is”. Not always a satisfying answer for me, but she is usually correct.

She is the light in the darkness; when I go to see her, four hundred miles away, I have to travel through the night until we reach daybreak. The intricacy of her systems and the complexities of her shape still mystify and enthrall me; I spend days drawing her, trying to understand. I have to pay close attention; she requires nothing less.

Lady Alpha is worth my care and attention. I would not be here without her. I owe her my life.