Code Name Verity (14 page)

Maddie could scarcely believe that, having just managed to get her first Lizzie down only by using every available inch of runway.

Theo pulled her crust to pieces and arranged three crumbs in an inverted L-shape to imitate torches blazing in a dark French meadow. ‘Here's what you do –' She glanced quickly over each shoulder to make sure she wasn't overheard. ‘They're always a bit boggled when a girl leaps out of the cockpit afterwards.'

‘They were a bit boggled when I got in this morning!'

‘How's your navigation? You're not allowed to mark this airfield on your map. Takes a bit of studying before you leave, so you can find it yourself.'

‘I can manage that,' Maddie said confidently, and truthfully, having earlier that day done almost exactly the same thing.

‘It'll be fun,' Theo repeated enthusiastically, encouraging her. ‘You couldn't get better training if they gave you a course! Flying a broken plane for two hours then landing a fixed one in twenty yards in the same day – we might as well be
operational
.'

All right, this airfield, the Special Duties airfield. It is the same one Maddie and I took off from six weeks ago. The pilots who use it are called the Moon Squadron – they fly by moonlight and only by moonlight. The location of their airfield is one of our most closely guarded secrets and I thank
God
I don't know its name or have any clue where it is. I really don't – though I have been there at least five times I was always flown there from my own base outside Oxford, in the dark, sometimes via another aerodrome, and I don't even know which direction we set off in to get there. They did that on purpose.

Their planes need a lot of maintenance as they tend to go through them quite rapidly, bashing the undercarriages in the dark and getting bits blown off by anti-aircraft guns on their way home. Later Maddie made that run several times ferrying damaged or mended aircraft in and out of the bigger aerodrome that surrounds them and hides them. More recently she served them as a taxi pilot delivering their rather special passengers. The dozen or so quite suicidally deranged pilots who are stationed there grew familiar with Maddie's increasingly expert dead-stop accurate short-field landings, and by and by they knew when she'd arrived before she got out of the plane.

I am out of time again – hell. I was enjoying myself

Ormaie 18.XI.43 JB-S

Engel thinks I am translating von Linden's horrid notes, but I am sneaking in a few recipe cards of my own because I have got ahead of her.

She can be a perfect fount of information when she's in the mood. It is because of her nattering on at me while I was hard at work that she has fallen behind. She tells me that if I am lucky I will be sent to a place called Ravensbrück when they have finished with me here. It is a concentration camp solely for women, a labour camp and prison. Perhaps it is where the charwoman who stole the cabbages was sent. Basically it is a death sentence – they more or less starve you until you can't work and then when you become too weak to shift any more rubble for replacing the roads blown up by our Allied bombers, they hang you. (I am ideally suited to shifting rubble, having previous experience on the runway at Maidsend.) If you are not put to work breaking rocks you get to incinerate the bodies of your companions after they have been hanged.

If I am
not
lucky, in other words if I do not produce a satisfactory report in the time allotted, I will be sent to a place called Natzweiler-Struthof. This is a smaller and more specialised concentration camp, the vanishing point for Nacht und Nebel prisoners, who are mostly men. Occasionally women are sent there as live specimens for medical experiments. I am not a man, but I am designated Nacht und Nebel.

God
.

If I am
very
lucky – I mean if I am clever about it – I will get myself shot. Here, soon. Engel didn't tell me this; I thought it out myself. I have given up hoping the RAF will blow this place to smithereens.

I want to update my list of ‘10 Things I Am Afraid Of.'

1) Cold. (I've replaced my fear of the dark with Maddie's fear of being cold. I don't mind dark now, especially if it's quiet. Gets boring sometimes.)

2) Falling asleep while I'm working.

3) Bombs dropping on my favourite brother.

4) Kerosene. Just the word on its own is enough to reduce me to jelly, which everybody knows and makes use of to great effect.

5) SS-Hauptsturmführer Amadeus von Linden. Actually he should be at the top of this list, the man blinds me with fear, but I was taking the list in its original order and he has replaced the college porter.

6) Losing my pullover. I suppose that counts under cold. But it is something I worry about separately.

7) Being sent to Natzweiler-Struthof.

8) Being sent back to England and having to file a report on What I Did In France.

9) Not being able to finish my story.

10) Also of finishing it.

I am no longer afraid of getting old. Indeed I can't believe I ever said anything so stupid. So childish. So offensive and
arrogant
.

But mainly, so very, very stupid. I desperately want to grow old.

 

Everybody is getting excited about the American radio woman's visit. My interview will be held in von Linden's study, office, whatever it is. I was taken to see it earlier today so that I would be forewarned and not fall over in a dead faint of astonishment seeing it for the first time in front of the interviewer (pretend
all
my ‘interviews' take place beneath the Venetian glass chandelier in this cosy, wood-panelled den. Pretend I sit writing at his pretty little 18th-century marquetry table every afternoon. Pretend I ask his
pet cockatoo
in its bamboo cage to supply me with unfamiliar German words when I get stuck).

(Or perhaps not. The helpful cockatoo might seem a little too far-fetched.)

I am not writing there now – I am in my usual bare broom cupboard, pulled up to the tubular steel table with my ankles tied to my chair, with SS-Scharführer Thibaut and his mate whose name I haven't been told breathing down my neck.

I am going to write about Scotland. I wasn't ever there with Maddie, but I feel as though I was.

I don't know what she was flying the night she got stuck at Deeside, near Aberdeen. It wasn't just Lysanders that she ferried, and she didn't do much taxi work that first year, so it probably wasn't an Anson. Let's say it was a Spitfire, just for fun – the most glamorous and beloved of fighter planes – even the Luftwaffe pilots would let you pull out their back teeth with a pair of pliers if it would buy them an hour in control of a Spitfire. Let's say that late in November of '41 Maddie was delivering a Spitfire to this Scottish airfield where they'd fly out to defend the North Sea shipping, or perhaps to take pictures of Luftwaffe-occupied airfields in Norway.

Our reconnaissance planes are tarted up in a lovely salmony-mauve camouflage to match the clouds. So let's say Maddie was flying a pink Spitfire, but not up to the soaring blue heavens like the fighter pilots. She was flying cautiously, making her way along the coast and up the straths, the wide valleys of Scotland, because the cloud was low. She was 3000 feet above sea level, but between the Tay and the Dee the Cairngorm Mountains rise higher than that. Maddie flew alone, careful and happy, low over the snow-tipped Highlands on those pretty tapered wings, deafened by the Merlin engine, navigating by dead reckoning.

The glens were full of frost and fog. Fog lay in pillows in the folds of the hills; the distant mountaintops shone dazzling pink and white beneath rays of low sunshine that didn't touch the Spitfire's wings. The haar, the North Sea coastal fog, was closing in. It was so cold that the moist air crystallised inside the Plexiglas hood, so that it seemed to be lightly snowing in the cockpit.

Maddie landed at Deeside just before sunset. But it wasn't sunset, it was twilight grey and turning blue, and she would either have to spend the night in a cheerless, unmade spare bed in the guestroom of the officers' billet, or she'd have to find a guesthouse in Aberdeen. Or she'd have to spend half the night on an unheated and blacked-out train and perhaps arrive back in Manchester at 2 o'clock in the morning. Unwilling to face the loneliness of the airfield's spartan accommodation, or a dour, granite-faced, Aberdeen landlady who wouldn't accept her ration coupons for an unarranged evening meal, Maddie opted for the train.

She walked to the branch line station at Deeside. There were no route maps posted on the walls, but a Wonderland-style sign commanding, ‘If you know where you are, then please tell others.' There were no lights in the waiting room because they'd show when you opened the door. The ticket seller had a dim banker's lamp burning behind his wee cage.

Maddie straightened herself out a bit. The girls in the ATA had been given a good splash of publicity in the papers and were expected to live up to certain standards of neatness. But she'd found that people didn't always recognise her navy uniform with its gold ATA pilot's wings, or make sense of them, and Scotland was as foreign a land as France to Maddie.

‘Is there a train any time soon?' she asked.

‘Aye, there is,' agreed the ticket seller, as cryptic as the platform posters.

‘When?'

‘Ten minutes. Aye, ten minutes.'

‘Going to Aberdeen?'

‘Och, no, not to Aberdeen
. The next train's the branch line to Castle Craig.'

To make this easier, I am translating the ticket seller's speech from Aberdeen Doric. Maddie, not being fluent in the Doric herself, wasn't sure she'd heard correctly.

‘Craig Castle?'

‘Castle Craig,' this bogle of a railway employee repeated laconically. ‘Single to Castle Craig, miss?'

‘No – No!' Maddie said sensibly, and then in a fit of pure insanity brought on, no doubt, by loneliness and hunger and fatigue, added, ‘Not a single, I've got to come back. A return, please. Third-class return to Castle Craig.'

Half an hour later: Oh,
what
have I done! Maddie thought to herself, as the antique and ice-cold two-coach stopping train lurched and crept past a number of pitch-dark, anonymous station platforms, bearing Maddie further and further into the haunted foothills of the Scottish Highlands.

The compartment in the railway carriage was dimly lit by one blue light overhead. The carriage was not heated. There were no other passengers in Maddie's compartment.

‘When's the next train back?' she asked the ticket collector.

‘Last one in two hours.'

‘Is there one before that?'

‘
Last one
in two hours,' he repeated unhelpfully.

(Some of us still have not forgiven the English for the Battle of Culloden, the last battle to be fought on British soil, in 1746. Imagine what we will say about Adolf Hitler in 200 years.)

Maddie got off the train at Castle Craig. She had no luggage but her gas mask and her flight bag, containing a skirt which she was supposed to wear when she wasn't flying, but which she hadn't been able to change into, and her maps and pilot's notes and circular slide rule for wind speed computations. And a toothbrush and her last flight's 2 oz bar of chocolate. She remembered how she'd nearly wept with envy at Dympna's description of having to spend the night in the back of a Fox Moth and nearly freezing to death. Maddie wondered if she'd freeze to death before the train she just got off finally went back to Deeside two hours later.

Here I think I should remind you that my family is long-established in rather the upper echelons of the British aristocracy. Maddie, you will recall, is the granddaughter of an immigrant tradesman. She and I would not ever have met in peacetime. Not
ever
, unless perhaps I'd decided to buy a motorbike in Stockport – perhaps Maddie might have served me. But if she hadn't been such a cracking radio operator and been promoted so quickly, it's not likely we'd have become friends even in wartime, because British officers don't mingle with the Lower Ranks.

(I don't believe it for a minute – that we wouldn't have become friends somehow – that an unexploded bomb wouldn't have gone off and blown us both into the same crater or that God himself wouldn't have come along and knocked our heads together in a flash of green sunlight. But it wouldn't have been
likely
.)

At any rate Maddie's growing misgivings on this particular ill-conceived rail journey were mostly based on her certainty that she simply
could not
go and knock on the door of a Laird's Castle and ask for accommodation, or even a cup of tea, while she waited for the return train. She was only Maddie Brodatt and not a descendant of Mary Queen of Scots or Macbeth.

But she had not taken the War into account. I have heard a good many people say that it is levelling the British class system. Levelling is perhaps too strong a word, but it is certainly mixing us up a bit.

Maddie was the only passenger to get off at Castle Craig, and after she'd dithered on the platform for five minutes, the station master came out to greet her personally.

‘You a mate o' young Jamie up the Big House, are ye?'

For a moment Maddie was too surprised to answer.

‘He'll be glad o' sensible company, he will, alone in that castle with them young rascals from Glasgow.'

‘Alone?' Maddie croaked.

‘Aye, the Lady's away to Aberdeen for three days with the Women's Voluntary Service, packing socks and cigarettes to send our lads fighting in the desert. It's young Jamie alone with them evacuees. Eight o' them, the Lady took in, last ones in the queue – no one else would have 'em, the mucky wee lads, wi' their nits an' streamin' noses. Dads all at work on the ships, bombs droppin' night and day, kiddies never been out o' the tenements in their lives. The Lady said she'd raised six weans of her own and five o' them lads, eight o' someone else's lads wouldn't be much different. But she's gone and left young Jamie to make their tea with them puir mangled hands o' his –'