Code Name Verity (4 page)

‘Little Scottish piece of shit.'

It sounds so pretty in French,
p'tit morceau de merde écossaise
. Single-handedly I have brought down the 700-year-strong Auld Alliance between France and Scotland.

There is another Jacques, a girl, who whistles ‘Scotland the Brave' if we are taken past each other (my prison is an antechamber to the suite they use for interrogations), or some other battle hymn associated with my heritage, and she spits too. They all detest me. It is not the same as their hatred for Thibaut, the Quisling turncoat, who is their countryman and is working for the enemy. I am your enemy too, I should be one of them. But I am beyond contempt. A wee Scots piece o' shite.

Don't you think it makes them stronger when you give them someone to despise? They look at me snivelling in the corner and think, ‘
Mon Dieu
. Don't ever let me be like
her
.'

The Civil Air Guard (Some Figures)

That heading looks terrifically official. I feel better already. Like a proper little Judas.

Suppose you were a girl in Stockport in 1938, raised by loving and indulgent grandparents and rather obsessed with engines. Suppose you decided you wanted to learn to fly: really
fly
. You wanted to fly aeroplanes.

A three-year course with Air Service Training would have cost you over a thousand pounds. I don't know what Maddie's granddad would have earned in a year back then. He did fairly well with his motorbike business, as I have said, not so well during the Depression, but still, by our standards then, anyone would have considered his a good living. At any rate it would have cost him most of his year's earnings to buy Maddie one year of flying lessons. She got her first flight free, an hour's excursion in Dympna's restored Puss Moth on a glorious clear summer evening of crisp wind and long light, and saw the Pennines from above for the first time. Beryl got to come along for the ride, since she had been as much involved in Dympna's rescue as Maddie had, but Beryl had to sit in the very back and couldn't see so well and was sick into her handbag. She thanked Dympna but never went for another flight.

And of course that was a joyride, not a lesson. Maddie couldn't afford lessons. But she made Oakway Aerodrome her own. Oakway came into being in parallel with Maddie's crush on aeroplanes – I want bigger toys, she'd wished, and hey presto, a week later, there was Oakway. It was only a fifteen-minute motorbike ride. It was so spanking new that the mechanics there were happy to have an extra pair of capable hands around. Maddie was out every Saturday that summer tinkering with engines and doping fabric wings and making friends. Then in October her persistence suddenly, unexpectedly paid off. That is when we started the Civil Air Guard.

I say
we
– I mean Britain. Just about every flying club in the kingdom joined in, and so many thousands of people applied – free flight training! – that they could only take about a tenth of them. And only one in 20 of those were women. But Maddie got lucky again because all the engineers and mechanics and instructors at Oakway knew and liked her now, and she got glowing recommendations for being quick and committed and knowing all about oil levels. She wasn't straight away any better than any other pilot who trained at Oakway with the Civil Air Guard. But she wasn't any worse either. She made her first solo flight in the first week of the new year, between snow flurries.

Look at the timing though. Maddie started flying in late October 1938 . . . Hitler (you will notice that I have thought better of my colourful descriptive terms for the Führer and carefully scratched them all out) invaded Poland on 1 September 1939 and Britain declared war on Germany two days later. Maddie flew the practical test for her ‘A' licence, the basic pilot's licence, six months before all civil aircraft were grounded in August. After that, most of those planes were taken into government service. Both Dympna's planes were requisitioned by the Air Ministry for communications and she was mad as a cat about it.

Days before Britain declared war on Germany, Maddie flew by herself to the other side of England, skimming the tops of the Pennines and avoiding the barrage balloons like silver ramparts protecting the sky around Newcastle. She followed the coast north to Bamburgh and Holy Island. I know that stretch of the North Sea very well because the train from Edinburgh to London goes that way, and I was up and down all year when I was at school. Then when my school closed just before the war, instead of finishing elsewhere I went to university a bit suddenly for a term and took the train to get there too, feeling very grown-up.

The Northumbrian coast is the most beautiful length of the whole trip. The sun still sets quite late in the north of England in August, and Maddie on fabric wings flew low over the long sands of Holy Island and saw seals gathered there. She flew over the great castle crags of Lindisfarne and Bamburgh to the north and south, and over the ruins of the twelfth-century priory, and over all the fields stretching yellow and green towards the low Cheviot Hills of Scotland. Maddie flew back following the 70-mile, 2000-year-old dragon's back of Hadrian's Wall, to Carlisle and then south through the Lakeland fells, along Lake Windermere. The soaring mountains rose around her and the poets' waters glittered beneath her in the valleys of memory – hosts of golden daffodils,
Swallows and Amazons
, Peter Rabbit. She came home by way of Blackstone Edge above the old Roman road to avoid the smoke haze over Manchester, and landed back at Oakway sobbing with anguish and love;
love
, for her island home that she'd seen whole and fragile from the air in the space of an afternoon, from coast to coast, holding its breath in a glass lens of summer and sunlight. All about to be swallowed in nights of flame and blackout. Maddie landed at Oakway before sunset and shut down the engine, then sat in the cockpit weeping.

More than anything else, I think, Maddie went to war on behalf of the Holy Island seals.

She climbed out of Dympna's Puss Moth at last. The late, low sun lit up the other aeroplanes in the hangar Dympna used, expensive toys about to realise their finest hour. (In less than a year that very same Puss Moth, flown by someone else, would ferry blood deliveries to the gasping British Expeditionary Force in France.) Maddie ran all the checks she'd normally run after a flight, and then started again with the ones she'd run before a flight. Dympna found her there half an hour later, still not having put the plane to bed, cleaning midges off the windscreen in the late golden light.

‘You don't need to do that.'

‘Someone does. I won't be flying it again, will I? Not after tomorrow. It's the only thing I
can
do, check the oil, clean the bugs.'

Dympna stood smoking calmly in the evening sunlight and watched Maddie for a while. Then she said, ‘There's going to be air work for girls in this war. You wait. They're going to need all the pilots they can get fighting for the Royal Air Force. That'll be young men, some of them with less training than you've got now, Maddie. And that'll leave the old men, and the women, to deliver new aircraft and carry their messages and taxi their pilots. That'll be us.'

‘You think?'

‘There's a unit forming for civil pilots to help with the War Effort. The ATA, Air Transport Auxiliary – men and women both. It'll happen any day. My name's in the pool; Pauline Gower's heading the women's section.' Pauline was a flying friend of Dympna's; Pauline had encouraged Dympna's joyriding business. ‘You've not the qualifications for it, but I won't forget you, Maddie. When they open up training to girls again, I'll send you a telegram. You'll be the first.'

Maddie scrubbed at midges and scrubbed at her eyes too, too miserable to answer.

‘And when you're done slaving, I'm going to make you a mug of best Oakway Pilot's Oily Tea, and tomorrow morning I'm going to march you into the nearest WAAF recruitment office.'

WAAF is Women's Auxiliary Air Force, auxiliary to the RAF, the Royal Air Force. You don't
fly
in the Women's Auxiliary Air Force, but the way things are now you can do almost any job a man does, all the work associated with flying and fighting: electrician, technician, fitter, barrage balloon operator, driver, cook, hairdresser . . . You would have thought our Maddie would go for a job in mechanics, wouldn't you? So early in the war, they hadn't yet opened up those jobs to women. It didn't matter that Maddie already had a deal more experience than a lot of boys; there wasn't a place for her. But she'd already learned Morse code and a bit about radio transmission as part of her training for her pilot's ‘A' licence. The Air Ministry was in a panic in August 1939, scrambling for women to do radio work as it dawned on them how many men they'd need to do the flying. Maddie joined the WAAF and eventually became a radio operator.

Some WAAF Trades

It was like being at school. I don't know if Maddie thought so too; she didn't go to a Swiss boarding school, she was at a grammar school in Manchester and she certainly never thought about going to university. Even when she was at school, she came home every day and never had to share a room with twenty girls, or sleep on a straw mattress made up of three bricks like a set of settee cushions. We called them biscuits. You were always so tired you didn't care; I would cut off my left hand to have one here. That fussy kit inspection they made you do, where you had to lay out all your worldly belongings in random but particular order on the folded blanket, like a jigsaw, and if anything was a millimetre the wrong way you got points off your score – that was just like being in school. Also all the slang, the ‘square-bashing' drilling exercises, and the boring meals and the uniforms, though Maddie's group didn't get issued proper uniforms at first. They all wore matching blue cardigans, like Girl Guides (Guides don't wear Air Force blue cardigans, but you see what I mean).

Maddie was stationed at Oakway to begin with, very convenient to home. This was late 1939, early 1940. The Phoney War. Nothing much happening.

Not in Britain anyway. We were biting our nails, practising.

Waiting.

Telephonist

‘You! Girl in the blue cardigan!'

Five girls in headsets looked round from their switchboards, pointed to their chests and mouthed silently,
Me?

‘Yes, you! Aircraftwoman Brodatt! What are you doing here? You're a licensed radio operator!'

Maddie pointed to her headset and the front cord she was about to connect.

‘Take the damned thing off and answer me.'

Maddie turned back to her switchboard and coolly plugged in the front cord. She toggled the appropriate keys and spoke clearly into the headset. ‘The Group Captain is through to you now, sir. You may go ahead.' She took off the headset and turned back to the troll who was waiting for a reply. It was the chief flight instructor for Oakway's Royal Air Force squadron, the man who had given Maddie her flight test nearly a year ago.

‘Sorry, sir. This is where I've been posted, sir.' (I did say it was like being at school.)

‘Posted! You're not even any of you in uniform!'

Five dutiful Aircraftwomen First Class straightened their Air Force blue cardigans.

‘We've not been issued full dress, sir.'

‘Posted!' the officer repeated. ‘You'll start in the radio room tomorrow, Aircraftwoman Brodatt. The operator's assistant is down with influenza.' And he lifted the headset from her console to perch it precariously over his own large head. ‘Put me through to the WAAF administration unit,' he said. ‘I want to talk to your Section Officer.'

Maddie flipped the keys and plugged in the cords and he gave her posting orders over her own telephone.

Radio Operator

‘Tyro to ground, tyro to ground,' came the call from the training aircraft. ‘Position uncertain, overhead triangular body of water to east of corridor.'

‘Ground to tyro,' answered Maddie. ‘Is it a lake or a reservoir?'

‘Say again?'

‘Lake or reservoir? Your triangular body of water.'

After a short silence, Maddie prompted: ‘A reservoir has got a dam at one end.'

‘Tyro to ground. Affirm reservoir.'

‘Is it Ladyswell? Manchester barrage balloons at ten o'clock and Macclesfield at eight o'clock?'

‘Tyro to ground, affirm. Position located. Overhead Ladyswell for return to Oakway.'

Maddie sighed. ‘Ground to tyro, call on final approach.'

‘Wilco.'

Maddie shook her head, swearing unprettily under her breath. ‘Oh my sainted aunt! Unlimited visibility! Unlimited visibility except for the dirty great city in the north-west! That would be the dirty great city surrounded at 3000 feet by a few hundred silver hydrogen balloons as big as buses! How in the name of mud is he going to find
Berlin
if he can't find
Manchester
?'

There was a bit of quiet in the radio room. Then the chief radio officer said gently, ‘Leading Aircraftwoman Brodatt, you're still transmitting.'

—

‘Brodatt, stop there.'

Maddie and everyone else had been told to go home. Or back to their various barracks and lodgings anyway, for an afternoon's rest. It was a day of such appallingly evil weather that the street lamps would have been lit if it weren't for fear of enemy aircraft seeing them, not that enemy aircraft can fly in such murk either. Maddie and the other WAAFs in her barracks still hadn't got proper uniforms, but as it was winter they had been issued RAF overcoats – men's overcoats. Warm, and waterproof, but ridiculous. Like wearing a tent. Maddie clutched hers tight in at the sides when the officer spoke to her, standing straight and hoping she looked smarter than she felt. She stopped so he could catch up with her, waiting on the duckboards laid over the concrete apron because there was so much standing water about that if you stepped in a puddle it came over the tops of your shoes.