Code Name Verity(105)

The man we’d rescued didn’t understand when we talked to him in French. He turned out to be Jamaican – a rear gunner in the RAF, shot down last week – perhaps they’d been hoping to get Allied invasion plans out of him? He’s in good shape, they hadn’t got to work on him yet, and though he’d barely eaten for a week he managed to carry out a lad whose knees had been broken –

He is a lovely man, the Jamaican, and he is here. Well, I don’t think he’s here in The Cottage, I think he’s been sent off to the proper RAF aerodrome, but I mean that he flew back to England with me. Hid with me too, in the Thibauts’ barn. He is from Kingston and has three kiddies, all girls. He followed me at a trot down the grand staircase of that dreadful, ruined hotel, with the silent, suffering boy whose legs were broken clinging to his back – me with an electric torch in one hand and Paul’s Colt .32 in the other, navigating by a memorised map as usual.

We all met to count up everyone in the courtyard where the guillotine is. Last one out turned the generator back on – we had attached a timer to it. Once it was on we had 20 minutes. A couple of Lancasters were still circling overhead, daring the searchlights, and the night was noisy with half-hearted flak – a lot of the anti-aircraft guns are manned by local lads, conscripted to beef up the Occupation army, and their hearts aren’t really in it when they fire at Allied planes. 20 minutes to get out of the Place des Hirondelles, and perhaps another hour to get into hiding before the all-clear.

Had to find someone close by to take the injured kid, Mitraillette managed that, and the rest of us scarpered on bicycles and on foot. Me and my Jamaican rear gunner took a tortuous route over a series of garden walls to avoid the checkpoint on the road. But we were outside Ormaie and cycling tandem, me standing on the bar at the back and him pedalling because he was so much heavier than me, when the explosion came.

It gave us such a shock we toppled over. We didn’t feel it – we were just startled witless by the bang. For a couple of minutes I sat in the road laughing like a maniac, full moon and fire lighting everything, and then my rescued rear gunner very gently made me get back on the bicycle and we set off again with Ormaie at our backs.

‘Which way, Miss Kittyhawk?’

‘Left at the fork. Just call me Kittyhawk.’

‘Is that your name?’

‘No.’

‘Oh,’ he said. ‘You are not French either.’

‘No, I’m English.’

‘What you doing in France, Kittyhawk?’

‘Same as you – I’m a shot-down airman.’

‘You are pulling my leg!’

‘I am not. I am a First Officer with the Air Transport Auxiliary. And I bet no one believes you either, when you tell them you’re a rear gunner in the Royal Air Force.’

‘You’re right about that, gal,’ he said with feeling. ‘It’s a white man’s world.’

I held on tight round his waist, and hoped he wasn’t as much of a lech as Paul or I would have to shoot him too, when we were stuck in the Thibauts’ barn together by ourselves.

‘What’s troubling you, Kittyhawk?’ he asked softly. ‘What’s making you cry so hard? Good riddance to that place.’

I was hanging on and leaning on his shoulder now, sobbing into his back. ‘They had my best friend in there – you were in her cell. She was there for two months.’

He pedalled silently, digesting this. At last he said, ‘She die there?’

‘No,’ I said. ‘Not there. But she’s dead now anyway.’

Suddenly I could feel though his jacket that he was crying too, shaking a little with silent, muffled sobs, just like me.

‘My best mate’s dead too,’ he said softly. ‘He was our pilot. Flew that plane into the ground – kept it flying straight and level so the rest of us could bail out after we were hit.’

Oh – only now that I am writing it down, only now I see that’s exactly what I did too.

Funny – it seemed the most heroic thing in the world when he told me about his friend, dead amazing that anyone could be that brave and selfless. But I didn’t feel heroic when I did it – just too scared to jump.

We rode through the moonlight with the flames of Ormaie behind us, and neither one of us stopped crying until we put the bicycle away.

We slept back to back in that tiny loft space in the old half-timbered barn for two nights – well, one and a half nights really – played 21 for hours with a deck of dreadful obscene playing cards I’d nicked from one of Etienne Thibaut’s hidey holes. On Monday, yesterday, last night I mean, we got collected by the rose lady’s chauffeur and taken to collect the Rosalie for our trip to the pick-up airfield.