Code Name Verity(111)

Bear in mind that despite my somewhat exhaustive quest for historical accuracy, this book is not meant to be a good history but rather a good story. So there is one major leap of fictional faith the reader has to grant me, and that is Maddie’s flight to France. Women ATA pilots were not allowed to fly to Europe until well after the invasion of Normandy, when German-occupied territory was safely back in Allied hands. (When Maddie is called the ‘only shot-down Allied airwoman outside Russia’, it is a reference to Russian women who were actually combat pilots during the war.) I worked very hard to construct a believable chain of events leading up to Maddie’s Lysander trip to France – her trump card is really my trump card, the fact that she can authorise her own flight.

The other thing I did make up (like a certain unreliable narrator) is all the proper nouns. Most of them anyway. My reasoning is that it is an easy way to avoid historical incongruities. For example, Oakway is a very thinly disguised Ringway (now Manchester Airport); but unlike Oakway, Ringway had no squadron on site in the winter of 1940. Maidsend is a composite of many Kentish airfields. The French city of Ormaie doesn’t exist, but it’s loosely based on Poitiers.

Early in my research I also planned to say here that I’d made up the specific jobs of SOE interrogator and SOE taxi pilot. But it turns out that there was an American ATA pilot, Betty Lussier, who more or less did both jobs herself at separate times during the war (though she worked for the OSS, the Americans, not the SOE). Every time I find out the life story of another woman who was a wartime pilot or Resistance agent I think to myself, You couldn’t make these people up.

I would love to go through my book page by page and document where Absolutely Every Last Detail comes from – how I found out that you can use kerosene to thin ink, or that school nurses used pen nibs to do blood tests, or where I first discovered a Jewish prescription form. Obviously I can’t do it for Absolutely Every Last Detail, but since paper and ink are the fabric of this novel, let’s talk about the BALLPOINT PEN! It was going to be very difficult to keep all my fictional writers supplied with ink, and it would be convenient to give them ballpoints. So I thought I ought to check to make sure ballpoint pens existed in 1943.

It turns out they did, but only just. The ballpoint pen was invented by László Bíró, a Hungarian journalist who fled to Argentina to escape the German occupation of Europe. In 1943 he licensed his invention to the RAF and the first ballpoint pens were manufactured in Reading, England, by the Miles aircraft manufacturer, to supply pilots with a lasting ink supply! I had to use a sample pen in Code Name Verity – ballpoints weren’t on the market yet. But it was plausible. That’s all I ask – that my details be plausible. And I love it that the ballpoint pen was first manufactured for the RAF. Who knew?

There’s a real story, like this one, behind just about every detail or episode in the book. I think it was in a Horrible History that I learned about the SOE agent who was caught looking the wrong way before crossing a French street. I myself nearly got killed once making the same mistake. I’ve also spent a couple of backbreaking afternoons clearing rocks from a runway. Even the breakdowns of the Lysander and the Citro?n Rosalie are based in reality. The Green Man is a real pub, if you can find it. I didn’t even make up the name of that one. But it’s called something else now.

I know there must be mistakes and inaccuracies sprinkled throughout the book, but for these I beg a little poetic licence. Some of them are conscious, some are not. The code name ‘Verity’ of the title is the most obvious to me. As far as I know, female SOE agents in France all had French girl’s names as code names, and Verity is an English name. But it translates well as vérité – the French word for truth – and some of the code names for wireless operators are so random (‘nurse’, for example), that I’ve decided to stick with it. Another good example is the use of the term ‘Nacht und Nebel’, which refers to the Nazi policy of making certain political prisoners vanish as though into ‘night and fog’. The term was so secret that it’s highly unlikely Julie would have ever heard it. However, prisoners at the Ravensbrück concentration camp knew they were designated ‘NN’ and by the end of 1944 they knew what it meant too. Nelson’s last words, also, are a subject of some considerable debate. But whatever he actually said, Hardy did kiss him. Where I fail in accuracy, I hope I make up for it in plausibility.

There are many people who helped to make this book complete and perfect, and they all deserve tremendous thanks. Among the unsung heroes are an enlisted trio of ‘cultural’ and language advisors, Scottish, French and German: Iona O’Connor, Marie-Christine Graham and Katja Kasri, who threw themselves into their requested jobs with the enthusiasm of wartime volunteers. My husband, Tim Gatland, was my technical and flight advisor (as always), and Terry Charman of the Imperial War Museum vetted the manuscript for historical accuracy. Jonathan Habicht of The Shuttleworth Collection allowed me to get up close and personal with a Lysander and an Anson. Tori Tyrrell and Miriam Roberts were indispensable first readers. Tori actually suggested the section titles which, obvious though they are, eluded me at first. My daughter Sara suggested some of the more harrowing plot twists.