Code Name Verity(31)

Maddie looked away, her eyes welling with tears of envy at the thought of a frozen lonely night in the back of a Fox Moth. She’d not touched an aircraft’s flight controls since before the war started. She’d never flown anything so big or so complicated as an Avro Anson.

Queenie was walking towards them, carrying her own cup of steaming black engine oil. Dympna stood up.

‘I’ve got to get going before I lose the light,’ she said casually. ‘Do come, Maddie. I’ll drop you here again on my way back. It’s only a 20-minute hop each way. Take off, fly straight and level –’

‘– “Second to the right, and then straight on till morning,”’ Queenie said. ‘Hello! You must be Dympna Wythenshawe.’

‘And you must be Maidsend’s impromptu crack gunner!’

Queenie gave a little bow. ‘I am a gunner on Tuesday mornings only. Just now I am in Bomb Disposal. See?’ She held up her own half-slice of dry toast. ‘Out of butter already.’

‘I’m about to take your friend Maddie for a flight lesson,’ Dympna said. ‘An hour off base. There’s room for one more, if you’re free.’

Maddie saw no flinch or blanch pass over the fair skin. But Queenie said calmly, putting her cup on the table, ‘No, I don’t think so.’ Then she repeated every one of Maddie’s own objections. ‘She’s not flown this type. She said so. And only as a civilian.’ She articulated exactly how long since Maddie had piloted a plane, a known fact. ‘A year ago. More than a year.’

Reason had been hammering at Maddie. She’d thought in rapid succession: I shouldn’t leave base, I don’t know what I’m doing, it’s probably illegal, I’ll be court-martialled, and so forth. But now she made up her mind. Reminded how long it had been since she had flown a plane herself, Maddie made up her mind. It had been far too long.

‘Now,’ Maddie said. ‘Now I wear Air Force blue and already this year I’ve been fired on in the air and I’ve shot down an enemy plane myself, or as good as. And Dympna’s my instructor and I’m a pilot and you –’

Queenie needed twisting. She was still on her feet, still clutching her untouched toast.

‘Pretend,’ Maddie told her, inspired – ‘Pretend you’re Jamie. Your favourite brother, the one you worry about, on a training mission. You’re sure and full of yourself. You’ve done your solo in a Tiger Moth, and now you’re going along as a stooge, and all you have to do is raise and lower the undercarriage, which will leave the instructor free to concentrate on the tyro pilot –’

Suddenly she faltered. ‘You’re not really afraid of heights, are you?’

‘A Wallace and a Stuart, feart o’ anythin’?’

Maddie thought it must be like having a little brass peg in your mind, like the hinged switch on an electric hall light, and when you flipped it, you turned instantly into another person. Queenie’s stance was different, her feet slightly further apart and flat on the floor, her shoulders squared back. Perhaps more like a drill sergeant than her Eton-educated older brother, but certainly more man than any WAAF Flight Officer. She cocked her blue cap back at a rakish angle.

‘High time they put the RAF in kilts,’ she remarked, flipping the hem of her uniform skirt disdainfully.

Maddie said a silent, secret thank-you to Adolf Hitler for giving her this utterly daft chameleon for a friend, and chummed Queenie out to the airfield, following Dympna.

The sky was low and grey and wet. ‘You’ll get an hour in your log book, P1 under training,’ Dympna told Maddie over her shoulder as they crossed to the Anson. ‘Taxi, takeoff and a full flight to RAF Branston. I’ll talk you through the landing there, and you can try it yourself when we get back to Maidsend.’

There was a lad (a real one) giving the aircraft the once-over when they reached it, and chatting with a couple of ground crew. He turned out to be Dympna’s other passenger, the other ferry pilot on her taxi run. He glanced up at Dympna as she approached and gave a laugh, and exclaimed in a broad American accent, ‘Well, look what we have here – three gorgeous English gals to fly with!’

‘Yankee idiot!’ cursed the youthful, blue-kilted bomber pilot. ‘I am a Scotsman.’

—

Maddie climbed in first. She crawled forward through the fuselage (ex-civil passenger aircraft, impressed by the RAF like Dympna’s Puss Moth) and into the left-hand seat, the pilot’s seat. Then she sat scanning the collection of gauges and instruments. She was surprised by how many of them were the friendly, familiar faces of dials she knew: rev counter, airspeed indicator, altimeter – and when she took hold of the flight controls and felt the ailerons and elevator responding reliably to her command, for one moment she thought she was going to cry properly. Then she glanced over her shoulder and saw her passengers climbing in behind her. Dympna slid her elegant length into the right-hand seat beside Maddie, and Maddie pulled herself together. On her behalf a random squall peppered the panes of the cockpit with fat raindrops for about ten seconds. Then the shower stopped suddenly, like a squirt of machine-gun fire.