Code Name Verity(38)

‘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).