Code Name Verity(39)

(Or perhaps not. The helpful cockatoo might seem a little too far-fetched.)

I am not writing there now – I am in my usual bare broom cupboard, pulled up to the tubular steel table with my ankles tied to my chair, with SS-Scharführer Thibaut and his mate whose name I haven’t been told breathing down my neck.

I am going to write about Scotland. I wasn’t ever there with Maddie, but I feel as though I was.

I don’t know what she was flying the night she got stuck at Deeside, near Aberdeen. It wasn’t just Lysanders that she ferried, and she didn’t do much taxi work that first year, so it probably wasn’t an Anson. Let’s say it was a Spitfire, just for fun – the most glamorous and beloved of fighter planes – even the Luftwaffe pilots would let you pull out their back teeth with a pair of pliers if it would buy them an hour in control of a Spitfire. Let’s say that late in November of ’41 Maddie was delivering a Spitfire to this Scottish airfield where they’d fly out to defend the North Sea shipping, or perhaps to take pictures of Luftwaffe-occupied airfields in Norway.

Our reconnaissance planes are tarted up in a lovely salmony-mauve camouflage to match the clouds. So let’s say Maddie was flying a pink Spitfire, but not up to the soaring blue heavens like the fighter pilots. She was flying cautiously, making her way along the coast and up the straths, the wide valleys of Scotland, because the cloud was low. She was 3000 feet above sea level, but between the Tay and the Dee the Cairngorm Mountains rise higher than that. Maddie flew alone, careful and happy, low over the snow-tipped Highlands on those pretty tapered wings, deafened by the Merlin engine, navigating by dead reckoning.

The glens were full of frost and fog. Fog lay in pillows in the folds of the hills; the distant mountaintops shone dazzling pink and white beneath rays of low sunshine that didn’t touch the Spitfire’s wings. The haar, the North Sea coastal fog, was closing in. It was so cold that the moist air crystallised inside the Plexiglas hood, so that it seemed to be lightly snowing in the cockpit.

Maddie landed at Deeside just before sunset. But it wasn’t sunset, it was twilight grey and turning blue, and she would either have to spend the night in a cheerless, unmade spare bed in the guestroom of the officers’ billet, or she’d have to find a guesthouse in Aberdeen. Or she’d have to spend half the night on an unheated and blacked-out train and perhaps arrive back in Manchester at 2 o’clock in the morning. Unwilling to face the loneliness of the airfield’s spartan accommodation, or a dour, granite-faced, Aberdeen landlady who wouldn’t accept her ration coupons for an unarranged evening meal, Maddie opted for the train.

She walked to the branch line station at Deeside. There were no route maps posted on the walls, but a Wonderland-style sign commanding, ‘If you know where you are, then please tell others.’ There were no lights in the waiting room because they’d show when you opened the door. The ticket seller had a dim banker’s lamp burning behind his wee cage.

Maddie straightened herself out a bit. The girls in the ATA had been given a good splash of publicity in the papers and were expected to live up to certain standards of neatness. But she’d found that people didn’t always recognise her navy uniform with its gold ATA pilot’s wings, or make sense of them, and Scotland was as foreign a land as France to Maddie.

‘Is there a train any time soon?’ she asked.

‘Aye, there is,’ agreed the ticket seller, as cryptic as the platform posters.

‘When?’

‘Ten minutes. Aye, ten minutes.’

‘Going to Aberdeen?’

‘Och, no, not to Aberdeen. The next train’s the branch line to Castle Craig.’

To make this easier, I am translating the ticket seller’s speech from Aberdeen Doric. Maddie, not being fluent in the Doric herself, wasn’t sure she’d heard correctly.

‘Craig Castle?’

‘Castle Craig,’ this bogle of a railway employee repeated laconically. ‘Single to Castle Craig, miss?’

‘No – No!’ Maddie said sensibly, and then in a fit of pure insanity brought on, no doubt, by loneliness and hunger and fatigue, added, ‘Not a single, I’ve got to come back. A return, please. Third-class return to Castle Craig.’

Half an hour later: Oh, what have I done! Maddie thought to herself, as the antique and ice-cold two-coach stopping train lurched and crept past a number of pitch-dark, anonymous station platforms, bearing Maddie further and further into the haunted foothills of the Scottish Highlands.