Code Name Verity(40)

The compartment in the railway carriage was dimly lit by one blue light overhead. The carriage was not heated. There were no other passengers in Maddie’s compartment.

‘When’s the next train back?’ she asked the ticket collector.

‘Last one in two hours.’

‘Is there one before that?’

‘Last one in two hours,’ he repeated unhelpfully.

(Some of us still have not forgiven the English for the Battle of Culloden, the last battle to be fought on British soil, in 1746. Imagine what we will say about Adolf Hitler in 200 years.)

Maddie got off the train at Castle Craig. She had no luggage but her gas mask and her flight bag, containing a skirt which she was supposed to wear when she wasn’t flying, but which she hadn’t been able to change into, and her maps and pilot’s notes and circular slide rule for wind speed computations. And a toothbrush and her last flight’s 2 oz bar of chocolate. She remembered how she’d nearly wept with envy at Dympna’s description of having to spend the night in the back of a Fox Moth and nearly freezing to death. Maddie wondered if she’d freeze to death before the train she just got off finally went back to Deeside two hours later.

Here I think I should remind you that my family is long-established in rather the upper echelons of the British aristocracy. Maddie, you will recall, is the granddaughter of an immigrant tradesman. She and I would not ever have met in peacetime. Not ever, unless perhaps I’d decided to buy a motorbike in Stockport – perhaps Maddie might have served me. But if she hadn’t been such a cracking radio operator and been promoted so quickly, it’s not likely we’d have become friends even in wartime, because British officers don’t mingle with the Lower Ranks.

(I don’t believe it for a minute – that we wouldn’t have become friends somehow – that an unexploded bomb wouldn’t have gone off and blown us both into the same crater or that God himself wouldn’t have come along and knocked our heads together in a flash of green sunlight. But it wouldn’t have been likely.)

At any rate Maddie’s growing misgivings on this particular ill-conceived rail journey were mostly based on her certainty that she simply could not go and knock on the door of a Laird’s Castle and ask for accommodation, or even a cup of tea, while she waited for the return train. She was only Maddie Brodatt and not a descendant of Mary Queen of Scots or Macbeth.

But she had not taken the War into account. I have heard a good many people say that it is levelling the British class system. Levelling is perhaps too strong a word, but it is certainly mixing us up a bit.

Maddie was the only passenger to get off at Castle Craig, and after she’d dithered on the platform for five minutes, the station master came out to greet her personally.

‘You a mate o’ young Jamie up the Big House, are ye?’

For a moment Maddie was too surprised to answer.

‘He’ll be glad o’ sensible company, he will, alone in that castle with them young rascals from Glasgow.’

‘Alone?’ Maddie croaked.

‘Aye, the Lady’s away to Aberdeen for three days with the Women’s Voluntary Service, packing socks and cigarettes to send our lads fighting in the desert. It’s young Jamie alone with them evacuees. Eight o’ them, the Lady took in, last ones in the queue – no one else would have ’em, the mucky wee lads, wi’ their nits an’ streamin’ noses. Dads all at work on the ships, bombs droppin’ night and day, kiddies never been out o’ the tenements in their lives. The Lady said she’d raised six weans of her own and five o’ them lads, eight o’ someone else’s lads wouldn’t be much different. But she’s gone and left young Jamie to make their tea with them puir mangled hands o’ his –’

Maddie’s heart soared at the idea of helping Jamie make tea for eight Glaswegian evacuees.

‘Can I walk there?’

‘Aye, half a mile along the main road to the gate, then a mile down the drive.’

Maddie thanked him, and he raised his cap to her.

‘How’d you know me for a friend of Jamie’s?’ she asked.

‘Yer boots,’ the station master said. ‘All you RAF lads wear the same boots. Never seen young Jamie take his off. Wish I had a pair.’

Maddie walked through the windy dark to Craig Castle, bubbling over with giddy laughter and relief and anticipation.

I’m an RAF lad! she thought, and laughed aloud in the dark.