Code Name Verity(47)

When he left, I said to him, ‘Je vous souhaite une bonne nuit’ – ‘I wish you a good night’ – not because I wished him a good night, but because that is what the German officer says to his unyielding, passive-resistant French hosts every night in Le Silence de la Mer – that tract of Gallic defiance and the literary spirit of the French Resistance. A copy was given to me by a Frenchwoman I trained with, just after she was brought back from the field late last year. I thought that von Linden might have read it too, as he is such a Know Your Enemy type (also he is very well-read). But he didn’t seem to recognise the quotation.

Engel has told me what he did before the War. He was rector of a rather posh boys’ school in Berlin.

A headmaster!

Also, he has a daughter.

She is safe at school in Switzerland, neutral Switzerland, where no Allied bombers raid the skies at night. I can safely assert she doesn’t go to my school. My school shut down just before the War began, when most of the English and French pupils were pulled out, which is why I went off to university a bit early.

Von Linden has a daughter only a little younger than me. I see now why he takes such a clinically distant approach to his work.

Still not sure whether he has a soul though. Any Jerry bastard with his wedding tackle intact can beget a daughter. And there are a lot of sadistic head teachers about.

Oh my God, why do I do it – again and again? I HAVE THE BRAIN OF A PTARMIGAN HEN. HE WILL SEE ANYTHING I WRITE.





Ormaie 21.XI.43 JB-S

Engel, bless her, skipped over the last few paragraphs I wrote yesterday when she was translating for von Linden last night. I think it was self-preservation on her part rather than any good nature towards me. Someone will eventually discover what a chatterbox she is, but she’s growing wise to my efforts to get her in trouble. (She pointed out to von Linden some time ago that I know perfectly well how to do metric conversions and only pretend ignorance to torment her. But it is true that she is better at them than I am.)

In addition to my extra week, I’ve now been given a fresh supply of paper. Sheet music, surely also the ill-gotten spoils of the Chateau des Bourreaux – a lot of popular songs from the last decade and some pieces by French composers, scored for flute and piano. The verso of the flute parts are all blank so I have paper in abundance again. I was getting a bit weary of those flipping recipe cards. We are still using them for the other work.

Wartime Administrative Formalities

I am condensing now. I can’t write fast enough.

Maddie was being groomed by the SOE long before she became aware of it. About the same time Jamie started flying again somewhere in the south of England, back in Manchester Maddie was put on a course to do night flying. She leaped at the chance. She was so used to being the only girl around, there being no more than two other women in the Manchester ATA ferry pool, that it did not occur to her there was anything unusual going on.

Everyone else on the course was a bomber pilot or navigator. The ferry pilots don’t fly at night, in general. In fact Maddie didn’t fly at night for a while after she’d clocked the hours and had her log book stamped, and she had a difficult time keeping in practice because she used it so little. Since 1940 we have not come off daylight saving at all, and in summer it is double, which means for a whole month it doesn’t get dark till nearly midnight. Maddie couldn’t have used her night flying anyway in the summer of 1942 unless she’d gone up in the middle of the night, so she didn’t wonder about it. She was busy – thirteen days on ferrying and two off, in all kinds of weather, and there were so many ongoing senseless administrative formalities or blunders that a bit of pointless night training was unremarkable.

They gave her parachute training too – an equally random and apparently useless skill. Maddie was trained not as an actual paratrooper, but she learned to fly the plane while people were jumping. They use Whitley bombers for the parachute training, a type Maddie hadn’t flown before, and they flew from her home airfield – nothing about it seemed strange until she was asked to come along as Pilot 2 when I was making my first jump from a plane over the low hills of Cheshire (at this point I had no choice but to cross ‘Heights’ off my list of fears). Maddie certainly hadn’t expected me and was too sharp to take it as a coincidence. She recognised me instantly as we climbed on board – despite my hair being uncharacteristically tied back with a ribbon like a pony club competitor (otherwise it wouldn’t have fitted inside those ducky wee helmets that make you look as though you have stuck your head in a Christmas cake). Maddie knew better than to register surprise or recognition. She’d been told who this group was – or who they weren’t, anyway – six of them, two of them women, jumping from a plane for the first time.