Code Name Verity(49)

Maddie recoiled.

‘Only if you’re willing.’

‘I’m not –’ She took a deep breath. ‘I can’t do that kind of work.’

This time he did laugh, a brief and quiet sympathetic chuckle. ‘Yes you can. It’s air taxi work. No intrigue attached.’

She stared at him with tight-lipped scepticism.

‘It doesn’t mean anything will change for you,’ he said. ‘No special missions to the Continent.’

Maddie gave him the ghost of a smile.

‘You’ll have to do some night landings, and you’ll have to be available as needed. There won’t be any advance notification for these flights.’

‘What are they for?’ Maddie asked.

‘Some of our people need fast and efficient private transport – travel when and as needed, there and back in one night, no messing about with petrol rationing or limited speed on country lanes or awkward railway schedules. No risk of being recognised on a station platform or through the window of a motor car at traffic lights. Does that make sense?’

Maddie nodded.

‘You’re a consistent pilot, a superb navigator, sharp as a tack and exceptionally discreet. There are plenty of men and several women better qualified than you, but none, I think, as appropriately suited for this particular taxi service. You remembered my name. You’re well aware of our work here and you keep quiet about it, except when you send us a recruit. If you take the assignments they’ll be given in the most straightforward manner through your ATA ferry pool. S chits, secret, with a report required. You won’t be told anything about the men and women you’ll be taxiing. You’ll already know most of the airfields.’

He is really very hard to resist. Or perhaps Maddie just couldn’t ever pass up a flying opportunity.

‘I’ll do it,’ she said decisively. ‘I’ll do it.’

‘Tell your assistant pilot you left your clothing ration coupons here on your last flight, and we’ve kept them for you –’

He thumbed through a file folder, held something up at arm’s length, then put it back with a sigh and pushed his heavy spectacles back up his nose. ‘Getting old,’ he apologised. ‘The middle distance is going now too! Here we are.’

He pored over the pages again and produced Maddie’s clothing ration coupons. Her stomach turned over. She never found out how he got them.

He handed them to her. ‘Explain to your colleague you were called in here today so we could return these and give you a lecture about taking greater care with your personal papers.’

‘Well, I jolly well will be more careful with them after this,’ she told him fiercely.

—

God, what a mess, I have to stop here until I stop crying or it will all be illegibly smeared

sorry sorry sorry





Ormaie 22.XI.43 JB-S

ATA S Chits (Secret)

At first it was much as he’d said – very little in Maddie’s life changed. For six weeks she heard nothing. Then twice in a week there were chits marked ‘S’ and bearing her own special code name – just an alert to let her know she was ‘operational’, as it were. But the only way the job really differed from a normal taxi run was that the chaps she picked up weren’t obviously pilots.

After that there were special flights that came regularly, but not frequently. Every six weeks or so. They were all prosaically dull. For taxi work Maddie was put back to flying small training and ex-civil aircraft, open cockpit Tiger Moths and a Puss Moth or two. Apart from the occasional night landing, there wasn’t much to the actual flying that Maddie found challenging.

There was one Lysander flight that was memorable because her passenger travelled with two guards. There is an armoured bulkhead that separates the Lysander pilot from her passengers – you can send her notes or coffee or kisses through an opening the size of a page, which she is able to shut against you if she wants, so that you cannot shoot her. Not that shooting your pilot would get you anywhere fast, except down, in a Lysander, as you would not be able to take over the controls.

Maddie was safely separated from her would-be assassin, if he was an assassin. She was never afterwards sure whether that passenger had travelled as a prisoner under guard or a liability under protection. At any rate they must have been very crowded with three grown men in the back of the Lysander.

Then at last there was me.

Maddie was interrupted in the middle of a bedtime cocoa, very cosy, at home with her gran and granddad in their house in Stockport – Maddie’s Operations officer rang and asked her to make a flight to another airfield that night, collect someone and deliver that someone elsewhere, all to be done ASAP. She’d be told where to go when she got to Oakway, but not over the telephone.