Code Name Verity(58)

It is six weeks today since I landed here. I suppose that’s quite a good innings for a wireless operator, though my success at staying alive for so long would carry more weight if I’d actually managed to set up a radio before I was caught. Now I really am living on borrowed time. Not much more to tell.

Still, Fr?ulein Engel will probably appreciate the closure of hearing about Maddie’s operational flight to France. I suppose somebody will be court-martialled for that. I’m not sure who.

The Special Duties squadron leader was supposed to take me. The Moon Squadron was suffering a bit at the end of September – they’d had a fantastically successful summer, a dozen flights a month, twice as many agents dropped off and scores of refugees picked up – but injury and incident had winnowed their Lysander pilots down to four at this particular point in time and one of those was so stricken with ’flu he couldn’t stand up (they were all exhausted). You can see where this is going.

For me, the preparation took months – another parachute course, then an elaborate field exercise in which I had to scramble around a real city (an unfamiliar one, they sent me off to Birmingham to do it) leaving coded messages for contacts I’d never met and arranging clandestine pick-ups of dummy parcels. The chief danger is that a policeman will notice your suspicious activities and arrest you – in which case it is quite difficult convincing your own authorities that you’re not working for the enemy.

Then there were specific arrangements to do with my own assignment – taking apart and putting together every one of those flipping radios a dozen times; making sure my clothes couldn’t be traced back to England, ripping the labels out of all my underthings (you see why the pullover is so ideal a garment – wholly anonymous and made over from locally obtained materials). Learning yards and yards of code – you know (all too well) that the wireless code gets keyed to poems so that it is easier to remember, and I was rather hoping von Linden would make his cipher breakers try to crack the ‘Tam o’ Shanter’ so I could laugh at them. But he is wise to me.

Then I had to undergo the nastiest sort of drills to make sure I had my story straight. They found it very difficult to simulate an interrogation for me. Most people find it disconcerting being woken in the middle of the night and dragged off for questioning, but I simply could not take it seriously. I knew the routine far too well. After about 5 minutes we would be wrestling over some detail of protocol or else something would send me into gales of laughter. In extremis they blindfolded me and held a loaded gun to the back of my head for nearly 6 hours – it was sinister and exhausting and I did go a bit wobbly eventually. (We all did. It wasn’t fun.) But even so I wasn’t ever afraid. You knew – you knew you’d be all right in the end. There were a lot of people involved because they had to keep swapping over guards, and my C.O. refused to tell me who it had been, to protect them, you know? 2 weeks later I presented him with a list of suspects that turned out to be 90 % accurate. I’d made the narrow rodent eyes at everybody for a few days and over the next week every single one of the men who had been in attendance that night bought me a drink. The women were harder to figure out, but I could have opened a black-market corner shop with the chocolate and cigarettes they slipped me. Guilt is a marvellous weapon.

So, mentally prepared, there was then packing to do – cigarettes (for gifts and bribes), clothing coupons (forged and/or stolen), ration cards, 2 million francs in small notes (now confiscated – it truly makes me ill to think about it), pistol, compass, brain. And then just waiting for the moon. Actually I was very good at being summoned to action without any notice, I was used to that (also at learning poetry by heart) – but this business of waiting, waiting, waiting for the moon, nibbling at your cuticles and watching the moon nibbling at the sky, is very testing. You sit by the telephone all morning, leap out of your skin when it rings; then when it turns out there’s too much fog over the Channel or the German army has put a guard over the farmer who owns the field you’re supposed to land in, you’re let off again for the rest of the day. Then there’s nothing to do except mooch about wondering if you can bear to sit in a smoke-filled cinema watching The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp for the sixth time, and if you will get in trouble if you do, because the Prime Minister disapproves of it and secretly you fancy Anton Walbrook as the noble German officer and you’re pretty sure your C.O. knows it. Just as you have decided ‘Bother the Prime Minister!’ and are looking forward to spending another dreamy afternoon with Anton Walbrook, the phone rings again and You Are Operational.