Code Name Verity(73)

Mitraillette spent a good two hours chatting with me last night, up here in the loft in the dark. Her English is as rubbish as my French, but though we persist in thoroughly mangling both languages, we understand each other pretty well. We were watching the road while they shifted some of the explosive – she has a wooden bird whistle for warning the people below if she sees headlamps coming down the hill. Since I arrived the explosive has been not-very-safely hidden under bales of hay on the floor of the barn. This building is easily 300 years old, probably more, timber-framed wattle-and-daub plaster like Wythenshawe Hall, and if anyone should drop a match or cigarette the whole place would go up like Vesuvius. There’s no way I’d ever be able to get out. I try not to think about it.

I also try not to fret over Julie. Word is that the day before yesterday she met her first contact. I don’t know where or who, my information is all third-hand, but what a huge relief to know she landed safely! My understanding is that the reception committee who prepared the landing field is not connected to Julie’s prearranged contacts in Ormaie – more accurately they are all different members of the same circuit. It is meant to work like a relay race with Julie as the baton, but she has missed out the first leg of the race, the connection at this end – probably due to coming down in the wrong place in the dark.

Must get in the habit of calling her Verity. Everyone else does. Her circuit is called Damask, after their most venerable member, who is 83 years old and a rose-grower – they generally label circuits by some trade. I haven’t been told the rose-grower’s name. No one goes by, or even knows, real names. I wouldn’t want to give Julie’s name away by accident.

Her assignment is so dead secret that her first contact wasn’t told she and her goods had arrived until she’d told him herself, so although he was aware there had been a Lysander crash outside Ormaie, he hadn’t known she’d survived until he met her – and when she spoke to him, neither one of them knew that the explosives landed safely as well. But word is spreading through the circuit that both Julie Verity and the explosives are here. Next stop the town hall. She is supposed to get access to the city archives and look up the original architect’s drawings for the old hotel building that the Ormaie Gestapo use as their headquarters. She won’t be able to do that till we sort out her ID though.

We are puzzling over how to do it. Mitraillette is not allowed to speak directly to Julie’s Verity’s contact, so she has to find someone else to take the message. They keep their tasks and names very carefully separated. And we don’t want to hand over Verity’s ‘Katharina Habicht’ papers to anyone but Verity, i.e. ‘Katharina’ herself. Mitraillette is going to try to arrange for V to pick them up from one of the Resistance ‘cachettes’, their secret letterboxes. That means we have to pass word along somehow.

I say ‘we’ as though I were going to do something dramatic to help, other than sit here blowing on my fingers to keep them warm and hoping no one finds me!

The operation is to go ahead as planned – they’ve got the equipment, they’ve got Verity, the contacts are all in place. With a little care and planning it’ll be the Ormaie Gestapo HQ that goes up like Vesuvius, and not this barn. If only K?the Habicht weren’t operating ‘behind enemy lines’, as it were, with Kittyhawk’s British identity papers!

I am beginning to think it was one of her less clever ideas to call herself Kitty Hawk in German. Terribly sweet, but not very practical. Though to be fair she wasn’t expecting me to come along.

Have taken Paul’s revolver apart and put it back together 7 times. It is not as interesting as a radial engine.





Another Lysander has come down.

Unbelievable but true. This one made it past the antiaircraft guns and came in just as planned, easy peasy, about 70 miles north of here, on Mon. 18 Oct. Unfortunately the landing field had become a sea of mud because there has been nothing but rain, rain, rain for the past week, all over France I think. The reception committee at the field up there spent five hours trying to haul the plane out of the mud – they hitched a pair of bulls to it, as it was too muddy even to drive a tractor on to the field, but finally had to give up as it was about to get light. So they have destroyed another aircraft and there is another Special Duties pilot stuck here.

I say another, but of course I am not really Special Duties. There’s some small comfort in not being the only one – mean and piggish of me, I know, but I can’t help it.