Code Name Verity(88)

4) Penn also found out a lot about the slave-girl secretary. Julie thinks she is about to have a crisis of conscience which we might be able to take advantage of – suggests we watch her and make it easy for her to find a Resistance contact when she’s ready.

It boggles me trying to think how Julie managed to communicate all this with the Gestapo captain listening. Apparently they were speaking English and the slave-girl had to translate for the captain, so either she just didn’t get it or she put up with it, which partly proves Julie’s point. Julie calls her ‘the angel’ – ‘l’ange’ – dead embarrassing if you ask me, no wonder the poor girl keeps mum. It’s masculine too, in French, not just a plain noun like it is in English. It is a direct translation of her surname, Engel, from the German.

Sometimes Julie used to make me jealous – her cleverness, her ease with men, how posh she is – the grouse-shooting and the Swiss school and speaking three languages and being presented to the King in a blue silk ball gown – even her MBE, after she caught those spies, like being knighted, and especially her term at Oxford – and I HATE MYSELF for ever having thought any of it was worth envying.

Now all I can think of is where she is and how much I love her. And I start to cry again.





I dreamed I was flying with Julie. I was taking her home, flying up to Scotland in Dympna’s Puss Moth. We were heading up the coast along the North Sea, the sun hanging low in the west – sky and sea and sand all gold, gold light all around us. No barrage balloons or anything, just empty sky like in peacetime. But it wasn’t peacetime, it was now, late November 1943, with the first snow on the Cheviot Hills in the west.

We were flying low over the long sands at Holy Island, and it was beautiful, but the plane kept trying to climb and I was fighting and fighting to keep it down. Just like the Lysander. Scared and worried and tired all at once, angry at the sky for being so beautiful when we were in danger of crashing. Then Julie, sitting alongside me, said, ‘Let me help.’

In the dream, the Puss Moth had dual controls side by side like a Tipsy, and Julie took hold of her own control column and gently pushed the nose forward, and suddenly we were flying the plane together.

All the pressure was gone. Nothing to be afraid of, nothing to battle against, just the two of us flying together, flying the plane together, side by side in the gold sky.

‘Easy peasy,’ she said, and laughed, and it was.





Oh Julie, wouldn’t I know if you were dead? Wouldn’t I feel it happening, like a jolt of electricity to my heart?

Amélie has just seen an execution at the Chateau de Bordeaux. Chateau des Bourreaux is what everybody calls it now – Castle of Butchers. The kids here get Thursday off school instead of Saturday, and Amélie had gone into Ormaie with a couple of her chums to a cheap café they like, which happens to be at the end of the lower lane at the back of the Gestapo building. Amélie and her friends were sitting in the café window and noticed a crowd gathering in the lane – being kids they piled along to see what was going on – turns out those bastards had got a guillotine rigged up in their rear courtyard and were executing people –

The kids saw. They didn’t know what was going on or they’d have never gone to look, Amélie says, but they arrived just as it was happening and they saw it. SAW IT HAPPEN. She has been sobbing her heart out all evening, impossible to comfort her. They saw a girl killed and Amélie recognised her from her school, though the girl had been a few years ahead of Amélie and had already finished – what if it had been Beryl? Or Beryl’s sister? Because that’s what it’s like, schoolmates being guillotined as spies. I didn’t understand before – really didn’t understand. Being a kid and worrying that a bomb might kill you is terrible. But being a kid and worrying that the police might cut your head off is something else entirely. I haven’t words for it. Every fresh broken horror here is something I just DIDN’T UNDERSTAND until I came here.

When I was eight, before the Depression, we had a holiday in Paris – I remember bits of it, we took a boat trip on the Seine, and we saw the Mona Lisa. But the thing I remember most is how Granddad and I went to the top of the Eiffel Tower. We took the lift up, but we walked the whole way down, and on the way we stopped at the First Stage and we could see Gran standing in the park below, wearing a big new hat she’d bought that morning, and we waved at her – she looked so posh, all alone in the Champ de Mars, that you’d have never known she wasn’t French herself. She took a picture of us and though we were so far away and tiny you can’t see us in the picture, I know we are there. And I remember also there was a shop, way up there on the First Stage, and Granddad bought me a tiny gold Eiffel Tower on a gold chain as a souvenir, and I still have it, back home in Stockport.