Code Name Verity(9)

And of course that was a joyride, not a lesson. Maddie couldn’t afford lessons. But she made Oakway Aerodrome her own. Oakway came into being in parallel with Maddie’s crush on aeroplanes – I want bigger toys, she’d wished, and hey presto, a week later, there was Oakway. It was only a fifteen-minute motorbike ride. It was so spanking new that the mechanics there were happy to have an extra pair of capable hands around. Maddie was out every Saturday that summer tinkering with engines and doping fabric wings and making friends. Then in October her persistence suddenly, unexpectedly paid off. That is when we started the Civil Air Guard.

I say we – I mean Britain. Just about every flying club in the kingdom joined in, and so many thousands of people applied – free flight training! – that they could only take about a tenth of them. And only one in 20 of those were women. But Maddie got lucky again because all the engineers and mechanics and instructors at Oakway knew and liked her now, and she got glowing recommendations for being quick and committed and knowing all about oil levels. She wasn’t straight away any better than any other pilot who trained at Oakway with the Civil Air Guard. But she wasn’t any worse either. She made her first solo flight in the first week of the new year, between snow flurries.

Look at the timing though. Maddie started flying in late October 1938 . . . Hitler (you will notice that I have thought better of my colourful descriptive terms for the Führer and carefully scratched them all out) invaded Poland on 1 September 1939 and Britain declared war on Germany two days later. Maddie flew the practical test for her ‘A’ licence, the basic pilot’s licence, six months before all civil aircraft were grounded in August. After that, most of those planes were taken into government service. Both Dympna’s planes were requisitioned by the Air Ministry for communications and she was mad as a cat about it.

Days before Britain declared war on Germany, Maddie flew by herself to the other side of England, skimming the tops of the Pennines and avoiding the barrage balloons like silver ramparts protecting the sky around Newcastle. She followed the coast north to Bamburgh and Holy Island. I know that stretch of the North Sea very well because the train from Edinburgh to London goes that way, and I was up and down all year when I was at school. Then when my school closed just before the war, instead of finishing elsewhere I went to university a bit suddenly for a term and took the train to get there too, feeling very grown-up.

The Northumbrian coast is the most beautiful length of the whole trip. The sun still sets quite late in the north of England in August, and Maddie on fabric wings flew low over the long sands of Holy Island and saw seals gathered there. She flew over the great castle crags of Lindisfarne and Bamburgh to the north and south, and over the ruins of the twelfth-century priory, and over all the fields stretching yellow and green towards the low Cheviot Hills of Scotland. Maddie flew back following the 70-mile, 2000-year-old dragon’s back of Hadrian’s Wall, to Carlisle and then south through the Lakeland fells, along Lake Windermere. The soaring mountains rose around her and the poets’ waters glittered beneath her in the valleys of memory – hosts of golden daffodils, Swallows and Amazons, Peter Rabbit. She came home by way of Blackstone Edge above the old Roman road to avoid the smoke haze over Manchester, and landed back at Oakway sobbing with anguish and love; love, for her island home that she’d seen whole and fragile from the air in the space of an afternoon, from coast to coast, holding its breath in a glass lens of summer and sunlight. All about to be swallowed in nights of flame and blackout. Maddie landed at Oakway before sunset and shut down the engine, then sat in the cockpit weeping.

More than anything else, I think, Maddie went to war on behalf of the Holy Island seals.

She climbed out of Dympna’s Puss Moth at last. The late, low sun lit up the other aeroplanes in the hangar Dympna used, expensive toys about to realise their finest hour. (In less than a year that very same Puss Moth, flown by someone else, would ferry blood deliveries to the gasping British Expeditionary Force in France.) Maddie ran all the checks she’d normally run after a flight, and then started again with the ones she’d run before a flight. Dympna found her there half an hour later, still not having put the plane to bed, cleaning midges off the windscreen in the late golden light.

‘You don’t need to do that.’

‘Someone does. I won’t be flying it again, will I? Not after tomorrow. It’s the only thing I can do, check the oil, clean the bugs.’

Dympna stood smoking calmly in the evening sunlight and watched Maddie for a while. Then she said, ‘There’s going to be air work for girls in this war. You wait. They’re going to need all the pilots they can get fighting for the Royal Air Force. That’ll be young men, some of them with less training than you’ve got now, Maddie. And that’ll leave the old men, and the women, to deliver new aircraft and carry their messages and taxi their pilots. That’ll be us.’