Code Name Verity(96)

Then the Nazi search party arrived and we spent an hour lying in the mud along the riverbank, hiding in the bulrushes like Moses, waiting for them to leave. Could hear them chatting with the groundskeeper. He came back later to lock up the boathouse and give us the all-clear – such as it was – now there were Nazi guards posted on the front drive, so we’d not be getting the Rosalie out any time soon. But the groundskeeper thought it would be safe for a couple of bicycles to leave by the river path on the opposite bank. Benzedrine handed out all round. Got one of the canoes out again and ferried 2 of the bikes, 2 of us and 2 of the escaped prisoners over the river, and saw them off into the fog.

At this point one of the remaining lads from the bus collapsed in a shivering heap and Mitraillette sort of stalled.

‘Nous sommes faits,’ she said. We’ve had it.

We bedded down in the stables with the bicycles. Not the safest place in the world.

I wonder where that is right now – the safest place in the world? Even the neutral countries, Sweden and Switzerland, are surrounded. Ireland’s stuck with being divided, they have to mark the neutral bit ‘IRELAND’ in big letters made of whitewashed stones hoping the Germans won’t drop bombs there thinking it’s the UK side of the northern border. I’ve seen it from the air. South America, perhaps.

We were all still wide awake when it grew light. I was sitting with my arms wrapped round my knees, side by side with one of the lads who’d escaped when I shot his chains apart. The men who’d been chained had to stay with us because they’d got to get rid of the fetters on their ankles before they could go anywhere.

‘How did they catch you? What did you do?’ I asked, forgetting he was French. He answered me in English though.

‘Just what you did,’ he said bitterly. ‘Blew up a bridge and failed to stop the German army.’

‘Why didn’t they just shoot you?’

He grinned. All his upper teeth had been savagely broken. ‘Why do you think, gosse anglaise, English kid? They cannot question you if they shoot you.’

‘How come only some of you were chained?’

‘Only some of us are dangerous.’ He was still grinning. I suppose he had reason to be optimistic – he’d been given a second chance at life, at hope. A slim one, but better than he’d had 12 hours ago. ‘They chain you if they think you are dangerous. The girl whose arms were tied behind her, did you see her? She wasn’t dangerous, she was a – collaboratrice, collaborator.’ He spat into the disintegrating straw.

The shattered pieces of my heart went cold. I felt as if I’d swallowed shards of ice.

‘Stop,’ I said. ‘Tais-toi. SHUT UP.’ He didn’t hear me, or didn’t take me seriously, and carried on relentlessly: ‘Better off dead, that one. Did you see her, even lying in the road last night, sweet-talking the guards in German? Because her arms were bound, someone would have had to help her, on the way to wherever they were taking us – feed her, help her drink. She would have had to offer favours to the guards to get them to do it. None of us would have done it.’

I am dangerous too, sometimes.

That morning I was an anti-personnel mine, a butterfly bomb, unexploded and ticking, and he touched the fuse.

I don’t actually remember what happened. I don’t remember attacking him. But the skin of my knuckles is torn where my fist connected with his broken teeth. Mitraillette says they thought I was going to try to dig his eyes out with my fingers.

I do remember 3 people holding me back, and I re-mem-ber screaming at the boy, ‘You wouldn’t have helped her EAT AND DRINK? SHE’D HAVE DONE IT FOR YOU!’

Then in panic, because I was making so much noise, they sat on me again. But as soon as they let me go I was back on top of him. ‘I FREED YOU! You would still be IN CHAINS and packed in a stinking freight wagon LIKE A COW by now if it wasn’t for me! You wouldn’t have helped another prisoner EAT AND DRINK?’

‘K?the, K?the!’ Mitraillette, weeping, tried to take my face between her hands to comfort me and shut me up. ‘K?the, arrête – stop, stop! Tu dois – you must! Wait – Attends –’

She held a tin cup of cold coffee laced with cognac up to my mouth – helped me. Helped me drink.

That was the first time she KO’d me. It takes 30 minutes for the drug to work. Suppose I’m lucky they didn’t hit me over the head with a bicycle to speed it up.

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