Rose Under Fire (Code Name Verity, #2)(10)

‘Does your Uncle Roger ever have to deal with unexploded bombs?’ Maddie asked as we watched them go. ‘Isn’t he in the Royal Engineers too, like the bomb squads?’

I never thought about it. I just assumed that all he did was build bridges and dig trenches. Or tell people to do it anyway. I think of Uncle Roger as having a ‘safe’ job.

I got back to the airfield at Hamble in time to pick up the last delivery chit for that evening, a new Spitfire to be delivered to Chattis Hill for testing. It’s only a twenty-minute flight there, but it took me a couple of hours to get back – no more trains and, of course, since I was the last flight of the day, there weren’t any other ferry pilots heading home for me to tag along with. By 10 p.m. the best offer I’d had was from a canteen dishwasher who said I could borrow her bicycle if I brought it back before lunchtime the next day, and I had to bribe her with today’s chocolate ration (you get a bar of Cadbury’s milk chocolate with every completed ferry flight). I’d already handed it over when a fireman who was going off duty took pity on me and offered me a lift on his motorcycle.

By the time I got home I was absolutely whacked. It was 11 o’clock and I was hungry enough to wolf down one of Mrs Hatch’s awful spam stews (she assures me the veg in it is cabbage and not nettle). Late as it was, she’d very kindly reheated it for me. I fell into bed and thought briefly of Maddie and Jamie, newlyweds too tired to make love; and then I fell asleep too.

I dreamed about the Rheinmetall fuse. I dreamed it detonated in the boy’s hands and blew his fingers off.

It was so vivid – like seeing a moving picture shot in close up. All I could see was the boy’s hands, palms spread, with the silver cylinder lying across them, smooth, round fingertips sticking out just beneath the shining metal, then all of it flying apart. I woke up gasping.

I am spooked by the image. I can’t get it out of my head. I was hoping I could forget it by writing about the wedding – I started out to do a poem, didn’t I? And all I’ve done is write about buzz bombs. I just learned that the TNT mix they use in them is called Amatol. It is a good word, if a bad thing. Perhaps I should try writing poetry about bombs.


Silver tube of fuse and hollow

Cylinder of detonator

Cap and gyro





Blah. It would be good if my heart was in it – like Edna St Vincent Millay’s ‘Counting-Out Rhyme’. But I don’t want to think about it. Small smooth fingers blown to bloody bone.

I am determined to do that wedding poem for Maddie. I am afraid it will be inevitably bomb-themed, but I have an idea.





Wartime Wedding


(by Rose Justice. I think this poem is too serious to call it ‘Doodlebug Bride’.)

In a storm of cocktail ice



their silver plane is tossed

from a silver bowl of sky

to a runway rimmed with frost.

The summer evening’s long and cold,

the ground crew shovels snow like glass.

Under their feet the crunching hail

breaks frozen blades of grass.

The house without a roof



seventh along the row

has shed its windowpanes like tears

over the street below.

A woman shovels glass like snow

from the sidewalk as they pass,

under their feet a mirrored hell

of bomb-strewn broken glass.

The dead beloved names



march down the grey and cold

walls of the little church.

He gives her the warm gold.

The loving cup is shared,

the crystal goblet smashed.

Their brave, determined, joyful heels

dance in the broken glass.





It is so hard trying to say what you mean. Of course Maddie and Jamie don’t fly together – I don’t know if they’ve ever flown together – and I’m pretty sure they haven’t been for a walk in London together since the buzz bombs started. But it’s meant to be metaphoric. It never quite comes out the way you want it to, and you always feel it is a little petty to write such floaty stuff about such serious things.

I am going to slam this notebook shut and see if I can raise Nick again on the telephone to plan our Big Date.





August 17, 1944

Hamble





Nick is gone.

We had a wonderful afternoon – he came here and we borrowed the Hatches’ canoe and took it down the Hamble, out into Southampton Water. He brought a bottle of champagne along, booty from one of his secret trips to France, and we drank it on the water. We sort of grazed instead of actually stopping for a picnic – it made the spam sandwiches seem more romantic. We sang camp songs and taught each other rounds. Mine was,

‘My paddle’s keen and bright,

Flashing with silver,

Follow the wild goose flight,

Dip, dip and swing.

Dip, dip and swing her back,



Flashing with silver,

Swift as the wild goose flies,

Dip, dip and swing.’





Nick’s round was,

‘Rose, Rose, Rose, Rose,

Will I ever see thee wed?

I will marry at thy will, sir,

At thy will.’