Rose Under Fire (Code Name Verity, #2)(4)

It’s so strange to be here at last, and so different from what I expected.

I have put my accident report into verse after all. (I think I am trying to trick myself into writing this darn accident report.) I wish I’d written this poem earlier. It would have been nice to read at Celia’s service. I will send a copy to her parents.





For Celia Forester


(by Rose Justice)

The storm will swallow



the brave girl there

who fights destruction

with wings and air –

life and chaos



hover in flight

wing tip to wing tip

until the slight

triumphant moment



when their wings caress

and her crippled Tempest

flies pilotless.





Now that I am an ATA pilot at last, I wish I were a fighter pilot.





August 5, 1944



Hamble, Southampton



And that was the first thing I said to Nick when I got him on the phone. I did get him at last. He wasn’t at home so I rang the airfield, and they said he was on his way, but hadn’t got there yet, AND he was ‘busy’ tonight so he might not be able to call back. I was so desperate I waited in the phone box for three-quarters of an hour till he got in, and we talked for exactly as long as my cigarette tin of pennies held out. In three weeks he will be off to France and I will not.

‘Hello, Rose darling.’

‘I want to fly Tempests,’ I said through clenched teeth. ‘I want to be operational. I want to be in the Royal Air Force, 56 Squadron 150 Wing, blasting flying bombs to smithereens.’

There was a good penny’s worth of silence down the wire before Nick answered. Maybe that’s where the saying comes from, penny for your thoughts. Speak up or the operator will cut you off.

Finally Nick said sympathetically, ‘What’s made you so bloodthirsty?’

‘I’m not bloodthirsty. There’s no blood in a pilotless plane, is there! I’m a good pilot, I’ve probably been flying five years longer than half the boys in 150 Wing. I flew with Daddy from coast to coast across America when I was fifteen, and I did all the navigation. You’ve never flown a Tempest, or a Mustang, or a Mark 14 Spitfire – I’ve flown them all, dozens of times. They’re wasting me, just because I’m a girl! They won’t even let us fly to France – they’re prepping men for supply and taxi to the front lines, guys with hundreds’ fewer hours than me, but they’re just passing over the women pilots. It isn’t fair.’

I stopped to breathe. Nick said evenly, ‘And there’s me worrying you’d be upset by your friend’s funeral. Instead you’re after shooting down doodlebugs. What’s going on, Rose?’

‘How do you topple a doodlebug?’ I asked. ‘The girls say you can do it with your wing tip.’

Nick laughed. Then he paused. I didn’t say anything, because I knew he was thinking. ‘You couldn’t,’ he said at last. ‘Yes, I’ve heard that too, but you need to be flying something fast, not a taxi Anson or a Spitfire with only enough fuel to get you to the maintenance airfield. An ATA pilot couldn’t topple a V-1 flying bomb.’

‘Celia did. She tried to anyway. We think that’s why she crashed. How do they do it? Do you just bash it with your wing tip? The Polish pilots have a word for it. Taran. Aerial ramming.’

Another longish pause. I had stuffed in the entire contents of the cigarette tin right away, more than two shillings’ worth – after feeding thirty of those gigantic pennies into the telephone, I felt like I’d just thrown away a pirate’s treasure hoard. At any rate it added up to more than ten minutes. I didn’t want to be cut off.

And, of course, the operator was probably listening in. Nick’s job is very secret. I didn’t want to get him in trouble.

‘No,’ he said at last. ‘No, for God’s sake don’t try that, Rose, you’ll kill yourself. Is that what Celia did? Good God almighty. The idea is not to touch them at all. The doodlebug’s a bloody brilliant bomb, but it’s not a brilliant aircraft. It’s unstable, and if you get your wing tip just beneath the bomb’s wing, half a foot or so away from it, you can upset the airflow around it and make it stall. But you have to fly fast enough to keep up with it, and it’ll still go off when it hits the ground. Promise me you won’t try?’

My turn to be silent. Because I couldn’t make that promise. I guess I’ll never get the chance anyway, but if I did – well, I’m a better pilot than Celia was.

‘Rose, darling?’ Nick had to prompt me. ‘I’m not a fighter pilot either. They also serve who only stand and wait.’

Show-off, quoting Milton. He knows I like poetry.

‘That’s garbage, Nick, and you know it,’ I said hotly. ‘You’re not standing and waiting. You’re dropping off –’ I choked back what I was going to say, thinking of the operator listening in. I’m not supposed to know what he’s doing, and I don’t know much about it, but Maddie’s boyfriend is in the same squadron – that’s how I met Nick – and you figure a little bit out after a while. They’ve been flying spies and saboteurs and plastic explosive and machine guns in and out of France for the past two years – secret supplies for the D-Day invasion.