Rose Under Fire (Code Name Verity, #2)(82)

I thought, Thank goodness I won’t have to explain anything. She’ll understand. And I went back to sleep, so glad to have someone next to me. Because even though the six months at Ravensbrück had been nothing but a battle for sleeping space on the bare bunk slats, those people crowded next to you were the only warmth and the only comfort you could get. And I missed them like crazy.

I wish it could always be that easy. I wish I never had to tell anyone and they would just know. I wish I could always have someone next to me.

The church bells didn’t wake me, but the sound was in my ears and head when I woke up again – all the bells in Paris. The official announcement wasn’t supposed to come till 3 o’clock in the afternoon. Nobody cared. The war was over and all the bells were already ringing.

Maddie had gone back to her own room and shut the communicating door behind her, so I got dressed in the worn, neat skirt and blouse the pitying chambermaid had given me – her missing daughter’s clothes – and knocked on Maddie’s door. She opened it almost immediately and this time we threw our arms around each other. And this time both of us began to cry.

‘Come on!’ Maddie said. ‘Come on, we’re going out.’

I shook my head, but she had me by the arm, and took advantage of me being easy to bully. It was stupidly easy to bully me then – I would follow directions meekly, without tears, cowering. That is how the chambermaid finally forced me to get dressed after my first two weeks of hermit-like so-called ‘freedom’.

Hanging on to my arm, Maddie stuffed her flight bag with chunks of French bread off the breakfast tray they’d grown used to sending me (she’d taken it in earlier), then grabbed her Air Transport Auxiliary uniform tunic and forced me into it.

‘No no no, I’m not a First Officer –’

‘No one will know or care. You are an ATA pilot and you are going to look like one.’

She gave me her side cap.

‘Wizard. You look perfect.’

Then she pulled on her leather flight jacket over her blouse and straightened her tie. ‘One uniform between the pair of us – that’ll do! We both look the part, right?’

I nodded, trying to smile. Her tunic was a little too short and a little too broad for me, but she belted it tight round my middle and it probably looked OK. Actually, it probably disguised how thin I was. We both wiped our eyes at the same time.

‘Let’s go. I’m taking you flying.’

Maddie tucked her arm in mine. I didn’t need propping up, but I needed someone hanging on to me, as though I were blind and couldn’t see where I was going and had to be led. Out through the sumptuous lobby, which I took in as though I were seeing it for the first time, and into the May sunlight in the Place Vend?me. It was already full of people – kids sitting on shoulders, waving paper flags and wearing paper hats that people were selling out of buckets and boxes like they’d been saving them up for weeks, everybody so dressed up.

Maddie was shameless. I think she started out heading for the Metro, but we didn’t make it across the square before she’d hitched a ride on a truck crowded with American pilots all waving and holding up two fingers in a ‘V’ for ‘Victory’.

‘Le Bourget!’ Maddie cried. ‘We want to get to Le Bourget!’

The ATA uniform worked its magic – even though we were sharing it.

‘Come on up, sister!’ They pulled us in with them.

For one long moment the world seemed hideous. The smell of engine exhaust and sweat, the bodies so close together –

Maddie, who’d been up most of the night reading about the prison where I’d spent the winter, held tight to my arm and cried out, ‘Let’s ride on the roof!’ And they boosted us up on top of the cab like a couple of figureheads. It was precarious, but it was nothing like being in a prison transport truck, and I could breathe again.

It took us hours to get through the crowded main thoroughfares. But it was fun and like nothing I’d ever done before, sitting on the roof of a slow-moving military truck, clinging to my borrowed ATA cap – with my friend’s arm secure around my shoulders and an enormous bundle of lilacs in my lap (where did those come from?), and our brave boys blowing kisses at everyone and trying to learn the words to the French national anthem.

At Le Bourget there was a line of Dakotas taking off and landing. They were giving people rides. For the past month they’d been shuttling all over Europe – hospital supplies, social workers, bringing home prisoners of war and ‘civilian hostages’ – thousands of people like me who’d been sent to concentration camps in the far corners of the continent and were trying to come home now. Maddie and I lined up with the other joyriders, and our shared uniform got us boosted up front with the flight crew. And off we went – low over the teeming streets of Paris, so low you could see the flags flying – so much red, white and blue! The French Tricolour, the Union Jack and the good old Star-spangled Banner. There were Soviet flags in there too. We sailed in stately flight up the Champs-élysées, so low we could see the crowd waving as we passed overhead.

‘Ever buzzed the Eiffel Tower?’ the pilot shouted lazily over the whine of the engine.

‘Rose did last year,’ Maddie yelled. ‘Flying an Oxford. Two weeks after Paris was liberated!’

‘Flying it herself ?’