Rose Under Fire (Code Name Verity, #2)(84)

It was a start.

Maybe Bob thought I was upset with him, because he added quickly, ‘The real reason I’m in Paris is that I’m on an assignment for my paper – I think I told you that. But I’ve got a sort of more creative personal project I’m working on now too – it’s a story for a literary journal out of Olympia University in Ohio, about people coming home. I got the idea after I dropped you off. I couldn’t stop thinking about you and your team. So since then I’ve started talking to others like you.’

‘Like me?’

‘You said you’d been in prison in Germany, but you were in a camp, right? You weren’t a prisoner-of-war. You’re a civilian. So I guessed you must have been in a concentration camp. There are plenty of camp survivors in Paris, on their way home, men and women both. You get an eye for spotting them.’

‘We’re all skeletons,’ I said, and looked away, my face burning.

‘No,’ Maddie suddenly interjected. ‘It’s summat in the eyes. You look like you’re in shock.’

Bob slapped the table and everyone’s glasses tinkled. ‘That’s it exactly. The POWs from the military prison camps are skinny too, but anyone who’s been in the concentration camps – they all look a little crazy.’ He bit his lip and reddened. ‘Sorry. Not you.’

‘It’s OK. I bet I do. I bet that’s how you figured it out.’

I felt a little crazy.

‘Well,’ Bob said, leaning back on his heels, ‘I’m telling you this because you said you wrote poetry, and I thought you might want to send something to the poetry editor at my magazine. It’s quarterly, and they’re doing a special issue focused on the war – social issues, how the war’s affected education, things like that. There’s a story about the massacre of university staff in Poland and a story about the past five years of Hollywood films, so you get some idea how flexible they’re being. If you wrote anything this year –’

Maddie leaned across me and coolly accepted the offer on my behalf, as though she were my literary agent. ‘She’ll take your card.’

He had it ready and waiting in his breast pocket. I felt a little bit like a starlet being discovered by a director. I nodded. I didn’t smile, but I let him know I’d consider it. Maybe this was the way I could tell people about it – without having to say anything, just the way I’d given my notebook to Maddie.

‘I’ve got a few new poems,’ I said cautiously. I wasn’t convinced any of them were good enough to be published in a literary magazine. I wasn’t convinced any of them would even make sense, outside Ravensbrück.

‘That’s my girl,’ Bob said, and refilled our glasses.

I picked mine up again, and took a tentative sip of victory champagne. I remembered now I’d drunk champagne at Maddie’s wedding too, and it tasted better when I was prepared for it. It wasn’t sweet but exciting – new and exotic and sparkling, but dry and cold too – like everything that day, joy mixed with agony.

‘Thank you!’ I said, and held my glass to Bob and Maddie and the light. ‘Thank you for waiting.’

There are four forces which work together if you want to put something into the sky and have it stay there. One of these is lift.

Lift is made when the air pressure under a wing is greater than the air pressure over the wing. Then the wing gets pushed upwards. That’s how birds fly. That’s how kites fly – a kite is basically just a solitary wing. That’s how airplanes fly.

But people need lift too. People don’t get moving, they don’t soar, they don’t achieve great heights, without something buoying them up.

There’s nowhere else in the world I’d have rather been to celebrate victory in Europe than in Paris on VE Day, but I don’t know if I’d feel the same if it hadn’t been for my friends Maddie and Bob generating lift for me – buoying me up at the heavy ebb of my life.





2. Weight





Each force in flight is balanced by an opposing force. The opposite of lift is weight. Weight is always trying to pull an object back to earth, so to get something to stay up, lift has to be greater than weight.

You’d think your weight would always be the same, but it isn’t. When you do aerobatics or go into a dive – like a kite that’s plunging into the sand at the beach – there’s an increase in gravity, and that makes you weigh more. If you want your heavy kite to stay in the air, you have to increase the lift as well. Maybe by waiting for a stronger wind. Maybe by finding a windier place to fly your kite.

Maddie brought lift back into my life by forcing me outside. So did Bob, who introduced me to the editors of this magazine. So did Fernande, the chambermaid at the Paris Ritz, who gave me her daughter’s clothes and made me get dressed and brought me coffee every morning for three weeks. So did the US Air Force pilot who let me take over the controls of his C-47 so I could fly it in long, lazy circles around the Eiffel Tower over the cheering crowds on VE Day.

My dad sends me an allowance and pays for me to rent a plane from time to time at a civilian flying club outside Edinburgh. I can’t find work as a pilot – there are so many of us cooling our heels with nothing to do now that the war is over. Plenty of women with more experience than me get turned down for the few instructor and air taxi jobs available. The new commercial airlines aren’t interested in women except as hostesses. But my dad, who taught me to fly, wants to make sure I don’t get rusty.