Code Name Verity Read online

  ‘He’s on fire!’ screamed Beryl in a fit of delighted panic.

  ‘He’s not on fire. He’s burning oil,’ Maddie said because she knows these things. ‘If he has any sense he’ll shut everything off and it’ll stop. Then he can glide down.’

  They watched. Maddie’s prediction came true: the engine stopped and the smoke drifted away, and now the pilot was clearly planning to put his damaged rig down in the field right in front of them. It was a grazing field, unploughed, unmown, without any livestock in it. The wings above their heads cut out the sun for a second with the sweep and billow of a sailing yacht. The aircraft’s final pass pulled all the litter of their lunch out into the field, brown crusts and brown paper fluttering in the blue smoke like the devil’s confetti.

  Maddie says it would have been a good landing if it had been on an aerodrome. In the field the wounded flying machine bounced haplessly over the unmown grass for thirty yards. Then it tipped up gracefully on to its nose.

  Unthinkingly, Maddie broke into applause. Beryl grabbed her hands and smacked one of them.

  ‘You gormless cow! He might be hurt! Oh, what shall we do!’

  Maddie hadn’t meant to clap. She had done it without thinking. I can picture her, blowing the curling black hair out of her eyes, with her lower lip jutting out before she jumped down from the gate and hopped over the green tussocks to the downed plane.

  There were no flames. Maddie scaled her way up the Puss Moth’s nose to get at the cockpit and put one of her hobnailed shoes through the fabric that covered the fuselage (I think that’s what the body of the plane is called) and I bet she cringed; she hadn’t meant to do that either. She was feeling very hot and bothered by the time she unlatched the door, expecting a lecture from the aircraft’s owner, and was shamefully relieved to find the pilot hanging upside-down in half-undone harness straps and clearly stone-cold unconscious. Maddie glanced over the alien engine controls. No oil pressure (she told me all this). Throttle, out. Off. Good enough. Maddie untangled the harness and let the pilot slither to the ground.

  Beryl was there to catch the dragging weight of the pilot’s senseless body. It was easier for Maddie to get down off the plane than it had been for her to get up, just a light hop to the ground. Maddie unbuckled the pilot’s helmet and goggles; she and Beryl had both done First Aid in Girl Guides, for all that’s worth, and knew enough to make sure the casualty could breathe.

  Beryl began to giggle.

  ‘Who’s the gormless cow!’ Maddie exclaimed.

  ‘It’s a girl!’ Beryl laughed. ‘It’s a girl!’

  —

  Beryl stayed with the unconscious girl pilot while Maddie rode her Silent Superb to the farm to get help. She found two big strong lads her own age shovelling cow dung, and the farmer’s wife sorting First Early potatoes and cursing a cotillion of girls who were doing a huge jigsaw on the old stone kitchen floor (it was Sunday, or they’d have been boiling laundry). A rescue squad was despatched. Maddie was sent further down the lane on her bike to the bottom of the hill where there was a pub and a phone box.

  ‘She’ll need an ambulance, tha knows, love,’ the farmer’s wife had said to Maddie kindly. ‘She’ll need to go to hospital if she’s been flying an aeroplane.’

  The words rattled around in Maddie’s head all the way to the telephone. Not ‘She’ll need to go to hospital if she’s been injured,’ but ‘She’ll need to go to hospital if she’s been flying an aeroplane.’

  A flying girl! thought Maddie. A girl flying an aeroplane!

  No, she corrected herself; a girl not flying a plane. A girl tipping up a plane in a sheep field.

  But she flew it first. She had to be able to fly it in order to land it (or crash it).

  The leap seemed logical to Maddie.

  I’ve never crashed my motorbike, she thought. I could fly an aeroplane.

  There are a few more types of aircraft that I know, but what comes to mind is the Lysander. That is the plane Maddie was flying when she dropped me here. She was actually supposed to land the plane, not dump me out of it in the air. We got fired at on the way in and for a while the tail was in flames and she couldn’t control it properly, and she made me bail out before she tried to land. I didn’t see her come down. But you showed me the photos you took at the site, so I know that she has crashed an aeroplane by now. Still, you can hardly blame it on the pilot when her plane gets hit by anti-aircraft fire.

  Some British Support for Anti-Semitism

  The Puss Moth crash was on Sunday. Beryl was back to work at the mill in Ladderal the next day. My heart twists up and shrivels with envy so black and painful that I spoiled half this page with tears before I realised they were falling, to think of Beryl’s long life of loading shuttles and raising snotty babies with a beery lad in an industrial suburb of Manchester. Of course that was in 1938 and they have all been bombed to bits since, so perhaps Beryl and her kiddies are dead already, in which case my tears of envy are very selfish. I am sorry about the paper. Miss E. is looking over my shoulder as I write and tells me not to interrupt my story with any more apologies.

  Over the next week Maddie pieced together the pilot’s story in a storm of newspaper clippings with the mental wolfishness of Lady Macbeth. The pilot’s name was Dympna Wythenshawe (I remember her name because it is so silly). She was the spoiled youngest daughter of Sir Somebody-or-other Wythenshawe. On Friday there was a flurry of outrage in the evening paper because as soon as she was released from hospital, she started giving joyrides in her other aeroplane (a Dragon Rapide – how clever am I), while the Puss Moth was being mended. Maddie sat on the floor in her granddad’s shed next to her beloved Silent Superb, which needed a lot of tinkering to keep it in a fit state for weekend outings, and fought with the newspaper. There were pages and pages of gloom about the immediate likelihood of war between Japan and China, and the growing likelihood of war in Europe. The nose-down Puss Moth in the farmer’s field on Highdown Rise was last week’s news though; there were no pictures of the plane on Friday, only a grinning mugshot of the aviatrix herself, looking happy and windblown and much, much prettier than that idiot Fascist Oswald Mosley, whose sneering face glared out at Maddie from the prime spot at the top of the page. Maddie covered him up with her mug of cocoa and thought about the quickest way to get to Catton Park Aerodrome. It was a good distance, but tomorrow was Saturday again.

  Maddie was sorry, the next morning, that she hadn’t paid more attention to the Oswald Mosley story. He was there, there in Stockport, speaking in front of St Mary’s on the edge of the Saturday market, and his idiot Fascist followers were having their own march to meet him, starting at the town hall and ending up at St Mary’s, causing traffic and human mayhem. They had by then toned down their anti-Semitism a bit and this rally was supposed to be in the name of Peace, believe it or not, trying to convince everybody that it would be a good idea to keep things cordial with the idiot Fascists in Germany. The Mosleyites were no longer allowed to wear their tastelessly symbolic black shirts – there was now a law in place about public marching in political uniforms, mainly to stop the Mosleyites causing riots like the ones they started with their marches through Jewish neighbourhoods in London. But they were going along to cheer for Mosley anyway. There was a happy crowd of his lovers and an angry crowd of his haters. There were women with baskets trying to get their shopping done at the Saturday market. There were policemen. There was livestock – some of the policemen were on horseback, and there was a herd of sheep being shunted through also on the way to market, and a horse-drawn milk cart stuck in the middle of the sheep. There were dogs. Probably there were cats and rabbits and chickens and ducks too.

  Maddie could not get across the Stockport Road. (I don’t know what it’s really called. Perhaps that’s its right name because it’s the main road in from the south. You should not rely on any of my directions.) Maddie waited and waited on the edge of the simmering crowd, looking for a gap. After twenty minutes, she began to get annoyed. There
were people pressing against her from behind now, as well. She tried to turn her motorbike round, walking it by the handlebars, and ran into someone.

  ‘Oi! Mind where you’re pushing that bike!’

  ‘Sorry!’ Maddie looked up.

  It was a crowd of thugs, black-shirted for the rally even though they could get arrested for it, hair slicked back with Brylcreem like a bunch of airmen. They looked Maddie up and down gleefully, pretty sure she would be easy bait.

  ‘Nice bike.’

  ‘Nice legs!’

  One of them giggled through his nose. ‘Nice —.’

  He used an ugly, unspeakable word, and I won’t bother to write it because I don’t think any of you would know what it means in English, and I certainly do not know the French or German for it. The thuggish lad used it like a goading stick and it worked. Maddie shoved the front wheel of the bike past the one she had hit in the first place, and knocked into him again, and he grabbed the handlebars with his own big fists between her hands.

  Maddie held on. They struggled for a moment over the motorbike. The boy refused to let go, and his mates laughed.

  ‘What’s a lass like you need with a big toy like this? Where’d you get it?’

  ‘At the bike shop, where d’you think!’

  ‘Brodatt’s,’ said one of them. There was only one on that side of town.

  ‘Sells bikes to Jews, he does.’

  ‘Maybe it’s a Jew’s bike.’

  You probably don’t know it, but Manchester and its smoky suburbs have got quite a large Jewish population and nobody minds. Well, obviously some idiot Fascists do mind, but I think you see what I mean. They came from Russia and Poland and later Roumania and Austria, all Eastern Europe, all through the nineteenth century. The bike shop whose customers were in question happened to be Maddie’s granddad’s bike shop that he’d had for the last thirty years. He’d done quite well out of it, well enough to keep Maddie’s stylish gran in the manner to which she is accustomed, and they live in a large old house in Grove Green on the edge of the city and have a gardener and a daily girl to do the housekeeping. Anyway when this lot started slinging venom at Maddie’s granddad’s shop, Maddie unwisely engaged in battle with them and said, ‘Does it always take all three of you to complete a thought? Or can you each do it without your mates if you have enough time to think it over first?’

  They pushed the bike over. It took Maddie down with it. Because bullying is what idiot Fascists like best.

  But there was a swell of noisy outrage from other people in the crowded street, and the little gang of thugs laughed again and moved on. Maddie could hear the one lad’s distinctive nasal whinny even after his back had become anonymous.

  More people than had knocked her down came to her aid, a labourer and a girl with a pram and a kiddie and two women with shopping baskets. They hadn’t fought or interfered, but they helped Maddie up and dusted her off and the workman ran loving hands down the Silent Superb’s mudguard. ‘Tha’s not hurt, miss?’

  ‘Nice bike!’

  That was the kiddie. His mum said quickly, ‘Oi, you hush,’ because it was a perfect echo of the black-shirted youth who had pushed Maddie over.

  ‘’Tis nice,’ said the man.

  ‘It’s getting old,’ Maddie said modestly, but pleased.

  ‘Ruddy vandals.’

  ‘Tha wants to get those knees seen to, love,’ advised one of the ladies with baskets.

  Maddie thought to herself, thinking about aeroplanes: Just you wait, you idiot Fascists. I am going to get me a bigger toy than this bike.

  Maddie’s faith in humanity was restored and she pushed her way out of the crowd and set off down the cobbled back lanes of Stockport. There was no one here but kiddies playing street football in screaming bunches, and harassed big sisters with their hair tied up in dust cloths, ungraciously shaking out rugs and scrubbing front doorsteps while their mothers shopped. I swear I shall weep with envy if I keep thinking about them, bombed to bits or otherwise.

  Fräulein Engel has been looking over my shoulder once again and has asked me to stop writing ‘idiot Fascist’ because she thinks Hauptsturmführer von Linden will not like it. I think she is a bit scared of Capt. von Linden (who can blame her), and I think Scharführer Thibaut is scared of him too.

  Location of British Airfields

  I can’t really believe you need me to tell you that Catton Park Aerodrome is in Ilsmere Port because for the last ten years it has been just about the busiest airfield in the north of England. They build planes there. Before the war it had a posh civil flying club and it has also been a Royal Air Force base for years. The local Royal Air Force squadron has been flying bombers from that field since 1936. Your guess is as good as mine, and probably a lot better, as to what they are using it for now (I don’t doubt it’s surrounded with barrage balloons and anti-aircraft guns). When Maddie pulled up there that Saturday morning, she stood for a moment goggling gormlessly (her word), first at the car park, which contained the biggest collection of expensive cars she’d ever seen in one place, and then at the sky, which contained the biggest collection of aeroplanes. She leaned against the fence to watch. After a few minutes, she worked out that most of the planes seemed to fly to a kind of pattern, taking it in turns to land and roar away again. Half an hour later she was still watching, and could tell that one of the pilots was a beginner and his machine always bounced six feet in the air after touching down before properly connecting with the ground, and another one was practising absolutely insane aerobatic manoeuvres, and another one was giving rides to people – once round the airfield, five minutes in the air, back down, hand over your two shillings and swap your goggles with the next customer, please.

  It was a very overwhelming place in that uneasy peacetime when military and civil pilots took it in turns to use the runway, but Maddie was determined, and followed the signs to the flying club. She found the person she was looking for by accident – easily really, because Dympna Wythenshawe was the only idle aviator on the field, lounging by herself in a long row of faded deckchairs lined up in front of the pilots’ clubhouse. Maddie did not recognise the pilot. She looked nothing like either the glamorous mugshot from the papers or the unconscious, helmeted casualty she had been when Maddie left her that Sunday past. Dympna didn’t recognise Maddie either, but she called out jovially, ‘Are you hoping for a spin?’

  She spoke in a cultured accent of money and privilege. Rather like mine, without the Scottish burr. Probably not as privileged as mine, but more moneyed. Anyway it made Maddie instantly feel like a serving girl.

  ‘I’m looking for Dympna Wythenshawe,’ said Maddie. ‘I just wanted to see how she’s getting on after – after last week.’

  ‘She’s fine.’ The elegant creature smiled pleasantly.

  ‘I found her,’ Maddie blurted.

  ‘She’s right as rain,’ Dympna said, offering a languid, lily-white hand that had certainly never changed an oil filter (my lily-white hands have, I would like you to know, but only under strict supervision). ‘She’s right as rain. She’s me.’

  Maddie shook hands.

  ‘Take a pew,’ Dympna drawled (just imagine she’s me, raised in a castle and educated at a Swiss boarding school, only a lot taller and not snivelling all the time). She waved to the empty deckchairs. ‘There’s plenty of room.’

  She was dressed as though she were going on safari, and contrived to be glamorous about it too. She gave private instruction as well as joyrides. She was the only woman pilot at the aerodrome, certainly the only woman instructor.

  ‘When my darling Puss Moth’s mended, I’ll give you a ride,’ she offered Maddie, and Maddie, who is nothing if not calculating, asked if she could see the plane.

  They had taken it to bits and carted it home from Highdown Rise and now a team of boys and men in greasy overalls were working at putting it back together in one of a long line of high workshop sheds. The Puss Moth’s lovely engine (this is Maddie talking; she is a bit mad) ha
d only HALF THE POWER of Maddie’s motorbike. They had taken it apart and were cleaning the bits of turf out of it with wire brushes. It lay on a square of oilcloth in a thousand gleaming pieces. Maddie knew instantly she had come to the right place.

  ‘Oh, can I watch?’ she said. And Dympna, who never got her hands dirty, could nevertheless name every cylinder and valve that was lying on the floor, and let Maddie have a go painting the new fabric (over the fuselage she’d kicked in) with a mess of plastic goo that smelled like pickled onions. After an hour had gone by and Maddie was still there asking what all the parts of the plane were for and what they were called, the mechanics gave her a wire brush and let her help.

  Maddie said she always felt very safe, after that, flying in Dympna’s Puss Moth, because she had helped to put its engine back together herself.

  ‘When are you coming back?’ Dympna asked her over oily mugs of tea, four hours later.

  ‘It’s too far for me to visit very often,’ Maddie confessed sadly. ‘I live in Stockport. I help my granddad in his office in the week and he pays for my petrol, but I can’t come here every weekend.’

  ‘You are the luckiest girl alive,’ Dympna said. ‘As soon as the Puss Moth’s flying again I’m moving both my planes to the new airfield at Oakway. It’s right by Ladderal Mill, where your friend Beryl works. There’s a big gala at Oakway next Saturday, for the airfield’s official opening. I’ll come and collect you and you can watch the fun from the pilots’ stand. Beryl can come along too.’

  That’s two airfields I’ve located for you.

  I am getting a bit wobbly because no one has let me eat or drink since yesterday and I have been writing for nine hours. So now I am going to risk tossing this pencil across the table and have a good howl