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I meant to give her a Night Out, but when I picture this scenario, it makes me think of Mata Hari on a mission. Would Engel be happier as a spy, glamorous and deadly? I just can’t imagine her in any role other than Beastly Punctilious Official. Also I can’t say that the bleak aftermath of a Special Agent’s unsuccessful mission has anything to recommend it.
I was going to do prescriptions for William Wallace and Mary Queen of Scots, and Adolf Hitler too, but I can’t think of anything clever enough to make it worth the reprisals for the waste of paper.
Coffee would be at the top of my own prescription list. Then aspirin. I am running a fever. It won’t be tetanus, as they inoculated us, but may be septicaemia; I don’t think those pins were very clean. There was one I missed for a while after I pulled the others out, and the spot is very sore now (I am a little worried about some of the burns too, which chafe when my wrist hits the table as I write). Perhaps I will die quietly of blood poisoning and avoid the kerosene treatment.
There’s no efficient way to kill yourself with a dressmaker’s pin (I wouldn’t call contracting gangrene an efficient way to kill yourself) – I puzzled over it for a long time, seeing as they’d left the pins there, but it’s just not possible. Useful for picking locks though. I so loved the burglary lessons we got when we were training. Didn’t so much enjoy the bleak aftermath of my unsuccessful attempt to put them to use – very good at picking locks but not so good at getting out of the building. Our prison cells are only hotel bedrooms, but we are guarded like royalty. And also, there are dogs. After that episode with the pins, they had a good go at making sure I wouldn’t be able to walk if I did manage to get out – don’t know where you pick up the skills for disabling a person without actually breaking her legs, Nazi School of Assault and Battery? Like everything else it wasn’t permanent damage, nothing left this week but the bruises, and they check me carefully now for stray bits of metal. I got caught yesterday trying to hide a pen nib in my hair (I didn’t have a plan for it, but you never know).
Oh – often I forget I am not writing this for myself, and then it’s too late to scratch it out. The evil Engel always snatches everything away from me and raises an alarm if she sees me trying to retract anything. Yesterday I tried ripping off the bottom of the page and eating it, but she got to it first. (It was when I realised I had thoughtlessly mentioned the factory at Swinley. It is refreshing sometimes to fight with her. She has the advantage of freedom, but I am a lot more imaginative. Also I am willing to use my teeth which she is squeamish about.)
Where was I? Hauptsturmführer von Linden has taken away everything I wrote yesterday. It is your own fault, you cold and soulless Jerry bastard, if I repeat myself.
Miss Engel has reminded me. ‘The air-raid siren went.’ Clever girl, she has been paying attention.
She makes me give her every page to read now as soon as I have finished with it. We had fun doing the prescriptions. Will it get her in trouble if I mention that she burned a few herself to get rid of them this time? That’ll teach you to try to make a chum of me, On-Duty-Female-Guard Engel.
I have already got her in trouble, without knowing I was doing it, by mentioning her cigarettes. She is not allowed to smoke while she is on duty. Apparently Adolf Hitler has a vendetta against tobacco, finds it filthy and disgusting, and his military police and their assistants are not meant to smoke at work. I don’t think this is too strictly enforced except when the place is run by an obsessive martinet like Amadeus von Linden. Shame for him really, as a lit cigarette is such a convenient accessory if your job happens to be Extracting Information from Enemy Intelligence Agents.
As long as Engel’s crimes are all so minor, they won’t get rid of her because her combined talents would be quite difficult to replace (a bit like mine). But her offences do consistently fall under ‘insubordination’.
Anti-Aircraft Gunner
The air-raid siren went. Every head in the room looked up in dismay and exhaustion at the canteen’s pasteboard ceiling, as if they could see through it. Then everybody rocketed from their borrowed church hall wooden folding chairs to meet the next battle.
Maddie stood facing her new friend by the table they had just abandoned, people around her whirling into action. She felt as though she were at the eye of a tropical storm. The still point of the turning world.
‘Come on!’ Queenie cried, just like the Red Queen in Through the Looking Glass, and grabbed Maddie by the arm to pull her outside. ‘You go on duty at one, what have you got –’ she glanced at her watch ‘ – an hour? Quick nap in the shelter before they need you in the radio room – pity you haven’t brought your brolly along. Come on, I’ll go with you.’
The pilots were already racing for the Spitfires, and Maddie tried to fix her mind on the practical problem of how best to take off from the half-mended runway – taxiing would be the hardest, as you wouldn’t be able to see the holes in the surface past the high nose of the little fighter planes. She tried not to think about what it would be like running across the airfield to the radio room an hour from now, under fire.
But she did it. Because you do. It is incredible what you do, knowing you have to. A bit less than an hour later – to allow themselves some extra time for dodging bombs – the two girls were outside again, in the moonscape that was now RAF Maidsend.
Queenie steered Maddie at a trot, both of them bent nearly double, hugging the sides of buildings and zigzagging across the open spaces. They’d heard how during the retreat from France the low-flying planes of the Luftwaffe would strafe people on the ground with machine-gun fire, just for the hell of it, and right now there were two or three German fighters buzzing low over the runway like wasps with the sun on their wings, drilling holes in windows and parked aircraft.
‘Over here! Here!’ someone yelled desperately. ‘Hey, you two, come and help here!’
For a few seconds Maddie, doggedly coping with her own private hell of rational or irrational fear, did not even notice Queenie’s change of direction as she headed towards the cry for help. Then sense came back to Maddie for a minute and she realised that Queenie was dragging her to the nearest anti-aircraft gun emplacement.
Or what was left of it. Most of the protective concrete barrier and the sandbags surrounding it had been blown to bits, taking with it two of the Army gunners who had been valiantly trying to keep the runway fit for the Spitfire squadron who would have to land there after the battle. One of the dead gunners was easily younger than Maddie. A third man who was still standing looked like a butcher, without the apron, soaked from neck to thighs in blood. He turned wearily and said, ‘Thanks for the relief. I’m beat.’ Then he sat down on the ruined platform and closed his eyes. Maddie cowered next to him, her arms over her head, listening to the hideous rattle of the gunner sucking air into blood-filled lungs. Queenie slapped her.
‘Get up, girl!’ she ordered. ‘I won’t have this. I’m your superior officer giving orders now. Get up, Brodatt. If you’re scared do something. See if you can make this gun work. Get moving!’
‘The shell needs loading first,’ the gunner whispered, lifting a finger to point. ‘The Prime Minister don’t like girls firing guns.’
‘Bother the Prime Minister!’ exclaimed the superior officer. ‘Load the damned gun, Brodatt.’
Maddie, nothing if not mechanically minded and trained to react positively to orders from people in authority, clawed her way up the gun.
‘That slip of a lass’ll never shift that shell,’ croaked the gunner. ‘Weighs 30 pounds, that does.’
Maddie wasn’t listening. She was reckoning. After a minute’s rational thought and with strength that she later couldn’t explain, she loaded the shell.
Queenie worked frantically over the fallen gunner trying to plug the holes in his chest and stomach. Maddie did not watch. After some time Queenie took her by the shoulders and showed her how to aim.
‘You’ve got to anticipate – it’s like shooting birds, you have to fire a little ahead of where they’ll be next –’
‘Shoot a lot of birds, do you?’ Maddie gasped, anger and fear making her peevish about the other girl’s seemingly limitless talents.
‘I was born in the middle of a grouse moor on the opening day of the shooting season! I could fire a gun before I could read! But this poxy thing is just a wee bit bigger than a Diana air rifle, and I don’t know how it works, so we have to do it together. Like yesterday, all right?’ She gave a sudden gasp and asked anxiously, ‘That’s not one of our planes, is it?’
‘Can’t you tell?’
‘Not really.’
Maddie relented.
‘It’s a Messerschmitt 109.’
‘Well, clobber it! Point this way – now wait till he comes back, he doesn’t know this station’s still operational – just wait.’
Maddie waited. Queenie was right: doing something, focusing, took away the fear.
‘Now go!’
The blast momentarily blinded them both. They did not see what happened. Maddie swore, afterwards, that the plane did not go down in a ball of flame until it had made at least two more passes over the runway. But no one else ever claimed to have shot down that Me-109 (oh, how many aircraft I know after all!), and God knows the fighter pilots were a competitive lot of bean counters. So that kill – I expect the Luftwaffe also call it a kill when someone shoots down a plane, like deer – was credited to two off-duty WAAF officers working together at an unmanned gun station.
‘I don’t think our gun did that,’ Maddie told her friend, whey-faced, as the black, oily smoke rose from the turnip field where the plane had come down. ‘It must have been one of our lot, firing from the air. And if it was this gun, it wasn’t you.’
It was bad enough she suspected the reason Queenie was at her side now was because she’d had to give up on the lad whose gun they’d taken over. Bad enough. But there had also been a pilot in that ball of flame, a living young man with not much more training than Maddie herself.
‘Stay here,’ Queenie choked. ‘Can you load another shell? I’ll find someone who knows what they’re doing to take over – you’ll be needed in the Tower now –’
Queenie paused a moment.
‘Which way to the north-east air-raid shelter from here?’ she asked anxiously. ‘I get so muddled in the smoke.’
Maddie pointed. ‘Straight line across the grass. Easy peasy if you’re brave enough – like finding Neverland, “Second to the right, and then straight on till morning.”’
‘What about you? Brave enough?’
‘I’ll be all right. Now I’ve got something to do –’
They both ducked instinctively as something exploded at the other end of the runway. Queenie squeezed Maddie round the waist and gave her a quick peck on the cheek. ‘“Kiss me, Hardy!” Weren’t those Nelson’s last words at the Battle of Trafalgar? Don’t cry. We’re still alive and we make a sensational team.’
Then she hitched up her hair to its two-inch above the collar regulation point, swabbed her own tears and the grease and the concrete dust and the gunner’s blood from her cheeks with the back of her hand, and she was off running again, like the Red Queen.
It’s like being in love, discovering your best friend.
‘Get your mac on,’ Maddie said, ‘I’m going to teach you to navigate.’
Queenie burst out laughing. ‘Impossible!’
‘Not impossible! There’s a couple of pilots here who scrapped their way out of Poland after it was invaded. They got here with no maps, no food, no language other than Polish. They’ll tell you all about it if you let them – bit tricky making sense of their English. Anyway if a couple of escaped prisoners can find their way across Europe and become RAF pilots, you can –’
‘You talk to the pilots?’ Queenie interrupted with interest.
‘There are other things you can do besides dance with them.’
‘Yes, but talking! How unimaginative.’
‘Some of them won’t dance, you know, so you have to talk. That vicar’s boy won’t dance. Hard to get him to talk either – but they all like jawing about maps. Or lack of maps. Come on, you don’t need a map. We’ve got the whole day. As long as we don’t go anywhere more than five miles away, so I can get back sharpish if the weather clears. But look at it –’ Maddie waved at the window. It was pouring, rain coming down in sheets, a gale blowing.
‘Just like home,’ Queenie said happily. ‘You don’t get proper Scotch Mist in Switzerland.’
Maddie snorted. Queenie was devoted to careless name-dropping, scattering the details of her privileged upbringing without the faintest hint of modesty or embarrassment (though after a while Maddie began to realise she only did it with people she liked or people she detested – those who didn’t mind and those she didn’t care about – anyone in between, or who might have been offended, she was more cautious with).
‘I’ve got bicycles,’ Maddie said. ‘A couple of the mechanics let me borrow them. Rain doesn’t stop those lads working.’
‘Where are we going?’
‘The Green Man. Pub at the foot of the cliffs on St Catherine’s Bay, last chance before it shuts down next week. The proprietor’s fed up being fired at. Not by the Germans, mind you, it’s our own lads drilling the pub sign out there on the edge of the shingle, last thing before they head home after a battle – they do it for luck!’
‘Bet they do it to get rid of unused ammunition.’
‘Well, it’s a landmark, and you’re the navigator. Find the coast and go south, easy peasy! You can use my compass. If you can’t find it I’m afraid it’ll be nowt but cold beans straight from the tin for your dinner –’
‘That’s not fair! I’m back on shift at eleven tonight!’
Maddie rolled her eyes. ‘Bloomin’ ’eck, that leaves us only about fifteen hours for a ten-mile pushbike ride! But it’ll give me a chance to finish telling you my fears.’ Maddie had her man’s greatcoat on and was tying it up round her ankles so it wouldn’t catch in the bicycle chain.
‘I hope you’ve got a tin-opener,’ Queenie said ominously, struggling into her own greatcoat, ‘and a spoon.’
It was astonishing, after ten minutes’ pedalling away from RAF Maidsend, how peaceful the drenched Kent countryside was. It was true that every now and then you passed a concrete gun emplacement or watchtower, but mostly you were just travelling through rolling, chalky fields, green with turnips and potatoes and mile upon mile of orchards.
‘You might have brought your brolly,’ Queenie said.
‘I’m saving it for the next air raid.’
They came to a crossroads. There were no road signs, not one; they’d all been taken down or blacked over to confuse the enemy in the event Operation Sea Lion was successful and the German army came swarming inland. ‘I’ve no idea where we are,’ Queenie wailed. The mechanic’s bike was so big for her that she couldn’t sit down on it; she had to stand on the pedals. She seemed in perpetual danger of falling off, or of being devoured by her enormous overcoat. She had the outraged, distraught look of a wet cat.
‘Use the compass. Keep going east till you find the sea. Pretend,’ Maddie told her, inspired – ‘Pretend you’re a German spy. You’ve been dropped here by parachute. You’ve got to find your contact, who’s at this legendary smugglers’ pub by the sea, and if anyone catches you –’
Under her dripping plastic rain hat, the kind you get in a tiny cardboard box with a flower on it for a halfpenny, Queenie gave Maddie a strange look. It had challenge in it, and defiance, and excitement. But also enlightenment. Queenie leaned forward over the handlebars of her bicycle and was off, pedalling like fury.
At the crest of a low rise she bounded off her bike in one almighty leap like a roe deer away up the glens, and was halfway up a tree before Maddie realised what she was doing.
‘Get down, you daft idiot! You’ll be soaked! You’re in uniform!’
‘Von hier aus kann ich das Meer sehen,’ said Queenie, which is ‘I can see the sea from here’ in German. (Oh – silly me. Of course it is.)
‘Shut up! You lunatic!’ Maddie scolded furiously. ‘What are you doing?’
‘Ich bin eine Agentin der Nazis.’ Queenie pointed. ‘Zum Meer geht es da lang.’
‘You’ll get us both shot!’
Queenie considered. She looked at the teeming sky, looked at the endless dripping apple orchard and looked at the empty road. Then she shrugged and said in English, ‘Don’t think so.’
‘“Careless talk costs lives,”’ Maddie quoted.
Queenie laughed so hard she slid gracelessly and painfully from one branch to a lower branch, and tore her coat climbing down. ‘Now just you be quiet, Maddie Brodatt. You told me to be a Nazi spy and I’m being one. I won’t let you get shot.’
(I really would like to catapult myself back there in time and kick my own teeth in.)
The outbound route to St Catherine’s Bay was, shall we say, creative. It involved Queenie getting off her bicycle at every single crossroads – each one wet, windy and featureless – and climbing a wall or gate or tree to get her bearings. Then there was always a palaver with the greatcoat as she got going again, and near misses with puddles.
‘You know what I’m scared of ?’ Maddie yelled at the top of her voice, rain and east wind beating in her face as she pedalled energetically to keep up with the small wireless operator. ‘Cold tinned beans! It’s quarter to two. The pub’ll be shut by the time we get there.’
‘You said it doesn’t shut till next week.’
‘For the afternoon, you gormless halfwit! They stop serving till evening!’
‘I think that’s frightfully unfair of you, blaming it on me,’ Queenie said. ‘It’s your game. I’m just playing along.’
‘Another thing I’m scared of,’ Maddie said.
‘That doesn’t count. Neither do the tinned beans. What are you most afraid of – what’s your number one fear?’
‘Court martial,’ answered Maddie briefly.
Queenie, uncharacteristically, was silent. And stayed silent for some time, even while she did another of her tree-climbing surveys of the surrounding area. Finally she asked, ‘Why?’
It had been a good long while since Maddie had given her answer, but Queenie did not need to remind her what the subject had been.
‘I keep doing things. I make decisions without thinking. Crikey, firing a ruddy anti-aircraft gun – no authorisation whatsoever, and Messerschmitt 109s circling overhead!’
‘The Messerschmitt 109s circling overhead were the reason you were firing it,’ Queenie pointed out. ‘I authorised you. I’m a Flight Officer.’
‘You’re not my Flight Officer and you don’t have any gunnery authority.’
‘What else?’ Queenie asked.
‘Oh – things like guiding in the German pilot the other day. I’ve done something like that before, only in English.’ She told Queenie about talking down the lads in the Wellington, the first time. ‘No one authorised that either. I didn’t get in trouble, but I should have. So stupid. Why did I do it?’
‘Charity?’
‘I could have killed them though.’
‘You have to take risks like that. There’s a war on. They could have bought it and gone down in flames themselves, without your help. But with your help they made it down safely.’
Queenie paused. Then she asked, ‘Why are you so damn good at it?’
‘At what?’
‘Air navigation.’
‘I’m a pilot,’ Maddie said – you know, she was so matter-of-fact, she wasn’t proud, she wasn’t defensive – just, I’m a pilot.
Queenie was outraged.
‘You said you didn’t have any skills, you fibber!’
‘I haven’t. I’m only a civil pilot. I haven’t flown for a year. I haven’t got an instructor’s rating. I’ve a good many hours, probably more than most of our lads in the Spitfires; I’ve even flown at night. But I’m not using it. When they expand the Air Transport Auxiliary, I’m going to try to join – if the WAAF’ll let me go. I’ll have to do a course. There’s no flight training on for women at the minute.’
Queenie apparently had to turn all this over in her head on her own for a while as she considered the implications of it: Maddie Brodatt, with her unrefined South Manchester accent and her no-nonsense bike mechanic’s approach to problems, was a pilot – with more practical experience than most of the young RAF Maidsend Squadron who were daily and sleeplessly hurling themselves towards flame and death against the Luftwaffe.
‘You’re dead quiet,’ Maddie said.
‘Ich habe einen Platten,’ Queenie announced.
‘Speak English, you lunatic!’
Queenie stopped her bike and climbed off. ‘I have a puncture. My tyre’s flat.’
Maddie sighed heavily. She propped her own bicycle against the verge and squatted in a puddle to look. Queenie’s front tyre was nearly completely flat. The puncture must have happened only seconds before – Maddie could still hear the air hissing out of the inner tube.
‘We’d better go back,’ she said. ‘If we go on we’ll have too far to walk. I don’t have a repair kit.’
‘O faithless one,’ Queenie said, pointing to the entrance to a farm lane about twenty yards further on. ‘This is my plan to scrounge a meal before I meet my contact.’ She sniffed knowingly, nose raised into the wind. ‘A provincial farmhouse lies less than a hundred yards away, and I smell meat stew and fruit pie –’ She took her wounded bicycle by the handlebars and set off up the lane at a determined pace. Land Army girls were hoeing among the cabbages in the adjoining field – no time off for them in the rain either. They had sacks tied round their legs with string and ground sheets with holes in the middle for rain capes. Maddie and the disguised Nazi spy were well-equipped by comparison in their RAF men’s overcoats.
A chorus of vicious dogs began to bark as they approached. Maddie looked round anxiously.
‘Don’t worry, that’s just noise. They’ll be tied up or they’d bother the Land Girls. Is the sign up?’
‘What sign?’
‘A jar of rowan berries in the window – if there’s no rowan in the window I won’t be welcome.’
Maddie burst out laughing.
‘You are daft!’
‘Is there?’
Maddie was taller than her companion. She stood on tiptoe to see over the barnyard wall, and her mouth dropped open.
‘There is,’ she said, and turned to gape at Queenie. ‘How –?’
Queenie leaned her bicycle against the wall, looking very smug. ‘You can see the trees over the garden wall. They’ve just been trimmed. It’s all very tidy and pretty in a wifely way, but she’ll have dug up her geraniums to plant tatties for the War Effort. So if she has something nice to decorate her kitchen with, like fresh-cut rowan berries, she’s likely to do it, and –’
Queenie settled her hair into shape beneath the plastic rain bonnet. ‘And she’s the sort of person who will feed us.’
She let herself in boldly at the kitchen door of the strange farm.
‘Ah’ve nae wish tae disturb ye, Missus –’ Her well-bred, educated accent suddenly developed an irresistible Scottish burr. ‘We’ve come frae RAF Maidsend and Ah’ve had this wee spot o’ bother wi’ me bike. Ah wondered –’
‘Oh, no trouble at all, love!’ the farmer’s wife said. ‘I’ve a couple of Land Girls boarding with me, and I’m sure we’ve got a puncture repair kit among us. Mavis and Grace’ll be in the fields just now, but if you wait a moment I’ll check the shed – Oh, and for goodness sake come in and warm yourselves first!’
Queenie produced, as if by magic, a tin of 25 Player’s from deep in the pockets of her greatcoat. Maddie realised suddenly that this infinite supply of cigarettes was carefully hoarded – realised that she’d scarcely ever seen Queenie smoking, but that she used cigarettes as gifts or as payment in kind in place of cash – for tips and poker chips and, now, bicycle patches and lunch.