I had managed to drag myself and my chair over to the door and prepared an ambush that sent two guards sailing head over heels as they tripped on me when they came in. Von Linden really should know me well enough by now to realise that I am not going to face my execution without a fight. Or with anything remotely resembling dignity.
When they had got me resurrected and pulled up to the table again, von Linden came in and laid a single white pill in front of me. Like Alice I was suspicious. I still thought I was about to be executed, you see.
‘Cyanide?’ I asked tearfully. It would be such a humane way to go.
But it was not a suicide tablet, it turns out. It was an aspirin.
Like Engel, he does pay attention.
He has given me another week. But he has doubled my workload. We made a deal. Another one. Truly I thought I couldn’t possibly have anything left of my soul to sell to him, but we have managed to strike another bargain. He has got a tame American radio announcer who does Nazi propaganda in English aimed at the Yanks – she works from Paris for Berlin’s broadcasting service, and she has been badgering the Ormaie Gestapo for an interview. She wants to give her American battleship audiences a sugarcoated, inside perspective on Occupied France, how well prisoners are treated, how stupid and dangerous it is that the Allies force innocent girls like me to do dirty work like mine, blah blah blah. Despite her shining, legitimate, Third Reich radio credentials the Ormaie Gestapo are reluctant to respond, but von Linden believes he can use me to make a good impression. ‘I would not be here if my own government were not so ruthlessly inhumane,’ I will tell her for him. ‘By contrast see how humanely the Germans deal with captured agents, see how I am doing translation work, neutrally occupying myself while I await trial.’ (A joke – they will not give me a trial.)
(After my second escape attempt, while they were waiting for von Linden to turn up and pronounce punishment, a couple of his stupid subordinates casually blabbed a great many administrative secrets in front of me, not realising I understand German. So I know a lot more about their plans for me than I’m supposed to know. I fall under a sickening policy called Nacht und Nebel, Night and Fog, which allows them to do whatever the hell they feel like to people suspected to be ‘endangering security’, and then make them disappear – really disappear. They don’t execute them here, they ship them off without leaving a trace, into the ‘night and fog’. Oh God – I am a Night and Fog prisoner. It is so secret they don’t even write it down – just use the initials NN. If this manuscript survives me they will probably black out everything I’ve just written. It is not really Nacht und Nebel policy to grant interviews for radio broadcasts, but these Gestapo are opportunists if nothing else. They can always chop me into bits afterwards and bury the scraps in the cellar.)
If I cooperate with the propagandist I can have more time. If I tell the bleak truth – then no. And they’ll probably make the American broadcaster disappear too, and I’ll have that on my conscience.
The aspirin and kerosene are part of Operation Cinderella, a programme designed to transform me from a feverish, nit-infested, mentally unstable prison rat back into a detained Flight Officer of cool nerve and confidence, suitable for presentation to a radio interviewer. To add credibility to our story I have been given a sort of translation job copying Hauptsturmführer von Linden’s own notes from the past year here, with names (when he knows them) and dates and, ugh, some methods used, in addition to information extracted. Oh, mein Hauptsturmführer, you are an evil Jerry bastard. A copy is to be made in German for his C.O. (he has a Commanding Officer!) and another made in French for some other official purpose. I am doing the French one. Fräulein Engel is doing the German (she is back today). We are working together and using up all my ill-gotten recipe cards. We are both cross about that.
The job is both horrific and unbelievably tedious. And so deviously instructional it makes me want to put the man’s eyes out with my pencil. I am made to see into a small methodical corner of von Linden’s mind, not anything personal, but how he works. And also that he is good at it – unless of course it is all fabricated to intimidate me. I don’t actually think he is imaginative enough to do that – at least, not in the way I use my imagination, not to pretend anything, not to concoct a fake collection of half a dozen notebooks bound in calfskin and filled with tragic miniature portraits of a hundred and fifty doomed spies and Resistance fighters.
But he is creative in his own scientific way – a technician, an engineer, an analyst. (I’d love to know what his civilian credentials are.) His persuasive techniques are tailored to the individual as he gains understanding into the character of each. Those three weeks I spent starving in the dark, waiting for something to happen – he must have been watching me like a hawk, tallying my silences, my tantrums, my numerous half-successful attempts to clamber out of the transom window, the heating duct, the air vent, to pick the lock, garrotte and/or emasculate various guards, etc. Observing how I cower and weep and plead whenever the screaming starts in the next room. Observing how I frantically try to put my hair up whenever someone opens the door and sees me (not everyone is questioned in their dreadful undergarments – it is a special torment reserved for the modest and the vain. I am one of the latter).
It is comforting to discover that I am not, after all, the only Judas to have been interned behind these desecrated hôtel walls. I suppose von Linden would be sacked if his success rate were that dismal. And now I suspect, as well, that I am exposed to the stubborn ones on purpose to demoralise me, perhaps with the dual effect of humiliating them at their most vulnerable moments with an embarrassing and appreciative audience.
I am still quite presentable. They have always gone easy on my hands and face, so when I’m fully dressed, you’d never look at me and think I’d recently been skewered and barbecued – they’ve packed their partially dismantled wireless set into a smooth and pleasing case. Perhaps it has been v.L.’s intention all along to use me in his little propaganda exercise. And of course – I am willing to play. How did he know? How did he know from the start, even before I told him? That I am always willing to play, addicted to the Great Game?
Oh, mein Hauptsturmführer, you evil Jerry bastard, I am grateful for the eiderdown they have given me to replace the verminous blanket. Even if it is just part of the temporary scheme to rehabilitate me, it is bliss. Half the stuffing has come out and it smells like a root cellar full of damp, but still, an eiderdown – a silk eiderdown! It is embroidered ‘Cd B’ so it must be spoiling stock from this building’s former life as the Château de Bordeaux. I do sometimes wonder what happened to the hotel’s furnishings. Someone must have gone to a good deal of effort to empty all the guestrooms of their wardrobes and beds and vanity tables and to bolt bars across the window shutters. What did they do with everything – carpets, curtains, lamps, light bulbs? Certainly my little room has no Gallic charm to recommend it apart from its rather pretty parquet floor, which I can’t see most of the time (as with all the prisoners’ rooms my window has been boarded shut), and which is very cold and hard to sleep on.
I had better get to work – though I have bought my extra week, I now have only half as much time each day for writing. And my day is longer too.
I am getting tired.
I know, I know. Special Ops Exec. Write –
Ferry Pilot
Maddie went back to Oakway. There was now an Air Transport Auxiliary ferry pool there, and Oakway had also become the biggest parachute training centre in Britain. As an ATA pilot Maddie was demoted in rank and a civilian again, but she was able to live at home, and she was given a petrol allowance for her bike so she could get to the airfield, and she could trade in a day’s completed ferry chit for a two-ounce bar of Cadbury’s milk chocolate.
Maddie was in her element at last. No matter that the sky had changed – it was an obstacle course of balloon cables and restrictions and military aircraft and, often, dirty weather. Maddie was in her element, and her element was air.
They throw you through some aerobatics that you’ll never use, watch you take off and land something and, hey presto, you’re qualified to fly Class 3 aircraft (light twin engines) and all the Class 2s (heavy single engines) without ever having seen most of them. Maddie said they are supposed to do 30 long-distance training flights up and down the country to imprint it on their brains until they can fly without looking at a map, but she got signed off at 12 because it was taking too long to wait for decent weather and they wanted her working. There is an ATA pilot killed every week. They are not shot down by enemy fire. They fly without radio or navigation aids into weather that the bombers and fighters call ‘unflyable’.
So Maddie, first day on the job, walks into the hut that the Oakway ATA pilots laughingly call their ‘Mess Hall’.
‘There’s a Lysander chalked up here with your name on it,’ says her new Operations officer, pointing to the blackboard with its list of aircraft to be moved.
‘Has it really?’
Everyone laughs at her. But not meanly.
‘Never flown one, have you,’ says the Dutchman, a former KLM pilot who knows the north of England almost as well as Maddie does, having made regular passenger landings at Oakway from the time it opened.
‘Well,’ says Ops, ‘Tom and Dick are taking the Whitleys over to Newcastle. And Harry is taking the Hurricane. That leaves the taxi Anson and the Lysander for the ladies. And Jane’s got the Anson.’
‘Where’s the Lysander going?’
‘Elmtree, for repair. Faulty tailplane handwheel. It’s flyable, but you have to hold the control column right forward.’
‘I’ll do it,’ says Maddie.
Not a Safe Job
They gave her a very thorough navigation briefing beforehand, as the aircraft’s defect meant she couldn’t expect to fly hands-free. She wouldn’t be able to juggle maps en route. She sat studying the pilot’s notes for an hour (the detailed notes they give the operational pilots who’ll only ever fly one type of aircraft), then panicked about losing the weather. Now or never.
The ground crew was aghast at the idea of a girl flying the broken Lysander.
‘She won’t be strong enough. With the tail set for take-off yon slip of a lass won’t be able to hold the stick hard for’ard enough for landing. Don’t know if anyone could.’
‘Someone landed it here,’ Maddie pointed out. She’d already been given the chit for the job and wanted to leave while she could still see the Pennines. ‘Look, I’ll just set it neutral by hand before I get in. Easy peasy –’
– And she gently pushed the tail into place, stood back and dusted her hands on her slacks (navy, with an Air Force blue shirt and navy tunic and cap).
The mechanics were still frowning, but they’d stopped shaking their heads.
‘It’ll be a pig to fly,’ Maddie said. ‘I’ll just keep the climb-out and landing nice and long and shallow. Come in fast, 85 knots, and the automatic flaps’ll stay up. It’s not too windy. Should be fine.’