Must get in the habit of calling her Verity. Everyone else does. Her circuit is called Damask, after their most venerable member, who is 83 years old and a rose-grower – they generally label circuits by some trade. I haven’t been told the rose-grower’s name. No one goes by, or even knows, real names. I wouldn’t want to give Julie’s name away by accident.
Her assignment is so dead secret that her first contact wasn’t told she and her goods had arrived until she’d told him herself, so although he was aware there had been a Lysander crash outside Ormaie, he hadn’t known she’d survived until he met her – and when she spoke to him, neither one of them knew that the explosives landed safely as well. But word is spreading through the circuit that both Julie Verity and the explosives are here. Next stop the town hall. She is supposed to get access to the city archives and look up the original architect’s drawings for the old hotel building that the Ormaie Gestapo use as their headquarters. She won’t be able to do that till we sort out her ID though.
We are puzzling over how to do it. Mitraillette is not allowed to speak directly to Julie’s Verity’s contact, so she has to find someone else to take the message. They keep their tasks and names very carefully separated. And we don’t want to hand over Verity’s ‘Katharina Habicht’ papers to anyone but Verity, i.e. ‘Katharina’ herself. Mitraillette is going to try to arrange for V to pick them up from one of the Resistance ‘cachettes’, their secret letterboxes. That means we have to pass word along somehow.
I say ‘we’ as though I were going to do something dramatic to help, other than sit here blowing on my fingers to keep them warm and hoping no one finds me!
The operation is to go ahead as planned – they’ve got the equipment, they’ve got Verity, the contacts are all in place. With a little care and planning it’ll be the Ormaie Gestapo HQ that goes up like Vesuvius, and not this barn. If only Käthe Habicht weren’t operating ‘behind enemy lines’, as it were, with Kittyhawk’s British identity papers!
I am beginning to think it was one of her less clever ideas to call herself Kitty Hawk in German. Terribly sweet, but not very practical. Though to be fair she wasn’t expecting me to come along.
Have taken Paul’s revolver apart and put it back together 7 times. It is not as interesting as a radial engine.
Another Lysander has come down.
Unbelievable but true. This one made it past the antiaircraft guns and came in just as planned, easy peasy, about 70 miles north of here, on Mon. 18 Oct. Unfortunately the landing field had become a sea of mud because there has been nothing but rain, rain, rain for the past week, all over France I think. The reception committee at the field up there spent five hours trying to haul the plane out of the mud – they hitched a pair of bulls to it, as it was too muddy even to drive a tractor on to the field, but finally had to give up as it was about to get light. So they have destroyed another aircraft and there is another Special Duties pilot stuck here.
I say another, but of course I am not really Special Duties. There’s some small comfort in not being the only one – mean and piggish of me, I know, but I can’t help it.
There had been talk of trying to get me out of here on that plane. They were going to try to squeeze me in with the two people I was supposed to have airlifted back to England in the first place – I’d have had to sit on the floor, but SOE and ATA are rather frantic about me at home and want me out of here. It hasn’t happened. Any number of things need to be arranged, then rearranged, then go wrong at the last minute. Every message to London has to be laboriously encoded and delivered on a bicycle to a hidden wireless set ten miles from here. The message perhaps doesn’t get sent straight away because someone has disturbed the leaf in the keyhole or the eyelash folded in the note left for the courier, and then they have to wait three days to make sure they are not being watched. The rain has been dreadful, with cloud at 1000 feet and visibility next to nothing in the river valleys where the mist hangs – no one could land here anyway. No field closer than Tours, 50 miles away, to replace the one I ruined.
They call a ruined field ‘brûlé’, burnt. Which mine is.
They will have to send a Hudson to collect us all, as there just isn’t the room in a Lysander. And that will mean waiting for the mud to dry out.
Ugh! I have never been so damp and miserable for such a long time – it is like living in a tent, no light, no heat. They pile the goosefeather quilts and sheepskin in with me, but the rain is constant – grey, heavy, autumnal rain that stops you doing anything, even if you weren’t trapped in a crawl space under the eaves. I have been down a few times – they try to give me a meal in the farmhouse each day to warm me up and break the monotony. Haven’t written anything here for a week, as my fingers are starting to get chilblained – so dead cold always. I need those mittens I made out of the pattern book Gran gave me, with the flaps that flip back so you can use your fingers. Essentials for the Forces that book was called. If I’d known how essential those mittens would be now I’d never have taken them out of my flight bag – except to wear them. Not like the flipping gas mask.
I wish I was a writer – I wish I had the words to describe the rich mixture of fear and boredom that I have lived with for the past ten days, and which putters on indefinitely ahead of me. It must be a little like being in prison. Waiting to be sentenced – not waiting for execution, as I’m not without hope. But the possibility that it will end in death is there. And real.
In the mean time my days are duller than a lifetime as a mill girl endlessly loading shuttles – nothing to do but suck on my cold fingers, like Jamie in the North Sea, and worry. I am not used to it. I am always doing, always at work on something. I don’t know how to occupy my mind without my whole self being busy. The other girls at Maidsend all lay snoring or knitting or doing their nails when the rain was tipping it down in such grotty visibility no one could fly. Knitting was never enough, got so bored with it, can’t concentrate on anything bigger than socks or gloves. I always ended up scrounging bicycles to go exploring.
Remember the Bicycle Adventure when I told Julie all my fears – they seem so trivial now. The quick, sudden terror of exploding bombs is not the same as the never-ending, bone-sapping fear of discovery and capture. It never goes away. There isn’t ever any relief, never the possibility of an ‘All Clear’ siren. You always feel a little bit sick inside, knowing the worst might happen at any moment.
I said I was afraid of cold. It’s true cold is uncomfortable, but … not really something to be afraid of, is it? What are ten things I am afraid of now?
1) FIRE.
Not cold or dark. There is still a great pile of Explosive 808 hidden under the hay bales on the floor of this barn. The smell is overwhelming sometimes. It’s like marzipan. Just can’t forget it’s there. If a German sentry poked his nose in here I don’t know how he’d not notice it.
It makes me dream I’m eternally rolling icing for fruit cakes, believe it or not.
2) Bombs dropping on my gran and granddad. That hasn’t changed.
3) Bombs dropping on Jamie. In fact I worry about Jamie a good deal more now that I’ve experienced a little of what he’s up against.
4) New to this list: the Nazi concentration camps. Don’t know any of their names, don’t know where they are – I suppose I haven’t been paying attention. They were never very real. Granddad roaring about ominous stories in the Guardian didn’t make them real. But knowing I may very likely end up in one is more frightening than any news story could ever be. If they catch me and they do not shoot me straight away, they will slap a yellow star on me and ship me out to one of these dreadful places and no one will ever know what happened to me.
5) COURT MARTIAL.
I’m trying to remember what else I told Julie I was afraid of. Most of those ‘fears’ we talked about that first day, in the canteen, were just so stupid. Getting old! It embarrasses me to think about it. The things I told her on our bicycle adventure were better. Dogs. Hah – that reminds me.
6) Paul. I had to chase him out of here at gunpoint – it was of course his own gun, the one he gave me and taught me to use. Perhaps I was overly dramatic to pull the gun on him. But he had actually come up into my loft, on his own in broad daylight, without any of the family knowing he was here, which is dead alarming of itself. They are so careful about keeping track of who comes and goes, and they need to trust him. I suppose all he wanted was a kiss and a cuddle. He backed off looking deeply injured and left me feeling guilty and dirty and prudish all at once.
It frightened me terribly, more afterwards when I thought about it than at the time. If he – or anyone – tried to force himself on me, I couldn’t run away. I couldn’t call for help. I’d have to endure it without a fight, and in silence, or risk giving myself up to the Nazis.
I lay awake in a funk nearly all night with Paul’s dratted gun in my hand, my ear pressed to the trapdoor listening, expecting him to come back and try again under cover of darkness. As if he hasn’t got better things to do under cover of darkness! Finally I fell asleep and dreamed there was a German soldier battering at the trapdoor. As he broke through I shot him in the face. Woke up gasping in horror – then fell asleep and had the same dream again and again, at least three times in a row. Every single time I thought, That was a dream, earlier, but THIS TIME it’s real.
When Mitraillette turned up to bring me my breakfast ration of bread and onions and their dreadful pretend coffee, I blurted out the whole sordid story. In English of course. I finished by bursting into tears. She was sympathetic but confused, not sure how much she understood and don’t think there’s anything she can do about it anyway.
‘In English of course’ leads me to Fear Number 7 – being English. I think I told Julie I was afraid of getting my uniform wrong and people laughing at my accent, and I suppose in a sense I am still worried about these things – with better reason. My clothes! Mitraillette’s don’t fit me in the waist and hips, have to wear a frock belonging to her mum – outmoded and severe, a thing no self-respecting girl of my generation would be caught dead in. Mitraillette’s pullover does fit and I have a many-times patched-over wool jacket that once belonged to her brother, but the combination of these warm outer garments and the dowdy frock looks dead weird. The outfit is completed with wooden clogs – just like Gran’s gardener wears at home. There is no hope of better equipping me unless we use Julie’s clothing coupons. I don’t mind not being stylish, but I am obviously wearing an odd collection of cast-offs and if I am seen, people will wonder.
And my ‘accent’! Well.
Mitraillette says she can tell by the WAY I WALK that I am not from Ormaie. If I walked to the corner shop dressed in the height of fashion and didn’t breathe a word to anyone, I would still betray myself and everyone around me. I am so afraid of letting them down.