Elizabeth Wein - Code Name Verity

‘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.