Code Name Verity: Part 2

It is true that I went to a Church of England grammar school and our diet is not in the least bit kosher even in the holidays and Grandad is the only one of us who ever goes to synagogue.

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 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.

I 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.

“...They’ll probably send me to prison anyway for hoodwinking my C.O., nicking an RAF plane and dumping it in France — ”

“I know what they’ll say. Silly girl, no brains, too soft, can’t trust a woman to do a man’s work. They only let us fly operational aircraft when they get desperate. And they’re always harder on us when we botch something.”

Two loose floorboards and a niche beneath the windowsill and a hole in the plaster are all crammed with his Small Boy Stuff — he hasn’t touched any of it for years, all of it dust-covered, but I’m sure he knows it’s there.

His friend who owns the motorcar set off at top speed, full out and going like the clappers, no lights as usual except the waning gibbous moon on the rise.

We left all the bikes and the car hidden — it is the same Citroen Rosalie, I don’t know how the man who owns it avoids being found out or at least having his car impounded, and I think he is too old for this kind of job anyway.

Then the Nazi search party arrived and we spent an hour lying in the mud along the riverbank, hiding in the bulrushes like Moses, waiting for them to leave.

The men who’d been chained had to stay with us, because they had to get rid of the fetters on their ankles before they could go anywhere.

A couple of Lancasters were still circling overhead, daring the searchlights, and the night was noisy with halfhearted flak — a lot of the antiaircraft guns are manned by local lads, conscripted to beef up the Occupation army, and their hearts aren’t really in it when they fire at Allied planes.

My Jamaican rear gunner and I took a tortuous route over a series of garden walls to avoid the checkpoint on the road.

So I got marched down to the debriefing room under guard, and as I walked in I was suddenly shamefully aware of what a ragamuffin I am always — like a Glaswegian evacuee! — still wearing the French photographer’s wife’s climbing trousers and Etienne Thibaut’s threadbare jacket and Jamie’s boots, the same clothes I’ve been wearing for the past week and a good deal of the past two months and, by the way, the same clothes that I was wearing when I blew the Ormaie city center to blazes.

He interrupted plaintively, “Must it be the murder first? Go back a bit.”