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.
