‘What are they for?’ Maddie asked.
‘Some of our people need fast and efficient private transport – travel when and as needed, there and back in one night, no messing about with petrol rationing or limited speed on country lanes or awkward railway schedules. No risk of being recognised on a station platform or through the window of a motor car at traffic lights. Does that make sense?’
Maddie nodded.
‘You’re a consistent pilot, a superb navigator, sharp as a tack and exceptionally discreet. There are plenty of men and several women better qualified than you, but none, I think, as appropriately suited for this particular taxi service. You remembered my name. You’re well aware of our work here and you keep quiet about it, except when you send us a recruit. If you take the assignments they’ll be given in the most straightforward manner through your ATA ferry pool. S chits, secret, with a report required. You won’t be told anything about the men and women you’ll be taxiing. You’ll already know most of the airfields.’
He is really very hard to resist. Or perhaps Maddie just couldn’t ever pass up a flying opportunity.
‘I’ll do it,’ she said decisively. ‘I’ll do it.’
‘Tell your assistant pilot you left your clothing ration coupons here on your last flight, and we’ve kept them for you –’
He thumbed through a file folder, held something up at arm’s length, then put it back with a sigh and pushed his heavy spectacles back up his nose. ‘Getting old,’ he apologised. ‘The middle distance is going now too! Here we are.’
He pored over the pages again and produced Maddie’s clothing ration coupons. Her stomach turned over. She never found out how he got them.
He handed them to her. ‘Explain to your colleague you were called in here today so we could return these and give you a lecture about taking greater care with your personal papers.’
‘Well, I jolly well will be more careful with them after this,’ she told him fiercely.
—
God, what a mess, I have to stop here until I stop crying or it will all be illegibly smeared
sorry sorry sorry
Ormaie 22.XI.43 JB-S
ATA S Chits (Secret)
At first it was much as he’d said – very little in Maddie’s life changed. For six weeks she heard nothing. Then twice in a week there were chits marked ‘S’ and bearing her own special code name – just an alert to let her know she was ‘operational’, as it were. But the only way the job really differed from a normal taxi run was that the chaps she picked up weren’t obviously pilots.
After that there were special flights that came regularly, but not frequently. Every six weeks or so. They were all prosaically dull. For taxi work Maddie was put back to flying small training and ex-civil aircraft, open cockpit Tiger Moths and a Puss Moth or two. Apart from the occasional night landing, there wasn’t much to the actual flying that Maddie found challenging.
There was one Lysander flight that was memorable because her passenger travelled with two guards. There is an armoured bulkhead that separates the Lysander pilot from her passengers – you can send her notes or coffee or kisses through an opening the size of a page, which she is able to shut against you if she wants, so that you cannot shoot her. Not that shooting your pilot would get you anywhere fast, except down, in a Lysander, as you would not be able to take over the controls.
Maddie was safely separated from her would-be assassin, if he was an assassin. She was never afterwards sure whether that passenger had travelled as a prisoner under guard or a liability under protection. At any rate they must have been very crowded with three grown men in the back of the Lysander.
Then at last there was me.
Maddie was interrupted in the middle of a bedtime cocoa, very cosy, at home with her gran and granddad in their house in Stockport – Maddie’s Operations officer rang and asked her to make a flight to another airfield that night, collect someone and deliver that someone elsewhere, all to be done ASAP. She’d be told where to go when she got to Oakway, but not over the telephone.
It was September a year ago, a gorgeous, glorious, clear and windless night, some of the best flying weather Maddie had ever known. She scarcely had to fly the little Puss Moth, merely to point it southward along the darkling hills. A great big wonderful waxing bomber’s moon was rising as she arrived at the pick-up airfield, and Maddie landed just before the local squadron took off. She taxied to the Operations hut as the brand-new Lancasters were leaving. The demure Puss Moth shuddered in the wind of their passing, like a marsh hen among a flock of grey herons – each thrice her wingspan, each with four times as many engines, heavy with the night’s fuel and payload of explosive, off to deliver vengeful destruction to Essen’s factories and railway yards. Maddie taxied her little plane to the apron in front of the Operations hut and idled the engine, waiting. She’d been told not to shut down.
The Lancasters roared past. Maddie watched with her nose pressed to the windscreen and for a second didn’t notice the passenger door being opened. Ground crew, caps pulled low and faces hidden in the wing’s shadow, helped the passenger in and fastened her harness. There was no baggage apart from the indispensable gas mask in its haversack, and as usual Maddie wasn’t told her special passenger’s name. She saw the silhouette of a peaked WAAF cap and could sense that the passenger was hugely keyed up, taut with excitement, but it never occurred to Maddie that she might know this person. Like the SOE drivers, she had been instructed not to ask questions. Over the purr of the engine she shouted emergency exit instructions and the location of the first-aid kit.
Once airborne, Maddie didn’t initiate conversation – she never did with special passengers. Nor did she point out how splendid the black and occasionally silver landscape was below them in the moonlight because she knew that part of the reason this person was being flown to her destination at night was so she couldn’t guess where she was going. There was a gasp from the passenger when Maddie, all business, unclipped the Verey pistol from the side of her seat. ‘Don’t worry,’ Maddie shouted, ‘it’s only a flare gun! I haven’t got a radio. The flare lets them know we’re here, if they don’t hear us buzzing them and put the lights on for us.’
But Maddie didn’t need to let off her firework display because after circling for a minute or two, the runway lights blazed up and Maddie put her own landing light on.
It was a straightforward landing. But not until the aircraft had come to a full stop and the engine shut down did the passenger startle Maddie by leaning over and giving her a quick kiss on the cheek.
‘Thank you. You are wonderful!’
The ground crew had already opened the passenger’s door.
‘You should have told me it was you!’ Maddie cried, as her friend gathered herself to disappear into the night.
‘I didn’t like to surprise you in the air!’ Queenie automatically checked that her hair was still in place and with one of her gazelle-like leaps vaulted from the plane on to the concrete. ‘I’m not used to flying and I’ve never had to go anywhere at night. Sorry!’
She leaned back into the cockpit for a moment – Maddie could see several figures beckoning and conferring behind her. It was nearly 2 a.m.
‘Wish me luck,’ Queenie begged. ‘It’s my first assignment.’
‘Good luck!’
‘I’ll see you when I’m done. You’re to take me home.’
Queenie vanished across the concrete, surrounded by attendants.
Maddie was given her own little guestroom in the increasingly familiar Cottage. It was odd not knowing what was going on. After a while she dozed off, and was almost instantly woken by that night’s operational Lysanders returning from France with their booty of shot-down American airmen, hunted French ministers, a crate of champagne and 16 bottles of Chanel No. 5.
Maddie would not have known about the perfume except that everybody was extraordinarily punchy the next morning, perhaps due to the champagne breakfast. (Maddie, being scheduled to take off again after daybreak, prudently didn’t take any champagne.) Queenie was smug as a cat and glowing with success. She looked as though she’d just won herself a gold medal at the Olympic Games. The squadron leader gave a bottle of French scent to every woman who happened to be on the airfield, including the Land Girl who turned up on her bicycle with a basket of three dozen unallocated eggs and 6 pints of milk for the Welcome-to-Freedom breakfast.
Freedom, oh, freedom. Even with the shortages, and the blackout, and the bombs, and the rules, and daily life so drab and dull most of the time – once you cross the English Channel you are free. How simple, and amazing really, that no one in France lives without fear, without suspicion. I don’t mean the straightforward fear of fiery death. I mean the insidious, demoralising fear of betrayal, of treachery, of cruelty, of being silenced. Of not being able to trust your neighbour or the girl who brings you eggs. Only 21 miles from Dover. Which would you rather have – an unlimited supply of Chanel No. 5, or freedom?
Stupid question really.
I have reached the point in this account where, unavoidably, I am going to have to talk about myself before Ormaie. And I don’t want to.
I just want to go on flying and flying in the moonlight. I dreamed I was flying with Maddie, in the five minutes or however short a time it was when there was a lull next door and I actually fell asleep. In my dream the moon was full, but it was green, bright green – I kept thinking, We’re in the limelight! But of course limelight is white, not green – chemical lime, not citrus. This was like the light in Chartreuse liqueur, like the Green Flash, and I kept wondering, How did I escape? I couldn’t remember how I got out of Ormaie. But it didn’t matter, I was on my way home in Maddie’s Puss Moth, I was safe and Maddie was alongside me flying confidently, and the sky was quiet and full of the beautiful green moon.
God, I’m tired. I truly shot myself in the foot again and am now being forced to regret it. I have been put back to work till whenever they run out of people to keep an eye on me. Can’t decide if this is good news or bad, as I don’t mind the infinite supply of paper, but I also forfeited my cabbage soup tonight and I didn’t sleep much the past couple of nights either. (I do wish they’d GIVE UP on that wretched French girl. She is never going to tell them anything.)
What happened was that when they brought me in this morning, poor Fräulein Engel was sitting at the table with her back to the door, busily numbering my countless recipe cards, and I frightened the living daylights out of her by braying in a deep, stentorian voice of command and discipline, ‘Achtung, Anna Engel! Heil Hitler!’ She catapulted to her feet and threw herself into a salute that must have nearly dislocated her shoulder. I’ve never seen her look so white around the gills. She recovered almost immediately and smacked me so hard she knocked me over. When Thibaut picked me up, she smacked me again just for the sheer hell of it. Wow wow wow is my jaw sore. I suppose they are not planning another phoney interview.
