Читать книгу Code Name Verity онлайн | страница 17

I know your other prisoners despise me. Thibaut took me to . . . I don’t know what you call it when you make me watch, is it instruction? To remind me how fortunate I am, perhaps? After my tantrum yesterday, when I had stopped writing and before I was allowed to eat, on the way back to my cell Scharführer Thibaut made me stop and watch while Jacques was being questioned again. (I don’t know what his real name is; Jacques is what the French citizens all call each other in A Tale of Two Cities, and it seems appropriate.) That boy hates me. It makes no difference that I too am strapped securely to my own chair with piano wire or something and gasp with sobs on his account and look away the whole time except when Thibaut holds my head in place. Jacques knows, they all know, that I am the collaborator, the only coward among them. No one else has given out a single scrap of code – let alone ELEVEN SETS – not to mention a written confession. He spits at me as they drag him out.

‘Little Scottish piece of shit.’

It sounds so pretty in French, p’tit morceau de merde écossaise. Single-handedly I have brought down the 700-year-strong Auld Alliance between France and Scotland.

There is another Jacques, a girl, who whistles ‘Scotland the Brave’ if we are taken past each other (my prison is an antechamber to the suite they use for interrogations), or some other battle hymn associated with my heritage, and she spits too. They all detest me. It is not the same as their hatred for Thibaut, the Quisling turncoat, who is their countryman and is working for the enemy. I am your enemy too, I should be one of them. But I am beyond contempt. A wee Scots piece o’ shite.

Don’t you think it makes them stronger when you give them someone to despise? They look at me snivelling in the corner and think, ‘Mon Dieu. Don’t ever let me be like her.’

The Civil Air Guard (Some Figures)

That heading looks terrifically official. I feel better already. Like a proper little Judas.

Suppose you were a girl in Stockport in 1938, raised by loving and indulgent grandparents and rather obsessed with engines. Suppose you decided you wanted to learn to fly: really fly. You wanted to fly aeroplanes.