Читать книгу Code Name Verity онлайн | страница 26

The pilot had been as scared as Maddie, but he was not shaking.

Joan put a comforting arm round Maddie’s shoulders and advised her in a whisper to pay no attention to the pilot’s language. Maddie gave an uncertain and forced laugh.

‘Wasn’t even sitting in the gun turret,’ she muttered. ‘Thank goodness I’m not flying into Europe.’

Signals Branch

‘Flight Lieutenant Mottram has been singing your praises,’ Maddie’s WAAF Section Officer told her. ‘He says you’ve got the sharpest pair of eyes at Oakway –’ (the Section Officer rolled her own eyes) ‘– probably a bit of an exaggeration, but he said that in flight you’re always the first to spot another aircraft approaching. How do you fancy further training?’

‘In what?’

The Section Officer coughed apologetically. ‘It’s a bit secret. Well: very secret. Say yes, and I’ll send you on the course.’

‘Yes,’ Maddie said.

—

To clarify a remark someone made earlier, I confess that I am making up all the proper nouns. Did you think I remembered all the names and ranks of everybody Maddie ever worked with? Or every plane she ever flew in? I think it is more interesting this way.

That is all I can usefully write today, though I would keep on blethering about nothing if I thought that by doing it I could avoid the next few hours’ cross-examination – Engel struggling over my handwriting and von Linden picking holes in everything I’ve said. It must be done . . . no point in putting it off. I have a blanket to look forward to afterwards, I hope, perhaps a tepid dish of kailkenny à la guerre – that is, cabbage and potato mash without the potato and with not very much cabbage. I have not got scurvy yet anyway, thanks to France’s infinite supply of prison cabbage. Heigh ho –

Ormaie 10.XI.43 JB-S

RAF WAAF RDF Y

S.O.B. S.O.E.

Asst S/O Flt Off

w/op

clk/sd

m’aidez m’aidez mayday

Coastal Defence

Actually I am afraid to write this.

I don’t know why I think it matters. The Battle of Britain is over. Hitler’s planned invasion, Operation Sea Lion, failed three years ago. And soon he will be fighting a desperate war on two fronts, with the Americans behind us and the Russians closing in on Berlin from the east, and organised Resistance in all the countries in the middle. I can’t believe his advisers don’t already know what went on in the makeshift huts of iron and concrete up and down the south-east coast of England in the summer of 1940 – in a general sense at any rate.