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‘Thanks for sharing your fears!’

‘You still owe me a few.’

The air-raid siren went.

Ormaie 11.XI.43 JB-S

Not Part of the Story

I must record last night’s debriefing because it was so funny.

Engel flapped down my sheaf of scribbled-on hotel stationery in frustration and said to von Linden, ‘She must be commanded to write of the meeting between Brodatt and herself. This description of early Radar operations is irrelevant nonsense.’

Von Linden made a sound like a very soft puff of air, like blowing out a candle. Engel and I both stared at him as though he’d suddenly sprouted horns. (It was a laugh. He didn’t crack a smile, I think his face is made of plaster of Paris, but he definitely laughed.)

‘Fräulein Engel, you are not a student of literature,’ he said. ‘The English Flight Officer has studied the craft of the novel. She is making use of suspense and foreshadowing.’

Golly, Engel stared at him. I of course took the opportunity to interpose wi’ pig-headed Wallace pride, ‘I am not English, you ignorant Jerry bastard, I am a SCOT.’

Engel dutifully slapped me into silence and said, ‘She is not writing a novel. She is making a report.’

‘But she is employing the literary conceits and techniques of a novel. And the meeting you speak of has already occurred – you have been reading it for the past quarter of an hour.’

Engel shuffled pages in frenzy, hunting backwards.

‘Do you not recognise her in these pages?’ von Linden prompted. ‘Ah, perhaps not, she flatters herself with competence and bravery which you have never witnessed. She is the young woman called Queenie, the wireless operator who takes down the Luftwaffe aircraft. Our captive English agent –’

‘Scottish!’

Slap.

‘Our prisoner has not yet elaborated on her own role as a wireless operator at the aerodrome at Maidsend.’

Oh, he’s good. I would never in a million years have guessed that SS-Hauptsturmführer Amadeus von Linden is a ‘student of literature’. Not in a million years.

He wanted to know, then, why I was choosing to write about myself in the third person. Do you know, I had not even noticed I was doing it until he asked.