Brodatt, are you completely bonkers?’
‘No,’ Maddie said very calmly.
They were all crouched on the dirt floor round the playing cards and glowing tobacco ends. It was cosy in perhaps the way you’d be cosy in hell. Something flying low was peppering the runway with machine-gun fire; even buried mostly underground, even a quarter of a mile away, the shelter’s iron walls shuddered.
‘Glad I’m not on shift right now!’
‘Pity the poor souls who are.’
‘Can I share your umbrella?’
Maddie looked up. Crouched next to her, in the light of the flickering candle and one oil lamp, was the small German-speaking wireless operator. She was a vision of feminine perfection and heroism even in her WAAF regulation issue men’s pyjamas, her fair hair tumbling in a loose plait over one shoulder. Everybody else was shedding hairpins; Queenie’s hairpins marched in ordered rank on her pyjama pocket and would not go back in her hair till she was back in bed. With her slender, perfectly manicured fingers she offered Maddie her cigarette.
‘Wish I’d brought a brolly,’ she drawled in the plummy, educated tones of the Oxbridge colleges. ‘Super idea! A portable illusion of shelter and safety. Have you room for two?’
Maddie took the cigarette, but did not immediately move over. The fey Queenie, Maddie knew, was given to fits of madness such as stealing malt whisky from the RAF officers’ mess, and Maddie was sure that anyone bold enough to impersonate an enemy radio operator on the spur of the moment was entirely capable of mocking someone who burst into tears every time she heard a gun fired. On a military airfield. In a war.
But Queenie didn’t seem to be making fun of Maddie – quite the opposite. Maddie budged over a little and made room for another body beneath the umbrella.
‘Marvellous!’ Queenie cried out happily. ‘Like being a tortoise. They ought to make these out of steel. Let me hold it up –’
She gently prised the handle out of Maddie’s trembling hand and held the ridiculous umbrella up over both their heads inside the bunker. Maddie took a drag on the offered cigarette. After a while of alternately biting her nails and smoking the borrowed cigarette down to a sliver of paper and ash, her hands stopped trembling. Maddie said hoarsely, ‘Thank you.’
‘Not a problem,’ said Queenie. ‘Why don’t you play this round? I’ll cover you.’
‘What were you on Civvie Street then –’ Maddie asked casually. ‘An actress?’
The little wireless operator dissolved in a fit of gleeful laugher, but still steadfastly held up the umbrella over Maddie’s head. ‘No, I just like pretending,’ she said. ‘I do the same thing with our own boys, you know. Flirting’s a game. I’m very boring really. I’d be at university if it weren’t for the war. I’ve not quite finished my first year. I started a year early and a term late.’
‘Reading what?’
‘German. Obviously. They spoke it – well, an odd variant – in the village where I went to school in Switzerland. And I liked it.’
Maddie laughed. ‘You were wizard this afternoon. Really brilliant.’
‘I couldn’t have done it without you telling me what to say. You were brilliant too. You were right there when I needed you, not a word or call out of place. You made all the decisions. All I had to do was pay attention, and that’s what I do all day on the Y sets anyway – just listen and listen. I never have to do anything. And all I had to do this afternoon was read from the script you gave me.’
‘You had to translate!’
‘We did it together,’ said her friend.
—
People are complicated. There is so much more to everybody than you realise. You see someone in school every day, or at work, in the canteen, and you share a cigarette or a coffee with them, and you talk about the weather or last night’s air raid. But you don’t talk so much about what was the nastiest thing you ever said to your mother, or how you pretended to be David Balfour, the hero of Kidnapped, for the whole of the year when you were 13, or what you imagine yourself doing with the pilot who looks like Leslie Howard if you were alone in his bunk after a dance.
No one slept the night of that air raid, or the next day. We had pretty much to resurface the runway ourselves that morning. We weren’t equipped for it, we didn’t have the tools or the materials, and we weren’t a building crew, but without a runway RAF Maidsend was defenceless. And Britain too, in the bigger picture. We repaired the runway.
Everyone mucked in, including the captured German – I think he was rather apprehensive about his fate as a prisoner of war and was just as happy to spend the day stripped to the waist shovelling piles of earth with twenty other pilots than to be moved on to some unknown official internment awaiting him inland. I remember we all had to bow our heads in a moment of silence for his dead companions before we set to work. I don’t know what happened to him after that.
In the canteen, Queenie was asleep with her head on the table. She must have done up her hair first, before she came in from two hours’ stone-picking on the runway, but she’d fallen asleep before she’d even taken the spoon out of her tea. Maddie sat down across from her with two fresh cups of tea and one iced bun. I don’t know where the icing came from. Someone must have been hoarding sugar just in case there was a direct hit on the airfield and everybody needed cheering up. Maddie was quite relieved to see the unflappable wireless operator with her guard down. She pushed the Cup That Cheers close to Queenie’s face so that the warmth woke her.
They propped their heads on their elbows, facing each other.
‘Are you scared of anything?’ Maddie asked.
‘Lots of things!’
‘Name one.’
‘I can name ten.’
‘Go on then.’
Queenie looked at her hands. ‘Breaking my nails,’ she said critically. After two hours clearing the runway of rubble and twisted metal, her manicure was in need of repair.
‘I’m serious,’ said Maddie quietly.
‘All right then. Dark.’
‘I don’t believe you.’
‘It’s true,’ said Queenie. ‘Now your turn.’
‘Cold,’ Maddie answered.
Queenie sipped her tea. ‘Falling asleep while I’m working.’
‘Me too.’ Maddie laughed. ‘And bombs dropping.’
‘Too easy.’
‘All right.’ It was Maddie’s turn to be defensive. She shook tangled dark curls off her collar; her hair was barely short enough to count as regulation and too short to put up. ‘Bombs dropping on my gran and granddad.’
Queenie nodded in agreement. ‘Bombs dropping on my favourite brother. Jamie’s the youngest of ’em, the nearest me in age. He’s a pilot.’
‘Not having a useful skill,’ said Maddie. ‘I don’t want to have to marry right away just so I don’t have to work down Ladderal Mill.’
‘You are joking!’
‘When the war’s over, I still won’t have a skill. Bet there won’t be this desperate need for radio operators when the war ends.’
‘You think that’ll happen soon?’
‘The longer the war goes on,’ Maddie said, carefully cutting her iced bun in half with a tin butter knife, ‘the older I’ll get.’
Queenie let out a giddy, tickled laugh. ‘Getting old!’ she cried. ‘I’m horribly afraid of being old.’
Maddie