next customer, please.
It was a very overwhelming place in that uneasy peacetime when military and civil pilots took it in turns to use the runway, but Maddie was determined, and followed the signs to the flying club. She found the person she was looking for by accident – easily really, because Dympna Wythenshawe was the only idle aviator on the field, lounging by herself in a long row of faded deckchairs lined up in front of the pilots’ clubhouse. Maddie did not recognise the pilot. She looked nothing like either the glamorous mugshot from the papers or the unconscious, helmeted casualty she had been when Maddie left her that Sunday past. Dympna didn’t recognise Maddie either, but she called out jovially, ‘Are you hoping for a spin?’
She spoke in a cultured accent of money and privilege. Rather like mine, without the Scottish burr. Probably not as privileged as mine, but more moneyed. Anyway it made Maddie instantly feel like a serving girl.
‘I’m looking for Dympna Wythenshawe,’ said Maddie. ‘I just wanted to see how she’s getting on after – after last week.’
‘She’s fine.’ The elegant creature smiled pleasantly.
‘I found her,’ Maddie blurted.
‘She’s right as rain,’ Dympna said, offering a languid, lily-white hand that had certainly never changed an oil filter (my lily-white hands have, I would like you to know, but only under strict supervision). ‘She’s right as rain. She’s me.’
Maddie shook hands.
‘Take a pew,’ Dympna drawled (just imagine she’s me, raised in a castle and educated at a Swiss boarding school, only a lot taller and not snivelling all the time). She waved to the empty deckchairs. ‘There’s plenty of room.’
She was dressed as though she were going on safari, and contrived to be glamorous about it too. She gave private instruction as well as joyrides. She was the only woman pilot at the aerodrome, certainly the only woman instructor.
‘When my darling Puss Moth’s mended, I’ll give you a ride,’ she offered Maddie, and Maddie, who is nothing if not calculating, asked if she could see the plane.
They had taken it to bits and carted it home from Highdown Rise and now a team of boys and men in greasy overalls were working at putting it back together in one of a long line of high workshop sheds. The Puss Moth’s lovely engine (this is Maddie talking; she is a bit mad) had only HALF THE POWER of Maddie’s motorbike. They had taken it apart and were cleaning the bits of turf out of it with wire brushes. It lay on a square of oilcloth in a thousand gleaming pieces. Maddie knew instantly she had come to the right place.
‘Oh, can I watch?’ she said. And Dympna, who never got her hands dirty, could nevertheless name every cylinder and valve that was lying on the floor, and let Maddie have a go painting the new fabric (over the fuselage she’d kicked in) with a mess of plastic goo that smelled like pickled onions. After an hour had gone by and Maddie was still there asking what all the parts of the plane were for and what they were called, the mechanics gave her a wire brush and let her help.
Maddie said she always felt very safe, after that, flying in Dympna’s Puss Moth, because she had helped to put its engine back together herself.
‘When are you coming back?’ Dympna asked her over oily mugs of tea, four hours later.
‘It’s too far for me to visit very often,’ Maddie confessed sadly. ‘I live in Stockport. I help my granddad in his office in the week and he pays for my petrol, but I can’t come here every weekend.’
‘You are the luckiest girl alive,’ Dympna said. ‘As soon as the Puss Moth’s flying again I’m moving both my planes to the new airfield at Oakway. It’s right by Ladderal Mill, where your friend Beryl works. There’s a big gala at Oakway next Saturday, for the airfield’s official opening. I’ll come and collect you and you can watch the fun from the pilots’ stand. Beryl can come along too.’
That’s two airfields I’ve located for you.
I am getting a bit wobbly because no one has let me eat or drink since yesterday and I have been writing for nine hours. So now I am going to risk tossing this pencil across the table and have a good howl
Ormaie 9.XI.43 JB-S
This pen does nt work. Sorry ink blots. Is this test or punishmt I want my pencil back
[Note to SS-Hauptsturmführer Amadeus von Linden, translated from the German:]
The English Flight Officer is telling the truth. The ink given her was too old/too thick to use and clotted badly in the pen nib. It has now been thinned and I am testing it here to affirm that it is acceptable for writing.
Heil Hitler!
SS-Scharführer Etienne Thibaut
—
You ignorant Quisling bastard, SS-Scharführer Etienne Thibaut, I AM SCOTTISH.
The comedians Laurel and Hardy, I mean Underling-Sergeant Thibaut and On-Duty-Female-Guard Engel, have been very jolly at my expense over the inferior ink Thibaut found for me to write with. He ruddy well had to thin it with kerosene, didn’t he. He was annoyed when I made a fuss over the ink and he didn’t seem to believe me about the clogged pen, so I became rather upset when he went away and came back with a litre of kerosene. When he brought in the tin, I knew straight away what it was, and Miss E. had to throw a jug of water in my face to stop my hysterics. Now she is sitting across the table from me lighting and relighting her cigarette and flicking the matches in my direction to make me jump, but she is laughing as she does it.
She was anxious last night because she didn’t think I’d coughed up enough facts to count as a proper little Judas yesterday. Again I think that she was worrying about von Linden’s reaction, as she is the one who has to translate what I write for him. As it turned out he said it was an ‘interesting overview of the situation in Britain over the long term’ and a ‘curious individual perspective’ (he was testing my German a bit while we talked about it). Also I think he hopes I will do some ratting on Monsieur Laurel and Mademoiselle Hardy. He does not trust Thibaut because Thibaut is French and he does not trust Engel because Engel is a woman. I am to be given water throughout the day while I write (to drink, as well as to prevent hysterics) and a blanket. For a blanket in my cold little room, SS-Hauptsturmführer Amadeus von Linden, I would without remorse or hesitation rat on my heroic ancestor William Wallace, Guardian of Scotland.
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