Code Name Verity

Obviously, the plane passed by. It didn’t linger over our field in particular either – must have been on some kind of routine patrol – don’t like to think what would have happened if it had done its fly-past while we were loading up a Lysander.

It sobered everybody up.

We drove the refugees and anyone else who fitted back to within a mile or two of their safe house, 3 bicycles tied on the running boards and roof of the Rosalie, the motor car absolutely jammed full with 3 of us in the front seat, 4 in the back, 2 in the boot and me and the w/op riding on the rear bumper and hanging on to the roof like baby monkeys clinging to their mum – the idea being that if we were stopped, she and I would at least be able to jump down and make a run for it. No one else would stand a chance. It’s marvellous, in a desperate kind of way, to opt for speed over subtlety – like screaming downhill to put out the fire when your aircraft’s in flames.

Every time we came to a gate, the two of us jumped down to open and shut it and took flying leaps back on to the rear bumper as the Rosalie set off again.

‘You’re so fortunate to be in Damask,’ the wireless girl shouted at me as we clattered through the dark – no lights, not even those useless, slitty blackout headlamps. Didn’t need them with the moon nearly full though. ‘Paul will take great care of you. And he’ll do everything he can to find your missing agent – that will be a matter of pride for him. He’s never lost any of his circuit before.’ Posh Southern English with a faint French accent. ‘My own circuit has collapsed – 14 arrests made last week. Organiser, couriers, the lot – someone’s leaking names. It’s been sheer hell. I’ve been given to Paul for safekeeping – shame he’s such a lech, but as long as you know –’

‘I can’t stand him!’ I confessed.

‘You have to ignore it. He doesn’t mean any harm. Close your eyes and think of England!’

We both laughed. Suppose we were a bit high – keyed up with the Benzedrine, rattling through the French countryside in the moonlight, people we love and work with disappearing around us like burnt-out sparklers. Hard to imagine how dead we’d have been ourselves if we’d met anyone – felt alive and unbeatable.

Don’t like to think of her being hunted. Hope she makes it out of France.

I am Katharina Habicht now. It’s not nearly as frightening as I thought it would be – the change brings such tremendous improvements to daily living that the additional danger’s nothing. Who cares? I couldn’t become a bigger jangle of nerves than I already am.

I’m sleeping in Etienne’s room now – ‘hiding in plain sight’ taken to extremes. I’ve also nicked some of his stuff. We cleared out a drawer to make room for Käthe’s underthings and extra skirt – illegally scrounged with Julie’s coupons. At the back of the drawer was a super Swiss pocket knife with a tin-opener and screwdriver attachment, and this notebook – a school exercise jotter dated 15 years ago. Etienne’s written out a list of local birds on the first three pages. For a week in 1928 Etienne Thibaut decided he was going to be a nature enthusiast. Sort of thing you do when you’re ten, about the age I took Gran’s gramophone to bits.

The list of birds makes me sad. What changes a small boy from a birdwatcher into a Gestapo inquisitor?

No good place for me to hide things in this room – Etienne knows where all the hiding places are. Two loose floorboards and a niche beneath the windowsill and a hole in the plaster are all crammed with his Small Boy Stuff – he hasn’t touched any of it for years, all of it dust-covered, but I’m sure he knows it’s there. I am keeping this notebook and my Pilot’s Notes IN the mattress – which I have slit with Etienne’s own knife.

I have met him. Trial by fire for Käthe. Went cycling with Amélie and Mitraillette, my first sortie looking for landing fields – three girls on bicycles, you know, having a jolly afternoon out together, what could be more normal? My bicycle is the one that belonged to the sentry Paul shot when I landed here. It has been ‘remade’. On our way back up the main road we met Etienne coming the other way, and of course he stopped to bait his sisters and find out who I am.

My evasive action consists of smiling like an idiot, hiding my face in my own shoulder as though I’m too shy to deserve to live, giggling a bit and mumbling. My French has not improved, but they have taught me a few responses to greetings which I am allowed to give when I am directly addressed – then let Mitraillette and her cadette sister do the rest of the talking for me. ‘She’s Mum’s cousin’s daughter from Alsace. Their house has been bombed and her mum’s been killed. She’s having a holiday with us till her dad finds a new place to live – she’s a bit fragile at the moment, doesn’t like to talk about it, you know?’

In an emergency they are supposed to say a code word, MAMAN, and speak directly to me in German. That’s the signal for me to burst into noisy tears, which the girls will respond to with equally noisy comfort and cooing – all in German. This performance is designed to shock and embarrass whoever is pestering us so deeply that they will quickly give us back our papers, without looking at mine too closely, and run in the other direction to get away from us.

We’ve practised this routine and made rather a fine art of it. And every morning since I moved into the house, La Cadette – Amélie – comes and bounces on my bed crying out, ‘Wake up, Käthe, come and feed the chickens!’ Suppose it’s quite easy for them to remember my ‘name’ as they’ve only ever known me as Kittyhawk anyway.

So – we met Etienne. And of course the whole conversation was carried on in German because not only do they speak it at home with their mother, but as their cousin I’m expected to understand it too. Every ounce of strength in me was invested in listening for the code word mixed in among their talk, which might as well have been Glaswegian for all I could make out! My maidenly blushes were not phoney – felt my face would catch fire with fear and embarrassment. I had to let the Thibaut girls do the hard work of covering for me, explaining me to their brother as a cousin he’d never heard of before.

But then Etienne and Amélie started scrapping, Amélie going whiter and whiter the more he talked – expect I did too, after a while – until I actually thought she was going to be sick, at which point Mitraillette snarled oaths at their turncoat brother and threatened to thump him. He went dead stiff, said something nasty to Mitraillette and started off on his bicycle away from us. But then he stopped and turned and gave me a nod, dead polite and formal, before he cycled off.

When he was nowhere near in earshot any more, Mitraillette burst out in English, ‘My brother is a SHIT.’ Don’t know where she learned that word – not from me! ‘He is a SHIT.’ She said it again and switched to French, which was harder for me to understand, but easier for her to swear in.

Etienne has been assisting at an interrogation. It is beginning to tell on him, and he took it out on Amélie, who had again poked fun at the fading bruise on his forehead. So he told her in hideous detail what would be done to her if she was a prisoner who refused to give answers when the Gestapo questioned her.

Can’t get it out of my head now that it’s in there.

I keep hearing it over and over in dribs and drabs from Amélie herself, who thinks I’m a good listener although I can’t understand half of what she says. She’s partly upset by the Gestapo captain’s involvement, as she puts him on the same shelf in her brain as her priest or the head of her school – someone in authority, a bit distant, mostly kind to her, but above all someone who plays strictly by the rules. Someone who lives by rules.

And forcing pins under a person’s toenails because they won’t talk to you doesn’t count as any rules that anyone has ever heard of.

‘I don’t believe they’d do that to a woman,’ Amélie told her brother as we stood in the road with our bicycles.

‘The pins go in your breasts if you are a woman.’

That was when Amélie gulped and went green, and when Mitraillette got angry.

‘Shut your trap, Etienne, you donkey, you’ll give the kids nightmares! God! Why the hell do you stay there if it’s so horrible? Does it make you excited, watching people stick pins in a woman’s breasts?’

That was when Etienne became cold and formal.

‘I stay because it’s my job. No, it’s not exciting. No woman is attractive when you’re pouring ice water over her head to revive her and she’s managed to be sick in her own hair.’

—

I tell Amélie not to think about it. Then I tell myself not to think about it. Then I tell myself I must think about it. It is REAL. It is happening NOW.

What Jamie said is giving me nightmares. If Julie is not already dead – if she is not already dead she is counting on me. She is calling me, whispering my name to herself in the dark. What can I do – I can scarcely sleep, I just go round in circles all night trying to think what I can do. WHAT can I do?

Have found a super field – rather far from here though – cycling all day with M., Fri. 12 Nov. Incredible how difficult it is to find a decent landing field for the SOE. It’s all so samey, farm after farm, shrines at every crossroad and a community bread oven in every village. The fields are so flat you could land anything anywhere. But there are never any good night-time landmarks or any kind of cover for a reception team. Must be lovely flying in peacetime.

I have been in France five weeks now.

My legs are stronger than they’ve ever been – cycled a good 60 miles twice this week, once to find the field and again two days later to take Paul to see it. He needs to get his w/op to send an RAF plane to take pictures for Moon Squadron approval. In between marathon bicycle rides I spend most of my time taking care of chickens, learning how to wire up small explosive devices and trying hard not to suddenly scream my head off with nerves.

The broadcaster Georgia Penn has had a ‘no’ from the head of the Gestapo in this region – a powerful and terrible man, called Ferber, I think, the Ormaie captain’s boss. Penn has let us know she plans to ignore his refusal and try again by going straight to the captain – she’ll backdate her application, tie them up in their own red tape, right hand not knowing what the left hand is doing. An amazing woman, but totally crackers, if you ask me – hope her own right hand knows what her left hand is doing.

Another Lysander pick-up is planned for tomorrow night, Tues. 16 Nov., at the same pylon-infested field near Tours. Weather unpredictable, but it’s the last chance before we lose the November moon. I may go home with my munitions expertise untested.

No, I am still here. Dratted Rosalie.

Can’t blame the poor car, I suppose, but don’t like to blame the stupid, well-meaning driver.

Oh, I’m tired. Moonrise at 10 p.m. last night so plane not due in till 2 in the morning – Paul came to collect me after curfew and we bicycled to meet the car, him cycling and me riding behind him standing on a bar wedged through the frame. Had to cling to him for dear life for 5 miles, bet he loved that. The car was late meeting us – the driver had to avoid an unexpected patrol – Paul and I stood for half an hour shivering and stamping around in the drainage ditch where we hid the bicycle. Don’t know when my toes have ever been so cold, standing in icy mud, mid-November, in wooden clogs – thought so much of Jamie floating in the North Sea. I was nearly crying by the time the car arrived.