I AM A COWARD

I wanted to be heroic and I pretended I was. I have always been good at

pretending. I spent the first twelve years of my life playing at the Battle of

Stirling Bridge with my five big brothers, and even though I am a girl they

let me be William Wallace, who is supposed to be one of our ancestors,

because I did the most rousing battle speeches. God, I tried hard last week.

My God, I tried. But now I know I am a coward. After the ridiculous deal I

made with SS-Hauptsturmführer von Linden, I know I am a coward. And

I’m going to give you anything you ask, everything I can remember.

Absolutely Every Last Detail.

Here is the deal we made. I’m putting it down to keep it straight in my

own mind. ‘Let’s try this,’ the Hauptsturmführer said to me. ‘How could

you be bribed?’ And I said I wanted my clothes back.

It seems petty, now. I am sure he was expecting my answer to be

something defiant – ‘Give me Freedom’ or ‘Victory’ – or something

generous, like ‘Stop toying with that wretched French Resistance laddie and

give him a dignified and merciful death.’ Or at least something more

directly connected to my present circumstance, like ‘Please let me go to

sleep’ or ‘Feed me’ or ‘Get rid of this sodding iron rail you have kept tied

against my spine for the past three days.’ But I was prepared to go sleepless

and starving and upright for a good while yet if only I didn’t have to do it in

my underwear – rather foul and damp at times, and SO EMBARRASSING.

The warmth and dignity of my flannel skirt and woolly jumper are worth far

more to me now than patriotism or integrity.

So von Linden sold my clothes back to me piece by piece. Except my

scarf and stockings of course, which were taken away early on to prevent

me strangling myself with them (I did try). The pullover cost me four sets of

wireless code – the full lot of encoding poems, passwords and frequencies.

Von Linden let me have the pullover back on credit straight away. It was

waiting for me in my cell when they finally untied me at the end of thatdreadful three days, though I was incapable of getting the damned thing on

at first; but even just dragged over the top of me like a shawl it was

comforting. Now that I’ve managed to get into it at last I don’t think I shall

ever take it off again. The skirt and blouse cost rather less than the pullover,

and it was only one code set apiece for my shoes.

There are eleven sets in all. The last one was supposed to buy my slip.

Notice how he’s worked it that I get the clothes from the outside in, so I

have to go through the torment of undressing in front of everybody every

time another item is given back to me. He’s the only one who doesn’t watch

– he threatened to take it all away from me again when I suggested he was

missing a fabulous show. It was the first time the accumulated damage has

really been on display and I wish he would have looked at his masterpiece –

at my arms particularly – also the first time I have been able to stand in a

while, which I wanted to show off to him. Anyway I have decided to do

without my slip, which also saves me the trouble of stripping again to put it

on, and in exchange for the last code set I have bought myself a supply of

ink and paper – and some time.

Von Linden has said I have got two weeks and that I can have as much

paper as I need. All I have to do is cough up everything I can remember

about the British War Effort. And I’m going to. Von Linden resembles

Captain Hook in that he is rather an upright sort of gentleman in spite of his

being a brute, and I am quite Pan-like in my naïve confidence that he will

play by the rules and keep his word. So far he has. To start off my

confession, he has given me this lovely creamy embossed stationery from

the Château de Bordeaux, the Bordeaux Castle Hotel, which is what this

building used to be. (I would not have believed a French hotel could

become so forbiddingly bleak if I had not seen the barred shutters and

padlocked doors with my own eyes. But you have also managed to make

the whole beautiful city of Ormaie look bleak.)

It is rather a lot to be resting on a single code set, but in addition to my

treasonous account I have also promised von Linden my soul, although I do

not think he takes this seriously. Anyway it will be a relief to write anything

that isn’t connected with code. I’m so dreadfully sick of spewing wireless

code. Only when we’d put all those lists to paper did I realise what a huge

supply of code I do actually have in me.

It’s jolly astonishing really.

YOU STUPID NAZI BASTARDS.

I’m just damned. I am utterly and completely damned. You’ll shoot me

at the end no matter what I do, because that’s what you do to enemy agents.

It’s what we do to enemy agents. After I write this confession, if you don’t

shoot me and I ever make it home, I’ll be tried and shot as a collaborator

anyway. But I look at all the dark and twisted roads ahead and this is the

easy one, the obvious one. What’s in my future – a tin of kerosene poured

down my throat and a match held to my lips? Scalpel and acid, like the

Resistance boy who won’t talk? My living skeleton packed up in a cattle

wagon with two hundred desperate others, carted off God knows where to

die of thirst before we get there? No. I’m not travelling those roads. This is

the easiest. The others are too frightening even to look down.

I am going to write in English. I don’t have the vocabulary for a warfare

account in French, and I can’t write fluently enough in German. Someone

will have to translate for Hauptsturmführer von Linden; Fräulein Engel can

do it. She speaks English very well. She is the one who explained to me that

paraffin and kerosene are the same thing. We call it paraffin at home, but

the Americans call it kerosene, and that is more or less what the word

sounds like in French and German too.

(About the paraffin, kerosene, whatever it is. I do not really believe you

have a litre of kerosene to waste on me. Or do you get it on the black

market? How do you claim the expense? ‘1 lt. highly explosive fuel for

execution of British spy.’ Anyway I will do my best to spare you the

expense.)

One of the first items on the very long list I have been given to think

about including in my confession is Location of British Airfields for

Invasion of Europe. Fräulein Engel will confirm that I burst out laughing

when I read that. You really think I know a damned thing about where the

Allies are planning to launch their invasion of Nazi-occupied Europe? I am

in the Special Operations Executive because I can speak French and

German and am good at making up stories, and I am a prisoner in the

Ormaie Gestapo HQ because I have no sense of direction whatsoever.

Bearing in mind that the people who trained me encouraged my blissful

ignorance of airfields just so I couldn’t tell you such a thing if you did catchme, and not forgetting that I wasn’t even told the name of the airfield we

took off from when I came here, let me remind you that I had been in

France less than 48 hours before that obliging agent of yours had to stop me

being run over by a French van full of French chickens because I’d looked

the wrong way before crossing the street. Which shows how cunning the

Gestapo are. ‘This person I’ve pulled from beneath the wheels of certain

death was expecting traffic to travel on the left side of the road. Therefore

she must be British, and is likely to have parachuted into Nazi-occupied

France out of an Allied plane. I shall now arrest her as a spy.’

So, I have no sense of direction; in some of us it is a TRAGIC FLAW,

and there is no point in me trying to direct you to Locations of Any

Airfields Anywhere. Not without someone giving me the coordinates. I

could make them up, perhaps, and be convincing about it, to buy myself

more time, but you would catch on eventually.

Aircraft Types in Operational Use is also on this list of things I am to tell

you. God, this is a funny list. If I knew or cared a damned thing about

aircraft types I would be flying planes for the Air Transport Auxiliary like

Maddie, the pilot who dropped me here, or working as a fitter, or a

mechanic. Not cravenly coughing up facts and figures for the Gestapo. (I

will not mention my cowardice again because it is beginning to make me

feel indecent. Also I do not want you to get bored and take this handsome

paper away and go back to holding my face in a basin of ice water until I

pass out.)

No, wait, I do know some aircraft types. I will tell you all the aircraft

types I know, starting with the Puss Moth. That was the first aircraft my

friend Maddie ever flew. In fact it was the first aircraft she ever had a ride

in, and even the first one she ever got close to. And the story of how I came

to be here starts with Maddie. I don’t think I’ll ever know how I ended up

carrying her National Registration card and pilot’s licence instead of my

own ID when you picked me up, but if I tell you about Maddie you’ll

understand why we flew here together.

Aircraft Types

Maddie is properly Margaret Brodatt. You have her ID, you know her name.

Brodatt is not a Northern English name, it is a Russian name, I think,because her grandfather came from Russia. But Maddie is pure Stockport.

Unlike me, she has an excellent sense of direction. She can navigate by the

stars, and by dead reckoning, but I think she learned to use her sense of

direction properly because her granddad gave her a motorbike for her

sixteenth birthday. That was Maddie away out of Stockport and up the

unmade lanes on the high moors of the Pennine hills. You can see the

Pennines all around the city of Stockport, green and bare with fast-moving

stripes of cloud and sunlight gliding overhead like a Technicolor moving

picture. I know because I went on leave for a weekend and stayed with

Maddie and her grandparents, and she took me on her motorbike up the

Dark Peak, one of the most wonderful afternoons of my life. It was winter

and the sun came out only for about five minutes and even then the sleet

didn’t stop falling – it was because the weather was forecast so unflyable

that she had the three days off. But for five minutes Cheshire seemed green

and sparkling. Maddie’s granddad owns a bike shop and he got some black

market petrol for her specially when I visited. I am putting this down (even

though it’s nothing to do with Aircraft Types) because it proves that I know

what I’m talking about when I describe what it was like for Maddie to be

alone at the top of the world, deafened by the roar of four winds and two

cylinders, with all the Cheshire plain and its green fields and red chimneys

thrown at her feet like a tartan picnic blanket.

Maddie had a friend called Beryl who had left school, and in the summer

of 1938 Beryl was working in the cotton mill at Ladderal, and they liked to

take Sunday picnics on Maddie’s motorbike because it was the only time

they saw each other any more. Beryl rode with her arms tight round

Maddie’s waist, like I did that time. No goggles for Beryl, or for me, though

Maddie had her own. On this particular June Sunday they rode up through

the lanes between the drystone walls that Beryl’s labouring ancestors had

built, and over the top of Highdown Rise, with mud up their bare shins.

Beryl’s best skirt was ruined that day and her dad made her pay for a new

one out of her next week’s wages.

‘I love your granddad,’ Beryl shouted in Maddie’s ear. ‘I wish he was

mine.’ (I wished that too.) ‘Fancy him giving you a Silent Superb for your

birthday!’‘It’s not so silent,’ Maddie shouted back over her shoulder. ‘It wasn’t

new when I got it, and it’s five years old now. I’ve had to rebuild the engine

this year.’

‘Won’t your granddad do it for you?’

‘He wouldn’t even give it to me until I’d taken the engine apart. I have

to do it myself or I can’t have it.’

‘I still love him,’ Beryl shouted.

They tore along the high green lanes of Highdown Rise, along tractor

ruts that nearly bounced them over drystone field walls and into a bed of

mire and nettles and sheep. I remember and I know what it must have been

like. Every now and then, round a corner or at the crest of a hump in the

hill, you can see the bare green chain of the Pennines stretching serenely to

the west, or the factory chimneys of South Manchester scrawling the blue

north sky with black smoke.

‘And you’ll have a skill,’ Beryl yelled.

‘A what?’

‘A skill.’

‘Fixing engines!’ Maddie howled.

‘It’s a skill. Better than loading shuttles.’

‘You’re getting paid for loading shuttles,’ Maddie yelled back. ‘I don’t

get paid.’ The lane ahead was rutted with rain-filled potholes. It looked like

a miniature landscape of Highland lochs. Maddie slowed the bike to a putter

and finally had to stop. She put her feet down on solid earth, her skirt

rucked up to her thighs, still feeling the Superb’s reliable and familiar

rumble all through her body. ‘Who’ll give a girl a job fixing engines?’

Maddie said. ‘Gran wants me to learn to type. At least you’re earning.’

They had to get off the bike to walk it along the ditch-filled lane. Then

there was another rise, and they came to a farm gate set between field

boundaries, and Maddie leaned the motorbike against the stone wall so they

could eat their sandwiches. They looked at each other and laughed at the

mud.

‘What’ll your dad say!’ Maddie exclaimed.

‘What’ll your gran!’