Ep 2

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.

***Download NovelToon to enjoy a better reading experience!***