Ep 4

‘She’s used to it.’

Beryl’s word for picnic was ‘baggin’, Maddie said, doorstep slices of

granary loaf Beryl’s auntie baked for three families every Wednesday, and

pickled onions as big as apples. Maddie’s sandwiches were on rye bread

from the baker’s in Reddyke where her grandmother sent her every Friday.

The pickled onions stopped Maddie and Beryl having a conversation

because chewing made so much crunching in their heads they couldn’t hear

each other talk, and they had to be careful swallowing so they wouldn’t be

asphyxiated by an accidental blast of vinegar. (Perhaps Chief-Storm-

Captain von Linden might find pickled onions useful as persuasive tools.

And your prisoners would get fed at the same time.)

(Fräulein Engel instructs me to put down here, for Captain von Linden to

know when he reads it, that I have wasted 20 minutes of the time given me

because here in my story I laughed at my own stupid joke about the pickled

onions and broke the pencil point. We had to wait for someone to bring a

knife to sharpen it because Miss Engel is not allowed to leave me by

myself. And then I wasted another 5 minutes weeping after I snapped off

the new point straight away because Miss E. had sharpened it very close to

my face, flicking the shavings into my eyes while SS-Scharführer Thibaut

held my head still, and it made me terribly nervous. I am not laughing or

crying now and will try not to press so hard after this.)

At any rate, think of Maddie before the war, free and at home with her

mouth full of pickled onion – she could only point and choke when a

spluttering, smoking aircraft hove into view above their heads and circled

the field they were overlooking as they perched on the gate. That aircraft

was a Puss Moth.

I can tell you a bit about Puss Moths. They are fast, light monoplanes –

you know, only one set of wings – the Tiger Moth is a biplane and has two

sets (another type I have just remembered). You can fold the Puss Moth’s

wings back for trucking the machine around or storing it, and it has a super

view from the cockpit, and can seat two passengers as well as the pilot. I

have been a passenger in one a couple of times. I think the upgraded version

is called a Leopard Moth (that’s three aircraft I have named in one

paragraph!).This Puss Moth circling the field at Highdown Rise, the first Puss Moth

Maddie ever came across, was choking to death. Maddie said it was like

having a ringside seat at the circus. With the plane at three hundred feet she

and Beryl could see every detail of the machine in miniature: every wire,

every strut of its pair of canvas wings, the flicker of the wooden propeller

blades as they spun ineffectively in the wind. Great blue clouds of smoke

billowed from the exhaust.

‘He’s on fire!’ screamed Beryl in a fit of delighted panic.

‘He’s not on fire. He’s burning oil,’ Maddie said because she knows

these things. ‘If he has any sense he’ll shut everything off and it’ll stop.

Then he can glide down.’

They watched. Maddie’s prediction came true: the engine stopped and

the smoke drifted away, and now the pilot was clearly planning to put his

damaged rig down in the field right in front of them. It was a grazing field,

unploughed, unmown, without any livestock in it. The wings above their

heads cut out the sun for a second with the sweep and billow of a sailing

yacht. The aircraft’s final pass pulled all the litter of their lunch out into the

field, brown crusts and brown paper fluttering in the blue smoke like the

devil’s confetti.

Maddie says it would have been a good landing if it had been on an

aerodrome. In the field the wounded flying machine bounced haplessly over

the unmown grass for thirty yards. Then it tipped up gracefully on to its

nose.

Unthinkingly, Maddie broke into applause. Beryl grabbed her hands and

smacked one of them.

‘You gormless cow! He might be hurt! Oh, what shall we do!’

Maddie hadn’t meant to clap. She had done it without thinking. I can

picture her, blowing the curling black hair out of her eyes, with her lower

lip jutting out before she jumped down from the gate and hopped over the

green tussocks to the downed plane.

There were no flames. Maddie scaled her way up the Puss Moth’s nose

to get at the cockpit and put one of her hobnailed shoes through the fabric

that covered the fuselage (I think that’s what the body of the plane is called)

and I bet she cringed; she hadn’t meant to do that either. She was feelingvery hot and bothered by the time she unlatched the door, expecting a

lecture from the aircraft’s owner, and was shamefully relieved to find the

pilot hanging upside-down in half-undone harness straps and clearly stone-

cold unconscious. Maddie glanced over the alien engine controls. No oil

pressure (she told me all this). Throttle, out. Off. Good enough. Maddie

untangled the harness and let the pilot slither to the ground

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