Code Name Verity

by Elizabeth E. Wein

  ‘That’s it exactly!’ I should remember. It’s the name of the American paper she used to work for.

  ‘What’s she going to do for us while she’s pulling off this positive Nazi propaganda campaign in Ormaie?’

  ‘Try to find Verity,’ I said softly.

  That’s what this woman does, this mad American broadcaster, though her wages get paid by the Nazi Minister of Propaganda in Berlin – she walks bold as brass into prisons and prison camps and finds people. Sometimes. Sometimes she’s refused entry. Sometimes she’s too late. Too often the people she’s looking for just can’t be found. But she tries. She gets let in as entertainment for the imprisoned soldiers, and comes out with information. And she hasn’t been caught yet.

  Dratted wind. Still howling all over France – a beautiful day otherwise, for once.

  Well – the plane got there, finally, one of the Moon Squadron Lizzies – lovely, familiar, ducky fuselage and diddy, hawklike wings – would have been a tight fit with the three of us in the back, but we’d have made it, none of us very big – anyway it didn’t land. Gusts must have been 40 knots, blowing crosswind over the landing strip, pylons to tangle with in the approach, batteries dying on the electric torches we were using to light the flare path – finally me and Paul and Jamie had to stand there switching the lights off whenever the pilot climbed away and back on as he started another circuit of the field. The chap circled overhead for three-quarters of an hour and tried to come down half a dozen times before finally bottling out. Suppose it’s a bit mean to say he ‘bottled out’, anyone with half a brain would have done the same and I don’t think I’d have stuck around as long as he did. Moon sets about 4 a.m. at the moment and it must have been down by the time he got back to England.

  Jamie and I knew he wouldn’t make it in. Still – I was desolated when he climbed away and headed back west. We stood watching, faces to the sky in the dark and fingers gripping the torch switches, only a few seconds and then we couldn’t see a thing of course – but could hear the familiar engine throbbing for a minute or two as it faded into the distance.

  Like the end of The Wizard of Oz when the balloon goes off without her. I didn’t mean to, couldn’t help it, let out an enormous babyish sob as we trudged back across the field. Just seem to howl at anything. When we reached the car, Jamie took hold of the back of my head and pressed my face against his shoulder to shut me up.

  ‘Shhh.’

  I did stop, out of shame mostly, because the hunted wireless girl was being so stoic about it.

  Had to pack everything up and head back the way we’d all come – we refugees to our different hiding places, and now of course it was well past curfew and we didn’t have the chickens to bluff with this time. Started bawling again when I had to say goodbye to Jamie.

  ‘Now stop. You go back to Ormaie and look after Verity.’

  I know he is dead sick with worry about her too and was being brave to make me brave, so I nodded. He wiped my cheeks with his thumbs.

  ‘Good girl. Buck up, Kittyhawk! Not like you to blub.’

  ‘Just feel so useless,’ I sobbed. ‘Hiding all day, everyone rushing around me risking their lives, waiting on me all the time, sharing food when they have to account for every missing crumb, can’t even wash my own pants – and what’ll happen when I do get home? They’ll probably send me to prison anyway for hoodwinking my C.O., nicking an RAF plane and dumping it in France –’

  ‘They will grill us all and we will all defend you. They’ve not stopped any of us flying – they’re desperate for Moon pilots. You only did what you were told.’

  ‘I know what they’ll say. Silly girl, no brains, too soft, can’t trust a woman to do a man’s work. They only let us fly operational aircraft when they get desperate. And they’re always harder on us when we botch something.’ All true, and what I said next was true too, but a bit petty – ‘You even get to keep your BOOTS and mine are BURNT.’

  Jamie burst out laughing. ‘It’s not because I’m a lad that they let me keep my boots,’ he said, with just as much outrage in his voice as I must have had in mine. ‘Only because I haven’t any toes!’

  That got a little choking laugh out of me at last.

  Jamie kissed me lightly on the forehead. ‘You’ve got to look for Julie,’ he whispered. ‘You know she’s counting on you.’

  Then he called out softly, ‘Oi, Paul! I want a word with you!’ Jamie kept one arm lovingly round my waist – so like his sister. Paul came close to us in the dark.

  ‘Used this field before?’ Jamie demanded.

  ‘For parachute drops.’

  ‘The pylons are always going to be a problem for landing, even without the crosswind. Listen, old chap, if you can risk taking Kittyhawk about in daylight a bit more, she’s your best bet for field selection around Ormaie. She’s a cracking good pilot-navigator and a reasonable mechanic too.’

  Paul was silent for a moment.

  ‘Aircraft mechanic?’ he asked finally.

  ‘And motorbikes,’ I said.

  Another moment of silence.

  Then, casually, Paul asked, ‘Explosives?’

  I hadn’t even thought about it. But – well, why not? That’s a brilliant thing to put my idle mind to work on: making a bomb.

  ‘Not yet,’ I answered cautiously.

  ‘Tough work for a slip of a lass – are you willing to risk it, Kittyhawk?’

  I nodded like an eager puppy.

  ‘Let’s get those papers made for you and let you off the lead a bit while you wait for the next flight out.’ He turned back to Jamie, and spoke in that nudge-nudge matey tone again as if I couldn’t hear, as if I were deaf. ‘Bit of a dark horse, isn’t she, our Kittyhawk? Thought she didn’t like men. Ready to go like a stoat with you though.’

  Jamie let go of me. ‘Shut your mucky gob, man.’ He stepped close to our fearless leader in the dark, took hold of his jacket by the collar, and in a dead quiet voice that had gone dangerously Scots, threatened heatedly, ‘Talk like that again wi’ these brave lassies listenin’ an’ Ah’ll tear the filthy English tongue frae yer heid, so Ah will.’

  ‘All right, lad,’ Paul said calmly, gently shaking Jamie loose. ‘Back down. We’re all a bit excited –’

  What was left of Jamie’s slim hand looked perilously small in Paul’s firm grip, and Jamie in general is nowhere near as big as Paul – a bit like a ferret going after a Labrador. At this moment the air began to hum. Another plane was crabbing in as low as it could safely fly, two broad searchlight beams stretching and leaping towards the ground before and behind it.

  Paul reacted first and pulled the wireless operator under the shrubs where the bicycles were hidden. The rest of us threw ourselves into the low ditch that was the field boundary. No part of last night seemed to last as long as those five minutes lying trapped and defenceless in frozen mud and dead grass, waiting for the Luftwaffe machine guns to drill us into the packed earth or pass us by.

  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.