Code Name Verity by Elizabeth E. Wein
‘Sorry – sorry!’ I gasped. ‘Je suis désolée –’ Unbelievable, I am still trying to speak French to people.
‘Not quite out of the trenches yet, are we?’ he remarked softly. With light fingertips against my back he guided me to one of the chairs. ‘Tea, Silvey,’ he directed, and Sergeant Silvey quietly served up and let himself out.
Balliol’s glasses were lying on the desk. He put them on and perched against the edge of the desk holding his teacup in its saucer, and his hands were so steady I had to put my own cup on the floor – couldn’t have bone china rattling in my lap while he stood there pinning me down with those huge magnified eyes. Crikey – Julie quite fancied him. Can’t imagine why. He scares me to death.
‘What are you afraid of, Maddie?’ he asked quietly. None of this ‘Flight Officer Beaufort-Stuart’ nonsense.
I am not going to say it again. There is no one else I need say it to. This was the last time –
‘I killed Julie. Verity, I mean. I shot her myself.’
He put his own cup down on the desk with a clatter and stared at me. ‘I beg your pardon?’
‘I’m afraid of being tried for murder.’
I looked away from him, at the drain in the floor. This was the place where the German spy tried to strangle Eva Seiler. I shivered, actually shivered, when I realised that. I have never seen such hideous bruises in my entire life, not before or since. Julie was tortured in this room.
When I looked back at Balliol he was still leaning against the desk, his shoulders slumped, spectacles pushed back on his head, pinching his nose between his fingers as though he had a migraine.
‘I’m afraid of hanging,’ I added miserably.
‘Great Scott, girl,’ he snapped, and jammed the specs back down over his eyes. ‘You’ll have to tell me what happened. I confess you have – startled me, but as I’m not wearing my judge’s wig at the moment, let’s have it.’
‘They were transporting her in a bus full of prisoners to one of their concentration camps and we tried to stop it –’
He interrupted plaintively, ‘Must it be the murder first? Go back a bit.’ He peered at me with an anxious frown. ‘Mea culpa, forgive me. Unfortunate choice of words. You didn’t say it was murder, did you? Only you’re worried others might see it that way . . . Possibly a mistake, or an accident. Well, out with it, my child. Start from the beginning, when you landed in France.’
I told him everything – well, almost everything. There is one thing I didn’t tell him about, and that is this big stack of paper I have been humping around in my flight bag – everything Julie’s written, everything I’ve written, all her scraps of hotel stationery and sheet music and my Pilot’s Notes and Etienne’s exercise book – I didn’t tell him there’s a written record.
I’m amazed at what a smooth liar I’ve become. Or, not a liar exactly – I didn’t lie to him. The story I gave him isn’t like a pullover full of holes, dropped stitches that will easily unravel when you start to poke at them. More like – slip one, knit one, pass slipped stitch over. Between Penn and Engel there was enough information that I didn’t need to mention I’d got Julie’s written confession up in my bedroom. Because I’m jolly well not turning it over to some filing clerk in London. It is mine.
And my own notes – well, I need them so I can make a proper report for the Accident Committee.
It did take a long time, the telling. Sgt Silvey brought us another pot of tea and then another. At the end Balliol assured me quietly, ‘You won’t hang.’
‘But I’m responsible.’
‘No more than I.’ He looked away. ‘Tortured and sent off to be used as a lab specimen – dear God. That lovely, clever girl. I may as well – I am wretched. No, you’ll not hang.’
He drew a long, shaking breath. ‘“Killed in action” was what the first wire told us, and “killed in action” the verdict shall remain,’ he said firmly. ‘She was killed in action by this account, and given the number of people who died under fire that night I don’t think we need give out details of who shot whom. Your story shall not leave this building. You’ve not told anyone here what happened, have you?’
‘I told her brother,’ I said. ‘And anyway you bug this room. People listen through the shutters to the kitchen. It’ll have to come out.’
He gazed at me thoughtfully, shaking his head.
‘Is there anything about us you don’t know, Kittyhawk? We’ll keep your secrets and you keep ours. “Careless talk costs lives.”’
It really does in France. It’s not as funny as it sounds.
‘Look, Maddie, let’s break for half an hour – I’m afraid there are a beastly lot of details I’m meant to grill you about which we’ve not even touched on yet, and I feel I’ve rather lost my composure.’
He pulled out a spotted silk handkerchief, turned aside again and wiped his nose. When he faced me once more he gave me a hand to raise me to my feet. ‘Also, I think you need a nap.’
What did Julie say about me – I am trained to react positively to orders from people in authority. I went back to my room and fell soundly asleep for 20 minutes, and dreamed Julie was teaching me to foxtrot in the kitchen at Craig Castle. Of course she did teach me to foxtrot, though it was at one of the Maidsend hops and not in the kitchen at Craig Castle, but the dream was so real that when I woke up I couldn’t at first figure out where I was. And then it was like being kicked in the head with desolation all over again.
Except now instead of ‘The Last Time I Saw Paris’ I have got ‘Dream a Little Dream of Me’ stuck playing in my mind over and over, which is what the band was playing when we were dancing at Maidsend. I don’t mind at all, as I am so sick of ‘The Last Time I Saw Paris’. If I ever hear either tune being played in some public place I am sure I will immediately start to howl.
So then Balliol and I had another session and it got a bit more technical, me having to remember names and numbers I didn’t know I knew – code names for every single Resistance agent I’d been introduced to, Balliol tallying them against notes in a little calfskin notebook of his own, and the location of any arms or supplies or cachettes I knew about. There was a moment where I was bent over with my elbows on my knees, and I was pulling at my hair until the roots hurt, trying to come up with accurate map coordinates for the Thibauts’ barn and the rose woman’s garage. It dawned on me I’d been sitting there tearing my hair like that for the past twenty minutes, and suddenly I got mad.
I raised my head with a jerk and asked furiously, ‘Why? Why do you care whether I can come up with the coordinates out of my head? I can make up coordinates the way Julie made up code! Give me a map and I’ll point it out, you don’t need me to do this! What do you really want, you bloody Machiavellian BASTARD?’
He was silent for a minute.
‘I’ve been asked to test you a bit,’ he confessed at last. ‘Turn up the heat, see how you respond. I’m not honestly sure what to do with you. The Air Ministry wants to take away your licence and the Special Operations Executive wants to recommend you for a George Medal. They’d like you to stay with them.’
NOT IN A MILLION YEARS.
But, but. My success as an unofficial agent for the SOE will cancel out my flight to France as an unofficial pilot for the RAF. I won’t get a medal, and I jolly well don’t want or deserve one, but I won’t lose my licence either – I mean, you could say I’ve already lost it myself, but they’ll reissue it. They won’t take it away. They won’t even take away my job. Oh – now this really is good reason to blub, tears of relief. They will let me fly again. I will have to go up before the Accident Committee, but that will just be about the actual accident – as if I were one of the Moon Squadron itself, pranging my own plane. I won’t be charged with anything else.
And the Air Transport Auxiliary will be ferrying planes to France, come the invasion. Not long now – spring. I will go back. I know I will go back.
I am exhausted. Except for my nap and a couple of hours after we landed I h
Balliol has given me a copy of a message they have just received and decoded from the Damask W/T operator.
REPORT HEAVY ALLIED BOMBARDMENT OVERHEAD ORMAIE NIGHT OF SAT 11 DEC AM SUN 12 DEC SUCCESSFUL OP DESTROYING CDB AKA GESTAPO REGIONAL HQ NO KNOWN ARRESTS ALL WELL SVP PASS MSG TO KITTYHAWK SAY ISOLDES FATHER IS FOUND SHOT THROUGH HEAD BELIEVED SUICIDE
‘Who is Isolde’s father?’ Balliol asked when he gave it to me.
‘The Gestapo officer who – who questioned Verity. And sentenced her.’
‘Suicide,’ Balliol said softly. ‘Another wretched man.’
‘Another wretched girl,’ I corrected.
—
Those ripples in the pond again – it just doesn’t stop in one place. All those lives that have touched mine so briefly – most of them I don’t even know their real names, like Julie’s great-aunt and the driver of the Rosalie. And some of them I don’t know anything other than their names, like Benjamin Zylberberg, the Jewish doctor, and Esther Lévi, whose flute music Julie was given to write on. And some of them I met briefly and liked and won’t ever see again, like the vicar’s son who flew Spitfires and Anna Engel and the Jamaican gunner.
And then there is Isolde von Linden, at school in Switzerland, who doesn’t know yet that her father has just shot himself.
—
Isolde still in the realm of the sun, in the shimmering daylight still, Isolde –
I have still got the matchbook that her father gave Amélie.
—
I’ve had a bath and borrowed a pair of pyjamas from the pretty First Aid Nursing Yeomanry driver who never says anything. Goodness knows what she thinks of me. I am not locked in or guarded any more. Someone is going to fly me back to Manchester tomorrow. Tonight – tonight I will sleep in this room one more time, in this bed where Julie cried herself to sleep in my arms eight months ago.
I’m going to keep her grey silk scarf. But I want Jamie to take this notebook, and my Pilot’s Notes, and Julie’s confession, and give them all to Esmé Beaufort-Stuart because it is only right that Julie’s lady mother should be told. If she wants to know, I think it is her right to know. Absolutely Every Last Detail.
I am back in England. I can go back to work. I haven’t got the words to say how stunned and grateful I am that I have been allowed to keep my licence.
But a part of me lies buried in lace and roses on a riverbank in France – a part of me is broken off forever. A part of me will always be unflyable, stuck in the climb.
Lady Beaufort-Stuart
Craig Castle
Castle Craig
Aberdeenshire
26 Dec. 1943
My darling Maddie,
Jamie has delivered your ‘letters’ – both yours and Julie’s, and I have read them. They will stay here, and be safe – the Official Secrets Act is of little consequence in a house which absorbs secrets like damp. A few more recipe cards and prescription forms tossed in amongst the teeming contents of our two libraries will surely go unnoticed.
I want to tell you what Jamie said to me as he gave me these pages:
‘Maddie did the right thing.’
I say so too.
Please come to see me, Maddie darling, as soon as they let you. The wee lads are all distraught with the news and you will do them good. Perhaps they will do you good as well. They are my only consolation at the moment and I have been fearfully busy trying to make it a ‘happy’ Christmas for them. Ross and Jock have now lost both parents in the bombing so perhaps I shall keep them when the war is over.
I should like to ‘keep’ you too, if you will let me – I mean, in my heart and as my only daughter’s best friend. It would be like losing two daughters if you were to leave us now.
Please come back soon. The window is always open.
Fly safely.
Yr. loving,
Esmé
P.S. Thank you for the Eterpen. It is most extraordinary – Not a single word of this letter has blotted. No one will ever know how many tears I shed whilst writing it!
I do mean fly safely. And I do mean come back.
Author’s Debriefing
As someone has already said, ‘My reports are so rubbish.’ I am legally bound to write this Afterword, as I am legally bound to ensure this book is not in breach of the Official Secrets Acts. This is meant to be a Historical Note and it pains me to admit that Code Name Verity is fiction – that Julia Beaufort-Stuart and Maddie Brodatt are not actually real people, merely products of my adventure-obsessed brain.
But I’ll try. This book started off rather simply as a portrait of an Air Transport Auxiliary pilot. Being a woman and a pilot myself, I wanted to explore the possibilities that would have been open to me during the Second World War. I’d already written a war story about a girl pilot (‘Something Worth Doing’ in Firebirds Soaring, edited by Sharyn November), but now I wanted to write something longer and more accurately detailed and, above all, more plausible.
I started with research, hoping to get plot ideas, and read The Forgotten Pilots by Lettice Curtis. This is the definitive history of the Air Transport Auxiliary, and it’s written by a woman, so it felt right and natural for my ATA pilot to be a girl. But the ATA story careened out of control when (by accident, while making dinner) I stumbled on the framework for Code Name Verity and added in a Special Operations Executive agent. More reading ensued – OK, I could have a pilot AND a spy and they’d both be girls. And it would still be plausible. Because there were women doing these jobs. There weren’t many of them. But they were real. They worked and suffered and fought just as hard as any man. Many of them died.
Bear in mind that despite my somewhat exhaustive quest for historical accuracy, this book is not meant to be a good history but rather a good story. So there is one major leap of fictional faith the reader has to grant me, and that is Maddie’s flight to France. Women ATA pilots were not allowed to fly to Europe until well after the invasion of Normandy, when German-occupied territory was safely back in Allied hands. (When Maddie is called the ‘only shot-down Allied airwoman outside Russia’, it is a reference to Russian women who were actually combat pilots during the war.) I worked very hard to construct a believable chain of events leading up to Maddie’s Lysander trip to France – her trump card is really my trump card, the fact that she can authorise her own flight.
The other thing I did make up (like a certain unreliable narrator) is all the proper nouns. Most of them anyway. My reasoning is that it is an easy way to avoid historical incongruities. For example, Oakway is a very thinly disguised Ringway (now Manchester Airport); but unlike Oakway, Ringway had no squadron on site in the winter of 1940. Maidsend is a composite of many Kentish airfields. The French city of Ormaie doesn’t exist, but it’s loosely based on Poitiers.
Early in my research I also planned to say here that I’d made up the specific jobs of SOE interrogator and SOE taxi pilot. But it turns out that there was an American ATA pilot, Betty Lussier, who more or less did both jobs herself at separate times during the war (though she worked for the OSS, the Americans, not the SOE). Every time I find out the life story of another woman who was a wartime pilot or Resistance agent I think to myself, You couldn’t make these people up.
I would love to go through my book page by page and document where Absolutely Every Last Detail comes from – how I found out that you can use kerosene to thin ink, or that school nurses used pen nibs to do blood tests, or where I first discovered a Jewish prescription form. Obviously I can’t do it for Absolutely Every Last Detail, but since paper and ink are the fabric of this novel, let’s talk about the BALLPOINT PEN! It was going to be very difficult to keep all my fictional writers supplied with ink, and it would be convenient to give them ballpoints. So I thought I ought to check to make sure ballpoint pens existed in 1943.
It turns out they did, but only just. The ballpoint pen was invented by Lászl
There’s a real story, like this one, behind just about every detail or episode in the book. I think it was in a Horrible History that I learned about the SOE agent who was caught looking the wrong way before crossing a French street. I myself nearly got killed once making the same mistake. I’ve also spent a couple of backbreaking afternoons clearing rocks from a runway. Even the breakdowns of the Lysander and the Citroën Rosalie are based in reality. The Green Man is a real pub, if you can find it. I didn’t even make up the name of that one. But it’s called something else now.
I know there must be mistakes and inaccuracies sprinkled throughout the book, but for these I beg a little poetic licence. Some of them are conscious, some are not. The code name ‘Verity’ of the title is the most obvious to me. As far as I know, female SOE agents in France all had French girl’s names as code names, and Verity is an English name. But it translates well as vérité – the French word for truth – and some of the code names for wireless operators are so random (‘nurse’, for example), that I’ve decided to stick with it. Another good example is the use of the term ‘Nacht und Nebel’, which refers to the Nazi policy of making certain political prisoners vanish as though into ‘night and fog’. The term was so secret that it’s highly unlikely Julie would have ever heard it. However, prisoners at the Ravensbrück concentration camp knew they were designated ‘NN’ and by the end of 1944 they knew what it meant too. Nelson’s last words, also, are a subject of some considerable debate. But whatever he actually said, Hardy did kiss him. Where I fail in accuracy, I hope I make up for it in plausibility.