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!’
‘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 feeling very 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.
Beryl was there to catch the dragging weight of the pilot’s senseless body. It was easier for Maddie to get down off the plane than it had been for her to get up, just a light hop to the ground. Maddie unbuckled the pilot’s helmet and goggles; she and Beryl had both done First Aid in Girl Guides, for all that’s worth, and knew enough to make sure the casualty could breathe.
Beryl began to giggle.
‘Who’s the gormless cow!’ Maddie exclaimed.
‘It’s a girl!’ Beryl laughed. ‘It’s a girl!’
—
Beryl stayed with the unconscious girl pilot while Maddie rode her Silent Superb to the farm to get help. She found two big strong lads her own age shovelling cow dung, and the farmer’s wife sorting First Early potatoes and cursing a cotillion of girls who were doing a huge jigsaw on the old stone kitchen floor (it was Sunday, or they’d have been boiling laundry). A rescue squad was despatched. Maddie was sent further down the lane on her bike to the bottom of the hill where there was a pub and a phone box.
‘She’ll need an ambulance, tha knows, love,’ the farmer’s wife had said to Maddie kindly. ‘She’ll need to go to hospital if she’s been flying an aeroplane.’
The words rattled around in Maddie’s head all the way to the telephone. Not ‘She’ll need to go to hospital if she’s been injured,’ but ‘She’ll need to go to hospital if she’s been flying an aeroplane.’
A flying girl! thought Maddie. A girl flying an aeroplane!
No, she corrected herself; a girl not flying a plane. A girl tipping up a plane in a sheep field.
But
