I don’t know why I bent the stupid thing again. It is so easy to wind Miss Engel up. She always wins; but only because my ankles are tied to my chair.
Well, and also because at the end of every argument she reminds me of the deal I made with a certain officer of the Gestapo, and I collapse.
‘Hauptsturmführer von Linden is busy, as you know, and will not wish to be interrupted. But I have been told to summon him if necessary. You have been given pen and paper by his judgement of your willingness to cooperate with him, and if you will not write out the confession you have agreed he will have no choice but to resume your interrogation.’
JUST SHUT UP, ANNA ENGEL. I KNOW.
I will do anything: she has only to mention his name and I remember now, I will do anything, anything, to avoid him interrogating me again.
So. Range and Direction Finding. Coastal Defence. Do I get my thirty pieces of silver? No, just some more of this hotel stationery. It is very nice to write on.
Coastal Defence, the unabridged version
We saw it coming – someone saw it coming. We were that little bit ahead of you and you didn’t realise it. You didn’t realise how advanced the RDF system was already, or how quickly we were training people to use it, or how far we could see with it. You didn’t even realise how quickly we were building new planes of our own. It is true we were outnumbered, but with RDF we saw you coming – saw the swarms of Luftwaffe aircraft even as they were leaving their bases in Occupied France, worked out how high they were flying, saw how many of them were making the raid. And that gave us time to rally. We could meet you in the air, beat you back, keep you from landing, distract you till your fuel ran out and you turned tail until the next wave. Our besieged island, alone on the edge of Europe.
Maddie was sworn to secrecy on the life of her unborn children. It’s so secret they don’t give you a title when you have anything to do with Radar; you’re just called a ‘special duties clerk’. Clerk, Special Duties, clk/sd for short, like w/op is for Wireless Operator and Y for wireless. Clk/sd, that’s possibly the most useful and damning piece of information I’ve given you. Now you know.
Maddie spent six weeks in Radar training. She was also given a very nice promotion and made an officer. Then she was posted to RAF Maidsend, an operational base for a squadron of new Spitfire fighter planes, not far from Canterbury, near the Kentish coast. It was the furthest she had ever been from home. Maddie was not actually put to work at a Radar screen in one of the direction finding stations, though Maidsend did have one; she was still in the radio room. In the fire and fury of the summer of 1940 Maddie sat in a tower of iron and concrete taking bearings over the telephone. The other RDF girls did the ID work on the glass screens with the blinking green lights, and wired or telephoned it to Operations; then when Operations identified approaching aircraft for her, Maddie answered air-to-ground radio calls as the aircraft came limping home. Or sometimes roaring home in triumph, or newly delivered from the maintenance depot at Swi
SWINLEY SWINLEY
At Swinley. Thibaut has made me finish writing the name. I am so ashamed of myself I want to be sick again.
Engel says impatiently not to bother about the name of the workshop. There have been repeated attempts to bomb it to bits and it’s not really a secret. Engel is sure our Hauptsturmführer will be more interested in my sample description of the early Radar network. She is cross with T. now for interrupting.
I hate them both. Hate them all.
I HATE THEM
Coastal Defence, damn it.
Snivelling IDIOT.
So. So, on the RDF screen you’d see a green dot for an aircraft, one or two, moving across the screen. It might be ours. You’d watch a battle building, the dots multiplying – more joining the first as the pulsing light swept the screen. They’d come together and some of them would go out, like the cinders of sparklers. And every green flash that disappeared was a life finished, one man for a fighter, a whole crew for a bomber. Out, out, brief candle. (That is from Macbeth. He is said to be another of my unlikely ancestors, and actually did hold court on my family’s estate from time to time. He was not, by all contemporary Scottish accounts, the treacherous bastard Shakespeare makes him out to be. Will history remember me for my MBE, my British Empire honour for ‘chivalry’, or for my cooperation with the Gestapo? I don’t want to think about it. I expect they can take the MBE away if you stop being chivalrous.)
If they were radio equipped Maddie could talk to the planes the special duties clerks saw on their screens. She’d tell the pilots more or less what she’d have told them back at Oakway, except she didn’t know landmarks so well in Kent. She’d pass bearings to the moving aircraft, along with wind speed and whether or not there were holes in the runway today (sometimes we got raided). Or she’d tell other planes to give priority to the one that had lost its flaps, or whose pilot had a lump of shrapnel lodged in his shoulder, or something like that.
Maddie was listening for incoming stragglers one afternoon following a battle that hadn’t involved the Maidsend Squadron. She nearly fell off her chair when she heard the desperate call that came in on her frequency.
‘Mayday – mayday –’
– Recognisable in English. Or perhaps that was French, ‘M’aidez’, help me. The rest of the transmission was in German.
The voice was a boy’s voice, young and scared. He broke off each call with a sob. Maddie swallowed – she had no idea where the anguished cries for help were coming from. Maddie called out, ‘Listen – listen!’ and switched her headset on to the Tannoy so that everyone could hear, and then she grabbed the telephone.
‘It’s Assistant Section Officer Brodatt in the Tower. Can I get directly through to Jenny in Special Duties? All right, Tessa then. Anyone with a screen going. I need an ident on a radio call – ’
Everyone crowded round the telephone, reading over Maddie’s shoulder as she took notes from the direction finding station, then gasping aloud as the meaning of her notes sank in.
‘Heading straight for Maidsend!’
‘What if it’s a bomber?’
‘What if it’s still loaded?’
‘What if it’s a hoax?’
‘He’d be calling in English if it was a hoax!’
‘Anyone speak German?’ shouted the officer in charge of the radio room. Silence.
‘Christ! Brodatt, stay on the ’phone. Davenport, you run to the wireless station, perhaps one of those girls can help. Get me a German-speaker! Now!’