‘I’ve no doubt she’s a superior pilot,’ the squadron leader said.
‘Well, what in creation is she doing ferrying clapped-out Tiger Moths about in that case? Give the Bloody Machiavellian English Intelligence Officer a ring and get permission,’ Jamie suggested.
Michael said, rather excitedly, ‘Don’t count it as my operational cross-country. I need the practice.’
‘If it’s not an operational flight,’ said the squadron leader, ‘there’s no need to ring Intelligence. I’ll take responsibility.’
Maddie had won. She could scarcely believe her luck.
‘I don’t want this out of this room,’ the squadron leader said, and everybody looked blank, shrugging with innocence and indifference. Maddie walked shoulder to shoulder with the SOE agent when they went out to climb into the waiting aircraft. The ground crew gave her funny looks.
‘Michael needing help with his navigation again?’ one of them asked kindly, offering her a leg up the ladder into the back of the plane.
Secretly Maddie thought Michael was as lucky as a boy with jam smeared all over his face, with his carefully annotated map marked with every single anti-aircraft gun and navigation pinpoint all the way into the middle of France and back.
She didn’t have her own map, sitting in the back, but she had an absolutely fabulous view out of both sides and behind, a view she didn’t normally get, and the leisure to enjoy it. She had a job too, keeping her eyes peeled for night fighters. It wasn’t far over the blacked-out villages of southern England before they reached the coast. The great golden moon made the blue lights on the wing tips of the operational Lysanders ahead of them scarcely distinguishable from stars – they bobbed and winked in and out of Maddie’s line of sight, but she knew where she was. That river, that chalk quarry, that estuary in the glimmering night – familiar landmarks. Then the unbelievable bright loveliness of the English Channel, a shimmering, infinite, lamé cloth of silver and blue. Maddie could see the black silhouettes of a convoy of ships below her. She wondered how long it would take the Luftwaffe to find them.
‘Oi, Michael,’ Maddie called out over the intercom. ‘You’re not meant to follow that lot into France! You’re supposed to change your heading here, and go further south on your own, aren’t you?’
She heard a lot of cursing from the front before the pilot pulled himself together and reset his course. Then she heard his sheepish, ‘Thanks, mate.’
Thanks, mate. Maddie hugged herself with pride and pleasure. I’m one of them, she thought. I’m on my way to France. I might as well be operational.
Deep in her stomach she nursed two cringing, niggling fears: 1) that they might be fired on, and 2) court martial. But she knew Michael’s route had been carefully plotted to avoid guns and airfields, and that their most dangerous moment had probably been when they crossed the shipping convoy. If they made it home safely there would be no need for court martial. If they didn’t make it home safely, well, presumably court martial wouldn’t be much of a problem in that case either.
Now they were over the ghostly white cliffs of eastern Normandy. The Seine’s loops shone like a great unwinding spool of silver mesh off the port wing tip. Maddie gasped at the river’s inadvertent loveliness, and all at once she found herself spilling childish tears, not just for her own besieged island, but for all of Europe. How could everything have come so fearfully and thoroughly unravelled?
There were no lights over France; it was as blacked-out as Britain. Europe’s lamps had all gone out.
‘What’s that!’ she gasped into the intercom.
Michael saw it at the same time and banked sharply away. He began to circle, a hair too steeply at first, then with steadier rudder control. Below and ahead of them, lit up like a ghastly funfair, was a rectangle of stark, garish white light desecrating an otherwise blacked-out landscape.
‘That’s where the last pinpoint is supposed to be!’ Michael told her.
‘Some pinpoint! Is it an airfield? It’s jolly well operational if it is!’
‘No,’ said the pilot slowly, as he circled back and got another look. ‘No, I think it’s a prison camp. Look – the lighting’s around the perimeter fence. To catch anyone trying to get out.’
‘Are you in the right place?’ Maddie asked dubiously.
‘You tell me.’ But he said it with confidence. He stuffed his waymarked map back through the opening in the bulkhead, followed by a pocket-sized electric torch. ‘Keep that under cover,’ he said. ‘There’s supposed to be an airfield twenty miles to the east. I’ve been trying to steer clear of it. I damn well don’t need an escort.’
Maddie studied the map beneath a tent she made of her tunic. Michael was smartly on target as far as she could tell. The glaring prison fence was close to a railway bridge over a river which should have been the turning-back point. Maddie switched off the torch and stared out of the window, her night vision ruined by trying to read the map. But she could tell they had turned back.
‘You didn’t need my help after all,’ she said, and passed him back his torch and map.
‘I’d have just played follow-my-leader after Jamie all the way to Paris if you hadn’t reminded me to turn.’
‘He’s not going to Paris, is he?’
Michael said enviously, ‘He won’t get to buzz the Eiffel Tower, but he’s picking up a couple of Parisian agents. He’ll have to land well outside the city.’ Then Michael added in a more sober voice, ‘I’m still jolly glad you came along. That prison gave me a turn. I was so sure I was in the right place, and then –’
‘You were,’ said Maddie.
‘I’m jolly glad you came along,’ Michael repeated.
He said it a third time when they landed back in England two hours later. The relieved squadron leader grinned and nodded tolerantly as he welcomed them back. ‘Find your way all right?’
‘A piece of cake, apart from the bit at the end where the pinpoint turned out to be next to a ruddy great prison!’
The squadron leader laughed. ‘I’ll say you did find your way. That always comes as a surprise the first time. Proves you got there though. Or did you have help?’
‘He found it all himself,’ Maddie said truthfully. ‘I can’t thank you enough for letting me go along.’