Burns, ha ha, Burns to stop the burns.
Behead me or hang me, that will never fear me –
I’LL BURN AUCHINDOON ere my life leave me
Burning burning burning burning
Oh God, those pictures.
burning
Maddie.
Maddie
Ormaie 23.XI.43 JB-S
Von Linden himself put an end to the proceedings last night – came storming in like the Charge of the Light Brigade and swept the pages together while I fell flat on my face on the table in a pool of ink with my eyes closed.
‘Lord God Almighty, Weiser, are you an idiot? She will not produce anything worth reading when she’s in this state. Look – this is verse. English doggerel. Pages and pages of it!’ The Jerry philistine proceeded to wad everything I can remember of ‘Tam o’ Shanter’ into balls of waste paper. I think he may read more English than he lets on if he recognises Burns as English. ‘Burn this rubbish. I have more than enough irrelevant nonsense out of her without you encouraging it! Give her water and take her back to her room. And get rid of that filthy cigarette. We will talk about that tomorrow.’
Which was as emotional an outburst as I have ever heard from him, but I think he is overtired too.
Oh yes, and ENGEL has been CRYING. Her eyes are very red and she keeps scrubbing at her nose, which is red too. I wonder what would make On-Duty-Female-Guard Fräulein Engel blub on the job.
Special Operations Training
After that disastrous interview last April (it wasn’t disastrous for Intelligence, I suppose, but it left Eva Seiler a bit damaged) Berlin’s interpretive liaison was given a week’s leave To Think About Her Work and whether she wanted to continue it. In other words, Queenie was given the opportunity to Gracefully Bow Out. She spent the week in Castle Craig with her lady mother, the long-suffering Mrs Darling (as it were) – poor Mrs Darling never had a clue what any of her six children were actually doing, or when they were coming or going, and she was not best pleased at the black marks on her fine-boned daughter’s Celtic white skin.
‘Pirates,’ Queenie said. ‘I was bound to the mast by Captain Hook.’
‘When this dreadful war is over,’ said her mother, ‘I want to know Absolutely Every Last Detail.’
‘Absolutely Every Last Detail of my work falls under the Official Secrets Act and I will be thrown into prison for the rest of my life if I ever tell you anything about it,’ Queenie told her mother. ‘So stop asking.’
Ross, the youngest of the Glaswegian evacuees, overheard this conversation – it was just as well Queenie hadn’t given her lady mother any details (careless talk costs lives, etc.) – but the official-looking, pretty wireless operator became rather a worshipped goddess among the Craig Castle Irregulars after that – she had been held prisoner by pirates.
(I love those wee laddies, I really do. Nits and all.)
During that week also, Queenie’s darling, elegant French nanny, her lady mother’s constant companion, in a fit of maternal compassion began to knit Queenie a pullover. Being limited in materials, due to shortages and rationing, she used a gorgeous, sunset-coloured wool which she had unravelled from a suit tailored for her by Ormaie’s most expensive modiste in 1912. I mention my sweater’s advent here because I think of it as part of the endgame – as though my poor loving nanny is a sort of Mme Defarge, knotting my fate inexorably into the stitches of this nobly field-tested woollen garment. It doesn’t look much like military issue, but it has seen active service and has the bloodstains to prove it. Also it is warm and fashionable – at least, the memory of fashion clings to it. It is still warm.
At the end of my week of reflection I decided that, like my dubious ancestor Macbeth, I was in figurative blood stepped in so far that there wasn’t much point in turning back; and also I loved being Eva Seiler. I loved the playacting and the pretence and the secrecy of it, and I flattered myself with my own importance. Occasionally I pulled Very Useful Information out of my ‘clients’. Location of airfields. Aircraft types. Code. Things like that.
At any rate, after that April interview, everyone including Eva agreed that she needed a change of scene. Perhaps a few weeks on the Continent, where she could put her sangfroid and multiple languages and wireless operator’s skills to much-needed use in Nazi-occupied France.
It seemed like a good idea at the time.
Do you know – you probably do know – that in enemy territory the life expectancy of a w/op, or W/T operator as they say in SOE, is only six weeks? That’s the usual time it takes your direction-finding equipment to ferret out the location of a hidden radio set. The rest of a Resistance circuit, the web of contacts and couriers, skulks in shadows, squirrelling away explosives and carrying messages that can’t be trusted to a postman, moving every day, never meeting in the same place twice. At the hub of the wheel, still and vulnerable, the wireless operator sits amid a pile of equipment that is awkward to shift and difficult to conceal, snarled in a fixed web of stat and code, radiating noisy electric beacons that beckon your trackers like neon advertisements.
It is six weeks today since I landed here. I suppose that’s quite a good innings for a wireless operator, though my success at staying alive for so long would carry more weight if I’d actually managed to set up a radio before I was caught. Now I really am living on borrowed time. Not much more to tell.
Still, Fräulein Engel will probably appreciate the closure of hearing about Maddie’s operational flight to France. I suppose somebody will be court-martialled for that. I’m not sure who.
The Special Duties squadron leader was supposed to take me. The Moon Squadron was suffering a bit at the end of September – they’d had a fantastically successful summer, a dozen flights a month, twice as many agents dropped off and scores of refugees picked up – but injury and incident had winnowed their Lysander pilots down to four at this particular point in time and one of those was so stricken with ’flu he couldn’t stand up (they were all exhausted). You can see where this is going.
For me, the preparation took months – another parachute course, then an elaborate field exercise in which I had to scramble around a real city (an unfamiliar one, they sent me off to Birmingham to do it) leaving coded messages for contacts I’d never met and arranging clandestine pick-ups of dummy parcels. The chief danger is that a policeman will notice your suspicious activities and arrest you – in which case it is quite difficult convincing your own authorities that you’re not working for the enemy.