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‘Won’t your granddad do it for you?’
‘He wouldn’t even give it to ine apart I have to do it myself or I can’t have it’
‘I still love hireen lanes of Highdown Rise, along tractor ruts that nearly bounced them over drystone field walls and into a bed of mire and nettles and sheep I remember and I knohat it must have been like Every now and then, round a corner or at the crest of a hureen chain of the Pennines stretching serenely to the west, or the factory chi the blue north sky with black smoke
‘And you’ll have a skill,’ Beryl yelled
‘A what?’
‘A 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 hland 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 fairl a job fixing engines?’ Maddie said ‘Gran wants ’
They had to get off the bike to walk it along the ditch-filled lane Then there was another rise, and they caate set between field boundaries, and Maddie leaned the ainst 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 exclairan!’
‘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 fa as apples Maddie’s sandwiches were on rye bread frorandmother sent her every Friday The pickled onions stopped Maddie and Beryl having a conversation because chewingin their heads they couldn’t hear each other talk, and they had to be careful sing so they wouldn’t be asphyxiated by an accidental blast of vinegar (Perhaps Chief-Storht find pickled onions useful as persuasive tools And your prisoners would get fed at the sael instructs me to put down here, for Captain von Linden to knohen he reads it, that I have wasted 20 hed at my own stupid joke about the pickled onions and broke the pencil point We had to wait for soel is not allowed to leaveafter I snapped off the new point straight away because Miss E had sharpened it very close to s into my eyes while SS-Scharführer Thibaut held hing 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, s 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 s – the Tiger Moth is a biplane and has two sets (another type I have just res back for trucking theit, and it has a super view froers as well as the pilot I have been a passenger in one a couple of tiraded version is called a Leopard Moth (that’s three aircraft I have na the field at Highdown Rise, the first Puss Moth Maddie ever ca 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 s, 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!’ screahted 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 caine stopped and the s to put his darazing field, unploughed, uns 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 aerodro rass for thirty yards Then it tipped up gracefully on to its nose