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The glens were full of frost and fog Fog lay in pillows in the folds of the hills; the distantpink and white beneath rays of low sunshine that didn’t touch the Spitfire’s wings The haar, the North Sea coastal fog, was closing in It was so cold that the las hood, so that it see in the cockpit

Maddie landed at Deeside just before sunset But it wasn’t sunset, it ilight grey and turning blue, and she would either have to spend the night in a cheerless, unuestroouesthouse in Aberdeen Or she’d have to spend half the night on an unheated and blacked-out train and perhaps arrive back in Manchester at 2 o’clock in theto face the loneliness of the airfield’s spartan accoranite-faced, Aberdeen landlady ouldn’t accept her ration coupons for an unarranged evening meal, Maddie opted for the train

She walked to the branch line station at Deeside There were no route n co, ‘If you knohere you are, then please tell others’ There were no lights in the waiting room because they’d shohen you opened the door The ticket seller had a die

Maddie straightened herself out a bit The girls in the ATA had been given a good splash of publicity in the papers and were expected to live up to certain standards of neatness But she’d found that people didn’t always recognise her navy unifors, or n a land as France to Maddie

‘Is there a train any tireed the ticket seller, as cryptic as the platform posters

‘When?’

‘Tento Aberdeen?’

‘Och, no, not to Aberdeen The next train’s the branch line to Castle Craig’

Tothe ticket seller’s speech fro fluent in the Doric herself, wasn’t sure she’d heard correctly

‘Craig Castle?’

‘Castle Craig,’ this bogle of a railway e, miss?’

‘No – No!’ Maddie said sensibly, and then in a fit of pure insanity brought on, no doubt, by loneliness and hunger and fatigue, added, ‘Not a single, I’ve got to co’

Half an hour later: Oh, what have I done! Maddie thought to herself, as the antique and ice-cold two-coach stopping train lurched and crept past a nu Maddie further and further into the haunted foothills of the Scottish Highlands

The coe was die was not heated There were no other passengers in Maddie’s compartment

‘When’s the next train back?’ she asked the ticket collector

‘Last one in two hours’

‘Is there one before that?’

‘Last one in two hours,’ he repeated unhelpfully

(Solish for the Battle of Culloden, the last battle to be fought on British soil, in 1746 Iine ill say about Adolf Hitler in 200 years)

Maddie got off the train at Castle Craig She had no luggage but her gasa skirt which she was supposed to hen she wasn’t flying, but which she hadn’t been able to change into, and her maps and pilot’s notes and circular slide rule for wind speed coht’s 2 oz bar of chocolate She remembered how she’d nearly ith envy at Dyht in the back of a Fox Moth and nearly freezing to death Maddie wondered if she’d freeze to death before the train she just got off finally went back to Deeside two hours later

Here I think I should re-established in rather the upper echelons of the British aristocracy Maddie, you will recall, is the granddaughter of an irant tradesman She and I would not ever have met in peacetime Not ever, unless perhaps I’d decided to buy a ht have servedradio operator and been promoted so quickly, it’s not likely we’d have become friends even in wartile with the Lower Ranks

(I don’t believe it for a minute – that ouldn’t have become friends soone off and blown us both into the sa and knocked our heads together in a flash of green sunlight But it wouldn’t have been likely)

At any rate Maddie’s growing s on this particular ill-conceived rail journey were o and knock on the door of a Laird’s Castle and ask for accommodation, or even a cup of tea, while she waited for the return train She was only Maddie Brodatt and not a descendant of Mary Queen of Scots or Macbeth

But she had not taken the War into account I have heard a goodthe British class syste a word, but it is certainly er to get off at Castle Craig, and after she’d dithered on the platforreet her personally

‘You aHouse, are ye?’

For a moment Maddie was too surprised to answer