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Must get in the habit of calling her Verity Everyone else does Her circuit is called Damask, after their rower – they generally label circuits by sooes by, or even knows, real naive Julie’s nanment is so dead secret that her first contact wasn’t told she and her goods had arrived until she’d told hih he are there had been a Lysander crash outside Ormaie, he hadn’t known she’d survived until he met her – and when she spoke to him, neither one of them knew that the explosives landed safely as well But word is spreading through the circuit that both Julie Verity and the explosives are here Next stop the town hall She is supposed to get access to the city archives and look up the original architect’s drawings for the old hotel building that the Ormaie Gestapo use as their headquarters She won’t be able to do that till we sort out her ID though

We are puzzling over how to do it Mitraillette is not allowed to speak directly to Julie’s Verity’s contact, so she has to find soe They keep their tasks and names very carefully separated And we don’t want to hand over Verity’s ‘Katharina Habicht’ papers to anyone but Verity, ie ‘Katharina’ herself Mitraillette is going to try to arrange for V to pick them up from one of the Resistance ‘cachettes’, their secret letterboxes Thatso to do so onno one finds o ahead as planned – they’ve got the equipot Verity, the contacts are all in place With a little care and planning it’ll be the Oroes up like Vesuvius, and not this barn If only K&au ‘behind enemy lines’, as it were, with Kittyhawk’s British identity papers!

I a to think it was one of her less clever ideas to call herself Kitty Hawk in Gerh to be fair she wasn’t expecting

Have taken Paul’s revolver apart and put it back together 7 tiine

Another Lysander has come down

Unbelievable but true This one uns and came in just as planned, easy peasy, about 70field had beco but rain, rain, rain for the past week, all over France I think The reception co to haul the plane out of the mud – they hitched a pair of bulls to it, as it was too muddy even to drive a tractor on to the field, but finally had to give up as it was about to get light So they have destroyed another aircraft and there is another Special Duties pilot stuck here

I say another, but of course I am not really Special Duties There’s so the only one – ish of me, I know, but I can’t help it

There had been talk of trying to getto try to squeeze me in with the two people I was supposed to have airlifted back to England in the first place – I’d have had to sit on the floor, but SOE and ATA are rather frantic about me at home and want s need to be arranged, then rearranged, then go wrong at the last e to London has to be laboriously encoded and delivered on a bicycle to a hidden wireless set ten ht away because someone has disturbed the leaf in the keyhole or the eyelash folded in the note left for the courier, and then they have to wait three days towatched The rain has been dreadful, with cloud at 1000 feet and visibility next to nothing in the river valleys where the s – no one could land here anyway No field closer than Tours, 50 miles away, to replace the one I ruined

They call a ruined field ‘brûlé’, burnt Which mine is

They will have to send a Hudson to collect us all, as there just isn’t the roo for the h! I have never been so da tiht, no heat They pile the goosefeather quilts and sheepskin in with rey, heavy, autu, even if you weren’t trapped in a crawl space under the eaves I have been down a few tiive me a meal in the farmhouse each day to war here for a week, as et chilblained – so dead cold always I need those ave ers Essentials for the Forces that book was called If I’d kno essential those ht bag – except to wear theas mask

I wish I was a writer – I wish I had the words to describe the rich mixture of fear and boredom that I have lived with for the past ten days, and which putters on indefinitely ahead ofto be sentenced – not waiting for execution, as I’m not without hope But the possibility that it will end in death is there And real

In the irl endlessly loading shuttles – nothing to do but suck on ers, like Jamie in the North Sea, and worry I a, always at work on so I don’t kno to occupy irls at Maidsend all lay snoring or knitting or doing their nails when the rain was tipping it down in such grotty visibility no one could fly Knitting was never enough, got so bored with it, can’t concentrate on anything bigger than socks or gloves I always ended up scrounging bicycles to go exploring

Remember the Bicycle Adventure when I told Julie all my fears – they see bo fear of discovery and capture It never goes away There isn’t ever any relief, never the possibility of an ‘All Clear’ siren You always feel a little bit sick inside, knowing the worst ht happen at any moment