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It’s like being in love, discovering your best friend.
Von Linden really should know me well enough by now to realize that I am not going to face my execution without a fight.
am no longer afraid of getting old. Indeed I can’t believe I ever said anything so stupid. So childish. So offensive and arrogant. But mainly, so very, very stupid. I desperately want to grow old.
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 unraveled?
Maddie did not ask what had happened. She was never so petty. She did not dabble with minnows at the surface when there were thirty-pound salmon swimming deeper down.
“Patriotism is not enough—I must have no hatred or bitterness for anyone.”
There is only one reason I did not go down in flames over Angers, and that is because I knew I had Julie in the back. Would never have had the presence of mind to put that fire out if I hadn’t been trying to save her life.
The quick, sudden terror of exploding bombs is not the same as the never-ending, bone-sapping 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 might happen at any moment.
I am so—just dead humbled by the risks everybody takes, the double lives they all lead, how they shrug and go on working.
How amazing, astonishing it is that we have this technology, this link—all the hundreds of miles between us, field and forest and river and sea, all the guards and guns, bypassed in an eye blink.
Paul tried desperately to translate and the driver resisted taking advice from a Slip of a Lass or whatever the French is for Slip of a Lass, I’m sure the direct translation in any language is more or less “Featherbrain,” as it’s what I get called whenever I’m expected not to be able to do whatever it is—fly a plane, load a gun, make a bomb—fix a car—so we lost fifteen minutes arguing.
You can work in a daze. If someone gives you a mindless job to do you can do it automatically, even if your heart is in pieces.
I wonder where that is right now—the safest place in the world? Even the neutral countries, Sweden and Switzerland, are surrounded.
How can something so wonderful and mysterious be true? But it is. And this, even more wonderful and mysterious, is also true: when I read it, when I read what Julie’s written, she is instantly alive again, whole and undamaged.
“So fierce, so beautiful, it was like breaking a hawk’s wings, stopping up a clear spring with bricks—digging up roses to make a space to park your tank. Pointless and ugly. She was just—blazing with life and defiance one moment, then the next moment nothing but a senseless shell lying on her face in the gutter—
How can my whole being, my whole life up to this point, be matched to one man in deadly combat?
It never occurred to him I was in every way his enemy, his opponent, I am everything he is battling against, I am British and Jewish, in the ATA I am a woman doing a man’s work at a man’s rate of pay, and my work is to deliver the aircraft that will destroy his regime.
Funny—it seemed the most heroic thing in the world when he told me about his friend, dead amazing that anyone could be that brave and selfless. But I didn’t feel heroic when I did it—just too scared to jump.
I want to tell you what Jamie said to me as he gave me these pages: “Maddie did the right thing.” I say so too.
I found that the way to control myself and still allow Maddie’s telling to have a certain lyrical, imaginative drive to it (just because she’s not a natural poet doesn’t mean she isn’t creative) was to tie all her figurative language to weather and aircraft.
Green is the color of life; light is the condition of our waking days, of summer and hope; light and sun are contrasted with the horror of the Nazi policy of “Night and Fog”;
