Free Code Name Verity by Elizabeth Wein

legs, Nazi School of Assault and Battery? Like everything else it wasn’t permanent damage, nothing left this week but the bruises, and they check me carefully now for stray bits of metal. I got caught yesterday trying to hide a pen nib in my hair (I didn’t have a plan for it, but you never know).
    Oh – often I forget I am not writing this for myself, and then it’s too late to scratch it out. The evil Engel always snatches everything away from me and raises an alarm if she sees me trying to retract anything. Yesterday I tried ripping off the bottom of the page and eating it, but she got to it first. (It was when I realised I had thoughtlessly mentioned the factory at Swinley. It is refreshing sometimes to fight with her. She has the advantage of freedom, but I am a lot more imaginative. Also I am willing to use my teeth which she is squeamish about.)
    Where was I? Hauptsturmführer von Linden has taken away everything I wrote yesterday. It is your own fault, you cold and soulless Jerry bastard, if I repeat myself.
    Miss Engel has reminded me. ‘The air-raid siren went.’ Clever girl, she has been paying attention.
    She makes me give her every page to read now as soon as I have finished with it. We had fun doing the prescriptions. Will it get her in trouble if I mention that she burned a few
herself
to get rid of them this time? That’ll teach you to try to make a chum of me, On-Duty-Female-Guard Engel.
    I have already got her in trouble, without knowing I was doing it, by mentioning her cigarettes. She is not allowed to smoke while she is on duty. Apparently Adolf Hitler has a vendetta against tobacco, finds it filthy and disgusting, and his military police and their assistants are not meant to smoke at work. I don’t think this is too strictly enforced except when the place is run by an obsessive martinet like Amadeus von Linden. Shame for him really, as a lit cigarette is such a convenient accessory if your job happens to be Extracting Information from Enemy Intelligence Agents.
    As long as Engel’s crimes are all so minor, they won’t get rid of her because her combined talents would be quite difficult to replace (a bit like mine). But her offences do consistently fall under ‘insubordination’.
    Anti-Aircraft Gunner
    The air-raid siren went. Every head in the room looked up in dismay and exhaustion at the canteen’s pasteboard ceiling, as if they could see through it. Then everybody rocketed from their borrowed church hall wooden folding chairs to meet the next battle.
    Maddie stood facing her new friend by the table they had just abandoned, people around her whirling into action. She felt as though she were at the eye of a tropical storm. The still point of the turning world.
    â€˜Come on!’ Queenie cried, just like the Red Queen in
Through the Looking Glass
, and grabbed Maddie by the arm to pull her outside. ‘You go on duty at one, what have you got –’ she glanced at her watch ‘ – an hour? Quick nap in the shelter before they need you in the radio room – pity you haven’t brought your brolly along. Come on, I’ll go with you.’
    The pilots were already racing for the Spitfires, and Maddie tried to fix her mind on the practical problem of how best to take off from the half-mended runway – taxiing would be the hardest, as you wouldn’t be able to see the holes in the surface past the high nose of the little fighter planes. She tried not to think about what it would be like running across the airfield to the radio room an hour from now, under fire.
    But she did it. Because you do. It is incredible what you do, knowing you have to. A bit less than an hour later – to allow themselves some extra time for dodging bombs – the two girls were outside again, in the moonscape that was now RAF Maidsend.
    Queenie steered Maddie at a trot, both of them bent nearly double, hugging the sides of buildings and