Free The Girl Who Fell From the Sky by Simon Mawer Page B

or something. All I want to do is go home, and all they do is send me on courses.’
    ‘Maybe …’ she said.
    ‘Maybe what?’
    ‘Maybe we can see each other.’
    ‘But there is no time. Perhaps in London.’
    ‘Perhaps.’
    And then the call was over and the receiver was dead in her hand and she felt abandoned.
    That night she dreamed. It was a repeat of a childhooddream, the falling dream, now fast, now slow, like Alice down the rabbit hole. People watched her as she fell. She knew them all but she didn’t recognise them, that was the strange thing. Except her parents. They were there among the audience. And the French boy, Benoît. He was laughing at her.
    On Sunday she accompanied her mother to Mass at St Aloysius on the Woodstock Road. The church was full, as though Catholics had multiplied in the war years.
    The sun shall not burn thee by day
, the choir sang,
neither the moon by night
.
    Maman
prayed long and hard after the blessing, and when she finally stood up to leave there were tears in her eyes. ‘I prayed that you will be safe,’ she said as they left. ‘Wherever you are going.’

II
    Parachute School passed in a blur of sensation. They learned how to fall from a ten-foot wall, they shot down slides and swung in harnesses from a gantry inside a hangar, they crunched to the ground on mattresses and coconut matting, they ascended in a tethered balloon and dropped to earth from five hundred feet. There was the same exhilaration you found in skiing – the same thrill of surrender to gravity, the same heart-stopping breathlessness that gave, for a moment, a glimpse of dying. At the end of the week they climbed, bound up in parachute harnesses, into an aged Whitley bomber and flew over Tatton Park where they lined up inside the fuselage to plunge out into empty space. ‘Go! Go! Go!’ the dispatcher called, urging them on like a trainer urging athletes to run faster, jump higher, throw longer. And she plunged out into the air and the wind hit her face and snatched her breath away and the falling dream became reality, people on the ground looking up at her and a disembodied voice calling to her to keep her feettogether and flex her knees, before the ground came up and threw her in a crumpled mass into the grass.
    After three drops you gained your parachute wings, but women weren’t allowed to wear them on their uniform jacket lest questions be asked. ‘Why the hell should questions always be asked about
women
?’ Marian complained, but no one paid her any attention. Immediately after the ceremony, transport took the members of her course to the railway station at Ringway to catch the train back down to London. The B School course started the next day near Beaulieu in Hampshire.

III
    At Beaulieu, any pretence about what they might be doing was set aside: this was training for the clandestine life. A school for spies, someone said. They’d given her a field name, and that was how she was to be known.
Alice
. It seemed fitting. The school was based in a large country house tucked away in the middle of the New Forest; but everything was French, all casual conversation was French, even the reading material was French. It was as though she had stepped through the looking-glass and emerged at a house party in a remote and rather dilapidated château in the French countryside, inhabited by a motley collection of people who knew only that they should not be known, who understood that they should not necessarily understand.
    ‘Remember,’ a rather louche young man with brilliantined hair explained to them, ‘the smallest detail you pick up here may one day save your life.’ The Knave of Hearts, Marian thought. A recent arrival from France, he spoke about the intricacies of the rationing system and the problems of day-to-day life. ‘France is no longer the place you knew before the war. You will arrive there and you will be strangers in what you think is home. Don’t walk boldly into a café and ask for