by Terry Deary
This book is dedicated to the members of the SOE, heroes far braver than any in stories.
‘I must go and meet with danger there,
Or it will seek me in another place.’
William Shakespeare – Henry IV, Part 2
Contents
Part I
Chapter One ‘He saved the lives of the men who killed my brother’
Chapter Two ‘Today we are expecting an important announcement’
Chapter Three ‘A German has booby-trapped my mask’
Chapter Four ‘It’s full of sheep isn’t it?’
Chapter Five ‘Don’t go hiding no guns or bombs in there’
Chapter Six ‘You know Mr Churchill?’
Chapter Seven ‘We need a new way of fighting them’
Chapter Eight ‘She wants me to tell them you’re my sister’
Chapter Nine ‘The early worm catches the train’
Chapter Ten ‘It’s a dangerous job’
Chapter Eleven ‘How will we know where we are when we get there?’
Chapter Twelve ‘You have a lot of goodness in Wales’
Chapter Thirteen ‘Blood, toil, tears and sweat’
Chapter Fourteen ‘Maybe he doesn’t wear socks’
Chapter Fifteen ‘It’s enough to make a saint swear’
Chapter Sixteen ‘I’ve got a blouse and shawl just like that’
Chapter Seventeen ‘What are we going to do with you now?’
Chapter Eighteen ‘I could sleep on a rock in the river’
Chapter Nineteen ‘The Battle of Britain is about to begin’
Chapter Twenty ‘Let me show you how it’s done…’
Chapter Twenty-One ‘Hello, King George. Pleased to meet you’
Chapter Twenty-Two ‘I must go and meet with danger’
Chapter Twenty-Three ‘Mr Churchill is a fool’
Part II
Chapter Twenty-Four ‘They’re looking for the agents’
Chapter Twenty-Five ‘We aren’t fools, but we need help’
Chapter Twenty-Six ‘I’m afraid to open the door in the dark’
Chapter Twenty-Seven ‘We can’t throw another tree on the track’
Chapter Twenty-Eight ‘We’re going to attack the Germans with pencils?’
Chapter Twenty-Nine ‘I know trouble when I see it’
Chapter Thirty ‘You leave in a coffin or not at all’
Chapter Thirty-One ‘Our lives will be much harder from now on’
Chapter Thirty-Two ‘I just didn’t see you’
Chapter Thirty-Three ‘Do something or do nothing’
Chapter Thirty-Four ‘Think, Brigit, think’
Chapter Thirty-Five ‘I’m not stupid, you know’
Chapter Thirty-Six ‘We still have work to do’
Chapter Thirty-Seven ‘We can’t just leave her there to die’
Chapter Thirty-Eight ‘Good evening, madame. Take a seat’
Chapter Thirty-Nine ‘My dream… my wildest dream come true’
Chapter Forty ‘I’ll kill the evil turncoat’
Chapter Forty-One ‘They’ve been there for over a hundred years’
Chapter Forty-Two ‘We will accept nothing less than full victory’
Epilogue
Part I
Chapter One
‘He saved the lives of the men who killed my brother’
Sunday, 3 September 1939: Castle Bromwich, England
Brigit Furst was not a popular girl. The girls in her class tried to bully her. Brigit Furst didn’t care.
‘You talk funny,’ Gladys Turnbull would sneer. And it was true. Brigit didn’t talk with the same English Midlands accent as the other girls.
Brigit wasn’t all that pretty, so Gladys and her gang couldn’t envy her good looks, but she did have glossy red-brown hair that shone in the September sun. Like the others in the class, her school uniform was frayed and worn, but always clean as rainwater.
‘Clean as the queen,’ the gang sneered. Yet they didn’t really hate her for that.
No. Brigit’s real crime, in the mean little eyes of Gladys, was being too clever. Tests? Brigit always came top of the class. Exams to get to grammar school? Brigit would sail through and Gladys would fail, they all knew that.
‘Miss Smarty Pants,’ Gladys jeered, so jealous she made her thin pale face turn red with rage. ‘Let’s get her.’
Not everyone hated Brigit. Jessie Burdess wondered at Brigit’s brains and trembled at Gladys’s spite. She met Brigit at the school gate that September morning. Jessie’s eyes were wide and her breath came in gasps. ‘Brigit, oh Brigit,’ she panted. ‘You’ll never guess what Gladys Turnbull’s done now.’
Brigit stopped and looked at her fair-haired friend. ‘No, Jessie, I’m sure I won’t. Far better if you just tell me.’
Jessie’s words tumbled out. ‘She’s got a pepper pot in her school bag and she’s going to wait till you leave your gas mask in your desk at break time, and then she’s going to put pepper in the mask so when we do gas-mask practice with Miss Dennison it’s going to blind you and choke you and make you sneeze as soon as you try to breathe.’
Brigit patted the dull cardboard gas-mask box that hung round her neck on a string. She sighed. ‘Thank you, Jess. Forewarned is forearmed,’ she said as she marched towards the classroom door.
‘What does that mean?’
Brigit gave a small smile. ‘It means that now you’ve told me, I can plan what I’m going to do about it.’
The class were shouting and arguing, gossiping and gabbling, as Brigit and Jessie walked in. The noise dropped a little. Brigit calmly and carefully placed her gas-mask box on her desk, then turned her back on it.
Brigit walked to the blackboard and picked up the rubber. She began to clean off the chalk. By now the class was almost silent so the girl could hear the soft scuff as someone lifted the cardboard lid. Someone giggled, then the lid was closed again.
Brigit turned in time to see Gladys Turnbull slip a wooden pepper pot into her school satchel. Gladys looked guilty. ‘Cleaning the blackboard won’t make Miss Dennison like you,’ she snarled.
Brigit gave her warmest smile. ‘I know.’
For once the mask of hate slipped from Gladys’s thin face. ‘You’re the cleverest girl in the class… except me, of course. But Miss Dennison hates you. Why’s that?’
‘Her brother died in the Great War,’ Brigit said.
‘So?’
Before Brigit could answer, the door was thrown open and banged against the doorstop. Miss Dennison’s face was wrinkled like an old cooking apple and twice as bitter. There was a scrambling and scraping as the girls threw themselves on to the wooden benches behind their desks. ‘Why are you out of your seat, Brigit Furst?’ the teacher asked sourly.
‘I was cleaning the blackboard for you, Miss Dennison. So it would save you the trouble and give you more time to share your wisdom with us.’
Miss Dennison’s eyes went narrow as she looked to see if Brigit’s words were meant as insolence. She placed her gas-mask box on her high desk. ‘If I want my blackboard cleaned then I’ll ask someone I can trust, not some grubby little kraut,’ she snapped.
‘What’s a kraut, miss?’ Jessie Burdess asked.
‘Never mind,’ the teacher muttered. ‘You have been called into school today, a Sunday, for an important announcement. But you will treat it like any other school day. This morning’s assembly will take place at eleven o’clock.’
‘Why, miss?’ Jessie asked.
The teacher glared and spoke slowly. ‘Because Mr Cutter has said so. And it is not our business to question the headmaster’s orders.’ Then her words came out machine-gun fast. ‘What is it not our business to do, Jessie Burdess?’
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br /> Frightened, Jessie swallowed hard and whispered, ‘It is not our business to order Mr Question’s cutter.’
The teacher shook her head. ‘We will study history for ninety minutes, have our morning break, and then go straight to the hall. Susan Wilson, help me give out the history books.’
Miss Dennison opened the door to a book cupboard in the wall, turned on the light and disappeared inside, followed by the smallest girl in the class. Brigit rose to her feet, took her gas mask carefully from its box and walked silently to the teacher’s desk. She opened Miss Dennison’s gas-mask case, took out the glass, rubber and metal mask inside, and replaced it with her own. She put Miss Dennison’s mask in her own box and sat down, folding her hands on the scarred desktop.
The class gasped, then fifty children seemed to hold their breaths as the teacher came out of the cupboard and ordered Susan Wilson to give out the dusty books.
Gladys Turnbull’s face lit up and she raised a hand. ‘Please, miss.’
‘Yes, what is it, girl?’
Brigit turned and looked across at her enemy two seats away. She pointed at Gladys’s satchel and mouthed the words, ‘Who has the pepper pot in her bag?’
Gladys’s mouth went dry as she muttered, ‘I like history, miss. Can we do the bit where Dick Turpin rode Black Beauty from London to York?’
The teacher tried not to look pleased. ‘It was Black Bess, Gladys, not Black Beauty. But I like that story too. Open your books at page one hundred and ninety-seven and let us take turns at reading around the class. Begin, Gladys.’
A fly buzzed against the grimy window and the droning noise was as dull as the reading. The pupils wrote a story in their dark red (history) exercise books: ‘My great race, by Black Bess’.
At last Miss Dennison passed a handbell to a girl by the door and told her to ring it in the corridor to signal break. ‘Leave your gas masks on your desks and go out to play,’ the teacher ordered.
Brigit fussed with her pencil case, so she was the last one left in the room and her gas mask was guarded. ‘Out, kraut,’ Miss Dennison snarled.
Brigit closed her eyes for a moment then looked at her teacher. ‘My father is German. I was born in France. We moved here to escape the hatred of the French. We thought the British would be more forgiving.’
The teacher put her podgy hands on the girl’s desk and leaned forward so she was breathing in her face. She smelled like an ashtray. ‘I will be forgiving when you bring my brother back to life. Your father was one of the Huns that killed him.’
‘My father acted as a nurse in the Great War. He killed nobody.’
Miss Dennison smiled, showing her light brown teeth. ‘He saved the lives of the men who killed my brother. It’s the same thing. I am ashamed to have a German in my class, and I will be glad when you leave.’
‘I am French,’ Brigit said calmly. ‘But I shall be so sorry to leave the best teacher I’ve ever had.’ She gave a little sniff of sorrow. ‘Probably the best teacher in the whole of Castle Bromwich.’
Miss Dennison’s mouth opened but she couldn’t find any words. ‘Out,’ she finally croaked.
Brigit turned away with a secret smile and left.
Chapter Two
‘Today we are expecting an important announcement’
The children shuffled their feet on the floor of the school hall; there were sniffs and coughs, but no one spoke. Two hundred pairs of eyes turned to the door in the corner. Mr Cutter, the head teacher, marched in with a cane under his arm. His black hair was shiny as wet coal, held down with a greasy hair cream. His one eye glared at the children, but his glass eye scared them more.
‘His eye was poked out with a German bayonet in 1917,’ Jessie Burdess squeaked one day.
Billy Anderson snorted. ‘I heard he got drunk and fell off his bike in 1933.’
Mr Cutter spoke and the pupils held their breath. Billy Anderson sneezed. ‘Today we are expecting an important announcement. It will be on the radio and everyone in Britain will be listening, I am sure. Be silent or take a thrashing from my cane like you have never been thrashed before… not even you, Billy Anderson.’
Billy had badly cut hair that bristled like a wet cat’s fur and his wide blue eyes were horrified. ‘I never did nothing.’
Mr Cutter lunged forward, brought the cane down with a swoosh and held it under Billy’s nose. ‘I never did anything,’ he hissed.
‘I never said you did,’ Billy gasped.
‘Not me. You. You should say “I did nothing”, or “I never did anything”. But to say I never did nothing is a double negative and means you did something. Do I make myself clear?’
Billy shook his head. ‘If you never did nothing and I never did nothing, then who did it?’ he asked.
‘Shut up, idiot,’ the teacher roared. ‘I’ll deal with you later.’ He turned on his heel and switched on the radio that stood on the platform. After a minute the valves grew warm with the smell of burning dust and the speaker hissed. At last a voice grew louder and clearer.
‘This morning the British Ambassador in Berlin handed the German government a final note stating that, unless we heard from them by eleven o’clock that they were prepared at once to withdraw their troops from Poland, a state of war would exist between us. I have to tell you now that no such undertaking has been received, and that consequently this country is at war with Germany.’
He went on to talk about Britain and France going to help Poland. But Brigit’s father and mother had already told her that would never happen. France would be invaded before the French armies could move. Britain would be alone.
And her father would be one of the enemy.
Mr Cutter paced across the stage in the school hall, waving his cane. ‘We are at war. The soldiers, sailors and airmen will do the fighting. But those of us who are not fighting must do all we can to support them.’ He raised his chin and looked at some distant point far outside the window. ‘We must all do our bit.’ There was a long silence. ‘What must we do, Jessie Burdess?’
‘Our bit, sir,’ Jessie said, in awe at the very thought.
‘What bit is that then?’ Billy Anderson said. He had stuck his hand in the air but hadn’t waited to be asked to speak.
Mr Cutter lowered his gaze to the boy. ‘Good question, Billy Anderson. Good question.’
Billy almost blushed under the grime on his face.
The teacher began to pace again. ‘Soon there will be less food to go around. Mr Hitler’s submarines will patrol the seas and try to sink our food ships, so we starve to death. Every potato and carrot you can grow will help to defeat his wicked plan.’
‘So growing a carrot is doing a bit… and growing two carrots is two bits?’ said Billy.
‘It is, Billy Anderson. But it’s not just about carrots. It’s about facing danger and showing no fear. Every time you face danger with courage, you are doing your bit.’
‘But we’re not in any danger here,’ Gladys Turnbull argued. ‘Not like the soldiers.’
Mr Cutter looked at the young eyes staring up at him. He cleared his throat and spoke carefully. ‘Do not panic. I do not want anyone to panic. Understand? But very soon Mr Hitler will be dropping bombs on Britain.’
So the children panicked and whimpered and looked to the ceiling. ‘I said I do not want you to panic,’ the head screamed as the sounds of fear faded. ‘The evil German dictator – yes German like Brigit Furst – will send his bombers. But our Spitfire planes will blow them out of the sky before they get as far as Castle Bromwich. And all the while the Spitfire factory in our town will be making hundreds of new planes to shoot down the thousands of bombers Germany will send. And Germany will send more planes to bomb our factories. Who can blame them?’
The children shuffled uneasily and looked out of the high hall windows for black-winged bombers. ‘What if they miss the factories, sir? They could hit our house,’ Gladys Turnbull cried.
‘Good point, Gladys, but you do not have to worry about a bomb mis
sing the factory and landing on your head. Why not, anyone?’ he asked.
‘Please, sir, because we’re going to be excavated,’ Jessie Burdess said in a quavering voice. Tears burst from her pale eyes. ‘I don’t want to go,’ she moaned. Other boys and girls joined in the sobbing.
Mr Cutter swished at the air. ‘Fine. Fine. Stay here and have a German bomb land on your head. You’ll not be crying then. You’ll be running to the railway station to get yourselves excavated… I mean evacuated.’
‘Please, sir,’ Brigit asked. ‘How can we run for the railway station if a German bomb lands on our head?’
Mr Cutter’s lips pulled back in a fierce sneer. ‘I might have expected a wisecrack from a German brat like you. I dare say you’ll be one of the ones putting a light on your roof to guide the enemy bombers to strike. Won’t you?’
Brigit smiled and shook her head slowly. ‘Why would I want to guide a German bomber to drop a bomb on me? I’d be better putting a light on the roof of your house, so they could blow up a British hero like you… sir.’
‘Don’t you dare,’ the teacher shouted and his glass eye almost popped out. He took a deep breath. ‘Anyway, you don’t know where I live,’ he finished savagely.
Brigit just gave a wise smile as if to say, ‘Are you sure about that?’
‘Now, your evacuation plans are in a letter you must take home. But before you leave, Miss Dennison here will take you through a gas-mask drill. I hope you’ve all remembered your gas masks?’
‘I left mine on the tram,’ Billy Anderson moaned.
‘Then you can choke to death while the rest of us walk the streets gas-free and fearless,’ Mr Cutter said. ‘When Mr Hitler’s bombers attacked Poland, they attacked hard and fast before the Poles could defend themselves. Bombs rained down from the skies as tanks drove in over the land.’
‘Didn’t the bombs fall on the tanks then?’
‘Shut up, Billy Anderson. Now, this sort of attack is called a Lightning War – a Blitzkrieg in German. So there is your new word for today. Blitzkrieg – or Blitz,’ he went on, chalking the word on a blackboard by the side of the stage. ‘Everyone say it after me… Blitz.’
