I didn’t answer. I could do without her laughing at me in front of B-Flight, and she’d been bloody cheeky about questioning them already. God knew what she’d pulled out of Dougie. My sullen silence made her throw me a curious glance. Then she looked away quickly, puffing on her cigarette.

“I’d love to get a chance to chat to the old woman at the inn, though,” she said thoughtfully. “Jane Warner, is that her name? I wonder what she thought of the Germans when she spoke to them. It might be useful.”

“Buy her a drink,” I suggested. “She likes whisky and water. It’ll cost you two and six.”

Louisa:

Mrs. Campbell hated having the Germans around.

She also hated Elisabeth Lind, who felt like a sort of German. She hated waiting on her and cooking for her, and Mrs. Campbell hated having to feed the real Germans, too. She made them corned beef sandwiches and porridge and sent them flasks of tea or pretend coffee. But she wouldn’t take the food to them. She tried to get Morag to do it, but after the first day Morag carried on so much, crying real tears because she was so afraid of Nazis, that Nan asked me to take over. And I was glad to.

Those limekilns! I couldn’t shake that haunting “lion kill” shiver just at the thought of them, only these ones really did hold brave and terrible people locked inside.

The limekilns were like honeycomb cells in the hillside, and each German airman was shut in his own cold cavern prison behind a huge oak door like the entrance to a dungeon. When the guards let me through with the tea and sandwiches, the makeshift cells were every bit as chilling in real life as in my head. The walls were mildewed whitewash over bare stone, with old lime ovens bricked up in the back. One electric lightbulb hung from the ceiling in each cell, and the only furniture was portable camp beds, wooden folding chairs, and paraffin heaters.

Eberhard Moritz and Dietrich Althammer nodded thanks to me when I came in, but otherwise I might as well have been invisible. I bet they were just as aloof when Morag brought them food the day before, with too many important things on their minds to be curious about timid teenage serving girls. They were perfectly polite, even to their guards, so I don’t know why she was so wet about it. All I had to do was put dishes on a packing crate and move on to the next cell. But Felix Baer…

When I came in with his porridge and coffee, two days after he got there, he was lying on his back staring up at the whitewashed ceiling. His face was a mess of black bruising, but he turned his head as the door opened.