Madeleine's War Read Online Free PDF

well as drizzling—but I had their full attention.
    â€œI repeat what I told you yesterday. Now that we have got to the practical part of the course, we operate totally in French. We all talk French, you all talk French, to me, to each other, to the support staff. You don’t stop talking French until I tell you. Is that clear?”
    I looked at the others one by one.
    â€œ
Oui, monsieur
,” said someone.
    â€œ
Bon
. Now,” I went on in French, pointing to the flatbed, “you’ve probably never seen a rail wagon like this one.” I turned and nodded. Across the dirty orange superstructure was stencilled CAMIONS .
    â€œNot in Scotland, anyway. That’s because it’s French. It came here with the boat train and was trapped in the UK at the time war broke out. Now it’s helping the war effort.”
    The cold wind gusted again. Loch Kishon wasn’t far away and there was little in the way of hills between the rail yard and Loch Hourn, the easternmost reach, hereabouts, of the Atlantic Ocean.
    I raised the tin I was holding. “This is today’s lesson. This tin looks like a perfectly ordinary tin of motor oil, the kind you would put in your Morris or your Wolseley any day of the week. If you could afford a Morris or a Wolseley. But, as perhaps you are learning to expect by now, here at SC2 things are not always quite as they seem to be.”
    Madeleine and the others had been at Ardlossan Manse nearly two weeks now. After she had agreed to join the “club,” and signed the Official Secrets Act, we had both grabbed a few hours’ sleep. Early the following morning, we had transferred from The Farm to the headquarters building on the opposite coast of the Highlands. There she had joined the other recruits, who had arrived the day before, having been tested—and selected—earlier.
    Ardlossan was ideal for its purposes. Nairn, where The Farm was, was on the east coast of Scotland, a location suited to the deception we had to create if recruits were to feel their interrogations as “real.” If enemy agents were ever flown in from Germany, they would reach Scotland over the North Sea, not the Western Isles. But the western coast of Scotland was much more remote than the east coast. Ardlossan was as remote as only the west coast could be.
    Had it been a person, Ardlossan Manse would have been red-headed and taciturn, like the stereotypical Scot. Three miles south of Ardnave, on McIntyre, one of the bleaker—if more beautiful—of Scotland’s western peninsulas, there was a milky redness veined into the manse’s stone façade. Its windows and doors were too small for the building’s overall dimensions, giving it a forbidding look, closed in on itself against the weather, and the world.
    In front of the manse a lawn ran down gently to a line of umbrella pines. Beyond them the rocks began, and beyond the rocks, depending on the tide, was half a mile or a mile and a half of sand, as white as a full moon and carved into huge snaky fingers by the grey-green inlets of Loch Hourn—when the waters were rising on Kyleakin they did so almost at walking pace. A mile offshore was Kiloran Bight, once part of the mainland,but now an uninhabited island—save for kittiwakes and gulls—and unremittingly barren, windswept. No trees, just gorse where the sparse shelter allowed. In the channel between the island and the mainland could be glimpsed occasional seals, their pelts pitch-black and shiny as oil, with heads like frogmen. In the night their barks punctuated your sleep and made you ask yourself if a submarine had just surfaced. The sound of the sea was always with us, a backdrop collapsing at intervals in a soft
shshsh
ing.
    Ardlossan’s strong point was its location, out of sight of any roads, at the end of a long drive and surrounded by bleak, bare hills and the sea. Its weak point was everything else—no heating in any of the