The Romeo and Juliet Code (27 page)

Flissy Bathburn’s story is fictional, but the historical incidents surrounding World War II in this book are true, with a few exceptions. In my story Flissy and Winnie and Danny crossed the ocean on the Cunard ocean liner the
Queen Anne
in 1941. This boat is fictional although based upon the great Cunard ocean liner the
Queen Elizabeth
and her secret maiden voyage in 1940 from England to the United States for safekeeping. The
Queen Elizabeth
was indeed painted entirely gray, including the portholes, so that no light would escape. And she did indeed zigzag silently across the ocean evading Nazi submarines.

Flissy’s beloved Winnie and Danny, as well as Gideon Bathburn, were all intelligence agents working with the English office of espionage in London called the SOE (Special Operations Executive) and also with the newly developed American intelligence gathering agency called the COI (Coordinator of Information) under the direction of Gen. William J. Donovan, the man who visited the Bathburns in my book. In reality quite a few British agents were women and some of them had children they left behind at home. There were a few husband and wife teams and sometimes romantic involvements among the agents. Many of these agents were beautiful and loved danger and intrigue. They were very brave and heroic and often died helping others.

In my story the agent with the wooden leg called Delphine as a code name was based on a real agent named Virginia Hall. She was an American who posed as a
New York Post
reporter in the Lyons region in France starting in 1941. At some point she did need word sent to America to get parts for her wooden leg which she couldn’t obtain in Lyons, although Winnie and Danny’s role in that story is fictional. Virginia Hall helped countless downed British RAF pilots and many other people get false papers and find escape routes. She also arranged for funds, obtained authentic-looking French clothing and shoes for their disguise, and provided other agents and downed pilots with safe houses. She even helped break some Resistance members out of prison.

There were unfortunately German sympathizers among the French who posed as part of the Resistance and who really worked for the Nazis. They turned in many Allied agents and blew the cover of many Resistance groups working all over France. One such agent was named Henri Déricourt. He worked in a very important position receiving Allied agents on the ground as they parachuted into central France. Many British agents and wireless operators were captured days later possibly because of this double agent. Although unproven, it appears he was responsible for destroying a major Resistance circuit called “Prosperous” and damaging other circuits.

The wireless operators were called “piano players” and it was a very dangerous job as the Nazis had direction finding devices that were often able to detect where the transmitters were. Once a wireless operator was caught, the Nazis used the same wireless machines and secret codes to send false messages back to the SOE in London. The messages often asked Britain for money, artillery, and other supplies. Sadly the SOE responded to these false messages by dropping in supplies and money that immediately fell into the hands of the Nazis.

I imagined while writing my story that Winnie and Danny had become aware of an important double agent posing as their circuit’s wireless operator and so they planned to use an alternative route and method to get information to the COI and the SOE. They decided to send letters via courier through neutral Portugal as a safer alternative. The trip over the Pyrenees Mountains to neutral Spain and Portugal was the preferred route for smuggling British pilots back to England and many agents went back to London this way, including agent Virginia Hall when she escaped France finally by walking over the snowy Pyrenees, in spite of her wooden leg. Most airmail letters and packages going from Europe to the USA went from Lisbon, Portugal. These letters were all checked by a censor looking for letters containing sensitive information. I imagined that Danny, Gideon, and Winnie had an ally in the postal system in Portugal who stamped the letters with a “passed censor” stamp allowing the letters to go through unchecked.

I know that Britain and America worked together as a unit in their spy efforts starting in 1942, but in my story I imagined that officials in Washington like General Donovan at the COI began organizing and running spy operations in Europe in the spring of 1941 before the US joined the war. Actually, General Donovan did not begin planning such covert operations until a year later when he started the OSS. Therefore this part of my story is purely fictional. However President Roosevelt was very independent and interested in espionage and had sent Donovan to England in 1940 to learn all he could about organizing spy circuits, so this part of my story is actually quite possible.

I was a ten-year-old girl when I lived in England and went to school there in the late 1950s. The first time I was in London I was struck by the numerous piles of brick ruble still on many street corners where buildings had been bombed. Much of the detail of Flissy Bathburn’s life in England comes directly from my firsthand 1950s experiences while living the life of a British girl.

Very special thanks to Rachel Griffiths, my editor, who is always sure and confident when I waver, and who has steered this project with great intelligence and enthusiasm, offering creative and inspiring suggestions that helped this book to become exactly what it is. Thank you!! A special thank-you also to Arthur Levine for his behind-the-scenes support and encouragement and kindness. In fact, thank you to all the people at Scholastic and Arthur A. Levine Books. I could not be happier! Thank you, Nikki Mutch!!! Thank you also to my friends who read this book for me early on: Susan Cole, child advocate lawyer and lecturer at Harvard Law School; Anne Corrigan, former British citizen now teaching at Mary Hogan Elementary School; my scientist friends Yvette Feig and Bob Murray; Kristy Carlson, avid reader; and my sister Marcia Croll, who always reads my books for me when I call up and say, “Quick! Read it overnight. I need to know what you think.” And she does. And thank you to my ever encouraging mom, the poet Ruth Stone, who says the only books she reads are children’s books, mine among them. Wow! And thank you to my husband and best friend David Carlson, who is always a part of all my books and as I am writing this now, I know he will read it over in a few minutes and tell me where I have misspelled or misplaced a stray or wandering word. We are all a team. I am forever grateful.

And a note of gratitude to these nonfiction books and authors who helped me understand Winnie and Danny’s complicated world.

The Women Who Lived for Danger: Behind Enemy Lines During World War II
by Marcus Binney. Harper Paperbacks, 2004.

The Wolves at the Door: The True Story of America’s Greatest Female Spy
by Judith L. Pearson. The Lyons Press, 2005.

Sisterhood of Spies: Women of the OSS
by Elizabeth P. McIntosh. Naval Institute Press, 1998.

A Life in Secrets: Vera Atkins and the Missing Agents of World War II
by Sarah Helm. Anchor Books, 2007.

Operatives, Spies, and Saboteurs: The Unknown Story of World War II’s OSS
by Patrick O’Donnell. Citadel Press Book, 2004.

My name used to be Louise but it’s not anymore. I had a T-shirt made that says across the front
NO LONGER LOUISE
. I changed my name because Louise rhymes with cheese and fleas and sneeze. So now I’m Thumbelina. I know. I know. It’s over the top. It’s unrealistic. It’s childish and stupid. Nobody has that name. But the thing is, I’m little. I’m only four feet seven and I’m in seventh grade. This means I have a seventh-grade soul that’s stuck in a fourth-grade body. This is major annoying. I’m planning on growing taller soon.

I came up with the idea of Thumbelina when I was walking along the river with my friend Henderson. He was looking at the sky. Henderson always looks at the sky when he’s thinking and he’s
always
thinking. He was saying, “Actually everybody has a story, a fairy tale in their heart that they adhere to. That’s why Hans Christian Andersen is so awesome.”

“Adhere to?” I said. This is the way this kid talks, seriously. Then I started looking up at the sky with Henderson. He’s very tall and I’m very small, and people started honking at us because it looked like we might wander into the half-frozen river by mistake. But while I was cloud watching with Henderson, it came to me. I “adhere to” the story of Thumbelina.

That was around the time in my life that things started shifting, like slabs of ice on a river. It all began with a very very snowy winter and a pizza I ordered after my grandma had a yard sale. I think of that pizza now as a cosmic wheel spinning through the universe, changing everything.

Through the window, I can see South Pottsboro is frozen solid. It’s icy and windy out there. In this case the word
south
is misleading. I don’t see any palm trees.
Dumpy, boring
Pottsboro would be more accurate. There’s another snowstorm on the way and my grandma is having an indoor yard sale in the foyer of our condo building. A yard sale during a snowstorm?

My grandma is like, “Blah blah blah. We’re the first people this season to have a sale. We’ll be swamped.”

My grandpa is all huffy because he doesn’t want to put his slippers in the yard sale. He’s wearing them to keep them safe, which is totally embarrassing because these slippers look like roadkill. Seriously.

And the lady downstairs already has plenty against my grandpa because he does noisy limbering-up exercises in our living room and then that lady starts pounding on our door. My grandma is very two-faced at these times. She’s so sweet to that lady then, but later, in the middle of the night, I can hear my grandma and grandpa laughing and giggling and calling her a big jerk.

In the middle of the night through the walls, I hear my grandma and grandpa talking about other things too. Sometimes they aren’t giggling. They’re talking about me. Sometimes my grandma starts sobbing and my grandpa goes, “Baby doll, give her a little time. She just needs more time. Relax. Relax.” And then the room goes stone silent like they both died in there.