In honor of Inter­na­tional Women’s Day, I am excited to wel­come Eliz­a­beth Wein, author of Code Name Ver­ity, (my review of which can be read here) to Turn the Page. Eliz­a­beth very gen­er­ously agreed to an in-depth inter­view about her new book and a guest post about flygirls!

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Fly­girls

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One of the things that I set out very con­sciously to do in writ­ing Code Name Ver­ity was to give my hero­ines impor­tant work that they were capa­ble of doing.  I feel that we all need a nudg­ing reminder that many women still don’t get taken seri­ously in jobs that are tra­di­tion­ally asso­ci­ated with men, and that we need to con­tin­u­ally expand our horizons.

I get so mad when peo­ple assume that you can’t be inter­ested in fly­ing just because you’re a girl.  At my first fly­ing club Christ­mas party, after I’d started tak­ing lessons, when I intro­duced myself to another woman at the party the first thing she asked was, ‘And whose wife are you?’ —As though I couldn’t pos­si­bly be there on my own.  The free­dom of the sky, and the sense of accom­plish­ment in know­ing how to land a plane myself, are the most hard-won prizes I have ever earned.  They shouldn’t be denied to anybody.

Amaz­ingly, because it seems to be a coin­ci­dence that 8 March is Inter­na­tional Women’s Day and that the first ‘national’ Women’s Day was cel­e­brated in 1910, 8 March 1910 hap­pens to be the day that Ray­monde de Laroche of France became the world’s first female licensed pilot.

And as well as Inter­na­tional Women’s Day, this week cel­e­brates Women of Avi­a­tion World­wide Week (5 — 11 March 2012).  Women of Avi­a­tion Week aims to ‘cel­e­brate his­tory, raise aware­ness of aviation’s oppor­tu­ni­ties among girls and women, and shape the future.’  This year, women pilots around the UK are hon­our­ing that event, along with the 100th anniver­sary of the Amer­i­can Har­riet Quimby’s first flight by a woman across the Eng­lish Chan­nel, with a cross-Channel fly-out on Sat­ur­day 10 March 2012, and many flights by women through­out the coun­try.  The Chan­nel flights are leav­ing from Head­corn — if you live any­where nearby you should def­i­nitely go along to cheer them on!

One of the things that was won­der­ful about doing the back­ground research for Code Name Ver­ity was dis­cov­er­ing more and more about women avi­a­tion pio­neers.  There are so many incred­i­ble peo­ple out there, liv­ing and dead, just wait­ing to be cel­e­brated.  I’ve listed a few of these, along with links to their sto­ries, in Amy’s Q&A.  Enjoy being intro­duced to these mar­velous women!

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*Inter­view con­tains a few vague spoil­ers about Code Name Verity*

Code Name Ver­ity  seems to be a bit dif­fer­ent from your other nov­els. What first inspired you to write the story?

I’d actu­ally writ­ten a short story called ‘Some­thing Worth Doing’ (in Fire­birds Soar­ing, edited by Sharyn Novem­ber, Fire­bird Books 2009), in which a girl dis­guises her­self as her dead brother and becomes a Spit­fire pilot just in time to take part in the Bat­tle of Britain.  I wrote this story very shortly after I got my pilot’s license and I was kind of obsessed with fly­ing at the time.  While I was doing the back­ground research for ‘Some­thing Worth Doing’ I dis­cov­ered the exis­tence of the ATA — the Air Trans­port Aux­il­iary.  The story’s hero­ine, Theo, actu­ally fin­ishes up by say­ing she is going to join the ATA, but that’s as far as it goes.

The orig­i­nal seed for Code Name Ver­ity came from this story — I thought I’d like to expand on Theo’s adven­tures (after all, there were still nearly 5 years left of the war to go) and I had a vague idea of turn­ing her into a fly­ing spy… Like ‘Ver­ity’, I sent Theo to a Swiss board­ing school so that I could give her a rea­son to speak French and Ger­man.  Her school gets a pass­ing men­tion in ‘Some­thing Worth Doing’, so even while I was writ­ing it I was set­ting myself up for some­thing big­ger.  Very early on in con­struct­ing CNV, the ‘fly­ing spy’ char­ac­ter split into two sep­a­rate roles and two new char­ac­ters.  Theo does actu­ally make a cameo appear­ance in CNV — she’s the ATA pilot who first tells Mad­die about the secret RAF Spe­cial Duties air­field, the so-called ‘sis­ter’ of the dead vicar’s son.

So although it’s very dif­fer­ent from my other books, Code Name Ver­ity is some­thing I was build­ing up to.  It was hugely refresh­ing to write a novel set in [rel­a­tively] mod­ern times!

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How did you go about research­ing the book — in par­tic­u­lar Verity’s role? Was it dif­fi­cult to find accounts on life as a female spy/interrogator dur­ing that time?

Oh, haha, so you think I actu­ally researched Verity’s role?

Books, the Inter­net, movies, muse­ums, some face-to-face com­mu­ni­ca­tion — I immersed myself in fic­tion and non-fiction.  To start out with, I read a lot of his­to­ries about the Air Trans­port Aux­il­iary and the Spe­cial Oper­a­tions Exec­u­tive.  Then I read biogra­phies or auto­bi­ogra­phies of spe­cific indi­vid­u­als whom I found par­tic­u­larly fas­ci­nat­ing.  A lot of the sec­ondary char­ac­ters are meant to call to mind real peo­ple, although they’re not truly based on them.  Amadeus von Lin­den, for exam­ple, has a coun­ter­part in the enig­matic Ger­man inter­roga­tor Hans Kiefer, who was based in Paris; the radio broad­caster Geor­gia Penn is a sort of com­bi­na­tion of the SOE agent Vir­ginia Hall and a selec­tion of Amer­i­can women who worked for Berlin’s radio pro­pa­ganda in Eng­lish dur­ing the war.

I made up the spe­cific women’s jobs of Spe­cial Duties taxi pilot and prisoner-of-war inter­roga­tor.  Based on the research I’ve done, I feel sure that peo­ple with the skill sets of these char­ac­ters would have been exploited to the fullest in exactly the way they’re exploited in the book.  It is true that the RAF used the Women’s Aux­il­iary Air Force to do flight crew debrief­ing inter­ro­ga­tions, and the SOE used their female trainees as ‘honey traps’ to catch unsus­pect­ing male trainees who might blab about their job.  An SOE girl in civil­ian clothes would go up to an unsus­pect­ing col­league in a pub, coo over him until he tried to impress her by telling her he was train­ing as a sabo­teur, where­upon he’d be booted out of the SOE.  My feel­ing about Verity’s role is that she drew on these prece­dents as much as I did, then added her own flair and instinct.  (And Eva Seiler’s role as ‘Berlin’s Inter­pre­tive Liai­son with Lon­don’ is com­pletely made up.  But I think that’s pretty obvious.)

Another thing I kind of learned from infer­ence was Nazi tor­ture tech­niques.  I just didn’t want to do this research.  I decided early on that any­thing nasty I could think of involv­ing house­hold objects a Gestapo tor­turer could prob­a­bly think of too.  Not sur­pris­ingly, in the course of other research I came across almost every hor­ri­ble thing I’d come up with on my own.  So I didn’t look them up, but unfor­tu­nately I didn’t really make them up either.

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Code Name Ver­ity is a story about strong female friend­ships. That, and the lack of romance, sets it apart from a lot of books pop­u­lar in the YA mar­ket right now. What made you decide to write a story that focused on a pla­tonic female relationship?

I didn’t intend the book to be about friend­ship when I started to write it.  The unbreak­able bond between Mad­die and Ver­ity was some­thing that was nec­es­sary to the denoue­ment of the plot.  But as I was writ­ing, and describ­ing that bond, I came to see the whole project as a real cel­e­bra­tion of friend­ship and of being best friends.  I put a lit­tle bit of all my friends in there — things we’d done together, the way you work so hard at being together even when cir­cum­stance keeps you apart most of the time — and I did it on pur­pose, because it was a plea­sure to remem­ber my friends and hon­our them that way.

Then, after it was done, my beta read­ers and I all sat around going, ‘Wait a minute — there aren’t any books out there about female friend­ship!’  And we’d try to come up with some.  And I think it really does fill a gap, because it is so won­der­ful to have a best friend, it’s some­thing girls can really relate to, and it’s not some­thing that YA lit­er­a­ture is focus­ing on at the moment.  You know what peo­ple keep men­tion­ing when we have this dis­cus­sion?  Anne of Green Gables.  But I think even in that, Anne is really the boss, engi­neer­ing the friend­ship.  I’ve tried to cre­ate a friend­ship where the girls are equals and com­ple­ment each other.

One of the things I tried to do was to leave sex­ual ori­en­ta­tion out of it—because it doesn’t mat­ter.  It’s the friend­ship that counts.

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Ver­ity and Mad­die are both very dis­tinct char­ac­ters, pas­sion­ate and intel­li­gent young women. Are they based on/inspired by any­one you know if par­tic­u­lar? Some­one in your life or a fig­ure from his­tory perhaps?

Mad­die and Ver­ity are really both just out of my own head.  They grew clearer and more com­plete as I wrote the book — as did Anna Engel, who never gets enough air time in reviews — and then I went back and filled in the gaps to make them consistent.

Both girls’ wartime sto­ries are based in part on real peo­ple (see links below).  In Verity’s case, they are the SOE agents Noor Inayat Khan, Alix d’Unienville, Vio­lette Szabo, and Odette Hal­lowes; in Maddie’s, the ATA pilots Let­tice Cur­tis, Diana Bar­nato Walker, and Betty Lussier.

Verity’s ances­tral home is influ­enced by a book called A Child­hood in Scot­land by Chris­t­ian Miller.

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Do you see more of your­self in Ver­ity or Mad­die? Or rather — given the choice, would you be a spy or a pilot?

There is a lit­tle of me in both of them.  I am prob­a­bly more like Mad­die in that I am not as bold or as dar­ing as Ver­ity, but on the other hand I think I have Verity’s mean streak.  The fur­ther I got into the book the more I found myself exclaim­ing aloud, ‘Mad­die, you are just so nice.’  I think she really is the nicest char­ac­ter I’ve ever made up — my char­ac­ters are usu­ally a lot more devi­ous and vindictive.

I will say that writ­ing as the voice of Ver­ity came more nat­u­rally to me than any other char­ac­ter I’ve ever writ­ten.  That com­bi­na­tion of self-deprecating sar­casm and earnest enthu­si­asm is very much the infor­mal voice of my own jour­nals.  I’ve never caught it before — it’s a lit­tle dif­fer­ent from my pub­lic (on-line!) writ­ing voice.

Given the choice, would I be a spy or a pilot?  That’s an easy one.  I am a pilot.

I went to a CIA recruit­ment meet­ing in my final year at uni­ver­sity, but all I can remem­ber about it is that they gave out free cook­ies.  That is pretty much the sum total of my spy­ing career.

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Are there any small or major plot lines that were aban­doned along the way that you can share with us?

Given that this book is so spoilerifcally-loaded most review­ers don’t even give out the narrator’s real name, that would be a hard ques­tion to answer if the answer was ‘yes’ — but in fact the fin­ished prod­uct isn’t hugely dif­fer­ent from the work-in-progress.  Orig­i­nally the Amer­i­can radio-broadcaster woman was a reporter, and I had to change that for rea­sons of his­toric accu­racy.  There was one scene that I cut where Ver­ity was imag­in­ing the ghosts that would inhabit the Gestapo head­quar­ters in Ormaie if it was ever turned back into a hotel (I’ve tried to find it for you but I can’t —  it wasn’t very long and it was rather grue­some, so that’s prob­a­bly not a bad thing).

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Code Name Ver­ity has been released with two quite dif­fer­ent cov­ers. Egmont with a female face in shadow and Hype­r­ion with two hands tied together at the wrist. I per­son­ally love both, but do you have a favourite? Which one do you feel really cap­tures the spirit of novel?

The dif­fer­ent cov­ers are aimed at dif­fer­ent audi­ences, British (the shad­owy girl and the rose and the spit­fire) and Amer­i­can (the two hands tied together), and it’s really inter­est­ing to me how often the British cover appeals to the Brits and the Amer­i­can cover appeals to the Yanks.  I love them both as well, and in many ways the British edi­tion is defin­i­tive to me (the text of the Amer­i­can edi­tion has been very slightly edited to make it more acces­si­ble to an Amer­i­can audi­ence).  But I have to con­fess that I like the Amer­i­can cover best.  It’s pos­si­bly just because I’m Amer­i­can myself.  I like that the hands tied together is tech­ni­cally a scene from the novel.  The girl and rose and Spit­fire of the British cover are all dis­as­so­ci­ated images, though each has sig­nif­i­cance within the book (Verity’s SOE Resis­tance cir­cuit is named ‘Damask’ after a local rose-grower).

Another rea­son I pre­fer the Amer­i­can cover is that although tech­ni­cally it’s not Maddie’s and Verity’s hands that get tied together in the book, the imagery sug­gests a strongly forged link between the girls.  The US cover also incor­po­rates some actual text from the book laid over the image.  I think the over­all result is very pow­er­ful and hard-hitting.  My husband’s reac­tion to this cover was, ‘It looks like a book about bondage!’  To which my response was, ‘AND?? Ver­ity writes her entire nar­ra­tive with her ankles tied to her chair!’

*coughs to announce impend­ing spoiler:*

There is one very won­der­ful sub­tle thing about the UK cover (the fem­i­nine one) that I want to point out — the cir­cling of the name ‘Ver­ity’ in red.  And also, the under­lin­ing in red on the back cover of ‘We are a sen­sa­tional team.’  There is a behind-the-scenes third hand at work here in addi­tion to Verity’s and Maddie’s.

  

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Is there a period of his­tory that you par­tic­u­larly love? If you could live dur­ing any time, when and where would you choose and why?

Well, my won­der­ful grand­mother was born in 1916 and I am a lit­tle envi­ous of the incred­i­ble changes to the world that she has seen in her life­time.  Motor­ways, transcon­ti­nen­tal air­craft travel, radio, colour and sound in film, com­put­ers and the Inter­net, huge break­throughs in med­i­cine and in women’s and civil rights, man’s land­ing on the moon — this has all occurred dur­ing her life­time.  There have been ter­ri­ble things too, obvi­ously, but I think that to have lived through most of the 20th cen­tury and into the 21st must be a most won­drous thing.

You could really do worse than grow­ing up as my grand­mother did, in middle-class Amer­ica in the early twen­ti­eth cen­tury.  This would also place me to be involved in the Sec­ond World War, tech­ni­cally… Although Europe in World War II is a place and period of his­tory that I am fas­ci­nated with, I am grate­ful that I did not have to live through it myself.

As a child I longed to be a Vic­to­rian girl in Lon­don or a pio­neer girl in the West­ern United States (being deeply influ­enced by Frances Hodg­son Burnett’s A Lit­tle Princess and the Laura Ingalls Wilder books).  But as I grow older I become increas­ingly aware that the time and place I’m liv­ing in now is really pretty ideal.  I am very lucky to have ended up in Scot­land after the arrival of latte and the 6-month-long strawberry-growing season.

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Can you rec­om­mend any must see/read books or exhibitions/museums for read­ers inspired to find out more about female pilots/undercover agents etc?

The ATA Museum in Maid­en­head leaps imme­di­ately to mind.  There is a spe­cial per­ma­nent exhibit there ded­i­cated to the women of the ATA (the exhibit is called ‘Grandma Flew Spitfires’).

There is also an exhi­bi­tion called ‘Women in Avi­a­tion: World War II’ going on at the moment in New York City at the Intre­pid Sea, Air and Space Museum (it’s on the Intre­pid air­craft car­rier) — this exhibit closes 8 July 2012.  I will miss it, but maybe some inter­ested read­ers will get a chance to go!

The Impe­r­ial War Museum, Lon­don, has a per­ma­nent dis­play on Spe­cial Oper­a­tions and spies dur­ing World War II as part of their ‘Secret War’ exhibit.

For a har­row­ing non-fiction read about the women of the SOE, try Mar­cus Binney’s The Women Who Lived for Dan­ger or Sarah Helm’s A Life in Secrets: The Story of Vera Atkins and the Lost Agents of SOE

Giles Whit­tell pro­vides an acces­si­ble account of female ATA pilots in Spit­fire Women of World War II

There’s also a great award-winning doc­u­men­tary film about the women of the ATA avail­able on DVD.  It’s called Spit­fire Sisters

Many of these rec­om­men­da­tions are also listed in the bib­li­og­ra­phy included at the end of CNV.

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Can we look for­ward to any more nov­els based around early female pilots and/or dur­ing war time?  

I’m at work on a book about another ATA pilot, this one a young Amer­i­can girl who comes to the UK to con­tribute her pilot­ing skills to the Allied war effort.  I’m really enjoy­ing draw­ing on my own child­hood in Penn­syl­va­nia (and my grandmother’s!) to add detail to my heroine’s back­ground.  The book begins about 6 months after the end of CNV, with the Allied inva­sion of Nor­mandy on D-Day (6 June 1944).

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Thanks for all these TERRIFIC ques­tions which I’ve obvi­ously enjoyed answer­ing.  It’s been a plea­sure to make a small con­tri­bu­tion to Inter­na­tional Women’s Day. And thanks so much for the oppor­tu­nity to talk about Code Name Ver­ity and to spread the word about women avi­a­tors this week.

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A mas­sive thanks to Eliz­a­beth Wein for agree­ing to answer so many ques­tions and shar­ing a lit­tle about her own fly­ing career, her grand­mother and intro­duc­ing so many inspi­ra­tion women on this impor­tant day.

For those inter­ested in learn­ing more about some of the SOE agents and ATA pilots and a few other peo­ple I’ve men­tioned, here’s a list of links:

Noor Inayat Khan (SOE agent)

Alix d’Unienville (SOE agent) (but she’s still alive and her Wikipedia entry doesn’t tell you any­thing about her life after her escape attempt that was foiled by the Gestapo in 1944). This link tells more about her life, but it’s in French. This is the not-so-great Eng­lish trans­la­tion of the pre­vi­ous link.

Vio­lette Szabo (SOE agent)

Odette Hal­lowes (SOE agent), who has just been put on a UK First Class postage stamp!

Let­tice Cur­tis (ATA pilot)

Diana Bar­nato Walker (ATA pilot)

Betty Lussier (ATA pilot; she also did Intel­li­gence work for the OSS)

Hans Kiefer (Ger­man Intel­li­gence officer)

Vir­ginia Hall (SOE agent)

Jane Ander­son (Amer­i­can broad­caster and Nazi collaborator)

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