to be able to walk to the drop before the first raid began, but High Street Kensington might work if it didn’t have a gate. If there was only a guard, she might be able to sneak past him—
It had a gate and a guard twice as determined not to let her go outside, and while she was arguing with him, the anti-aircraft guns started up. I’ve got to face it, she thought. I’m stuck here for the night.
No, she wasn’t. She couldn’t get to the drop, but she didn’t have to spend the night here. She could take the tube to one of the deep stations and observe the shelterers. Balham would be the most interesting, but Mr. Dunworthy would have a fit, even though it hadn’t been hit till October fourteenth. And to go to Leicester Square, she’d have to change trains. She needed to be able to get back to Notting Hill Gate in the morning to tidy up before work. And, if the all clear went early enough, go to the drop and through to Oxford to get her skirt before work. Which meant she needed a station on the Central Line. Holborn.
With its 150-foot-deep tunnels, Holborn had been one of the first tube stations the contemps had co-opted when the Blitz started. The government hadn’t intended for them to be used as shelters. They’d been worried about sanitation and infectious disease. But their admonitions to “Stay at Home—Build an Anderson Shelter” had gone unheeded, and there’d been no effective way to enforce the ban, not when there were stories of people being killed in Andersons and surface shelters. And not when all a person had to do was buy a ticket and ride to Holborn.
Which the entire city of London had apparently done tonight. Polly could scarcely get off the train, the platform was so jammed with people sitting on blankets. She picked her way carefully through them, trying not to step on anyone, and out to the tunnel. It was just as bad there, a solid mass of people, bedding, and picnic baskets. One woman was boiling tea on a Primus stove and another was setting out plates and silverware on a tablecloth on the floor, which reminded Polly that she hadn’t had supper. She asked the woman where the canteen was.
“Through there,” she said, pointing with a teaspoon, “and down to the Piccadilly Line.”
“Thank you,” Polly said and made her way toward it through masses of people sitting against the tiled walls and standing in little knots, chatting.
The main hall was only slightly less mobbed. Polly rode down the long escalator to the canteen, which was much larger than Notting Hill Gate’s and had china cups and saucers—“Just bring them back when you’re done, there’s a dear,” the WVS volunteer behind the counter said—and Polly bought a ham sandwich and a cup of tea and walked about, looking at the contemps.
Historians had described the shelters as “nightmarish” and “like one of the lower circles of hell,” but the shelterers seemed more like people on holiday than doomed souls, picnicking and gossiping and reading the comic papers. A foursome sat on camp stools playing bridge, a middle-aged woman was washing out stockings in a tin pot, and a wind-up portable gramophone was playing “A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square.” Station guards were patrolling the platforms to keep order, but their only job seemed to be ordering people to put out their cigarettes and pick up their discarded wastepaper.
The government was right to have been concerned about sanitation. There was only one makeshift toilet on each level, with endless waiting queues. Polly saw several toddlers sitting on chamber pots and watched as a mother carried a pot over to the platform’s edge and emptied it onto the tracks. Which no doubt accounted for the odor. Polly wondered what it would be like by the middle of winter.
There’d been some attempts to impose order—a lost-and-found, a first-aid post, and a lending library—but for the most part, chaos reigned. Children ran wild in the tunnels and played dolls and marbles and hopscotch in the middle of the tunnels and on the narrow strip of platform reserved for passengers getting on and off the trains. No one was making any effort to put them to bed, even though it was half past nine and a number of adults were unfolding blankets and plumping pillows, and one teenaged girl was putting cold cream on her face.