you for coming such a long way to see me,” he said, trying to figure out a way to bring the conversation around to asking her if anyone had come into the pub inquiring about him. “Did you come by bus?”
“No, Mr. Powney took me to Dover, and I took the train from there,” she said, taking off her gloves and laying them across her lap.
Mr. Powney. So he’d finally shown up.
“I couldn’t come before because of the pub being busy on the weekend. Dad wanted me to write, but I didn’t like to, you being injured and all.” She picked up her gloves again and twisted them. “I thought it would be better to tell you in person.”
The retrieval team had been there. What story had they told her? That they were looking for him because he was AWOL? Was that why the Commander hadn’t told them where he was? “Tell me what?” he asked.
“About the Commander and his grandson Jonathan,” she said, twisting the gloves in her hands.
“What about them? Daphne?”
She looked down at the tortured gloves. “They were killed, you see. At Dunkirk.”
We cannot tell when they will try and come. We cannot be sure that in fact they will try at all.
—WINSTON CHURCHILL, 1940
London—21 September 1940
POLLY LOOKED PAST MARJORIE AT THE SPIRE OF ST. Martin-in-the-Fields. Beyond it lay Charing Cross. And Trafalgar Square. You’re wrong, she thought. It won’t come out right in the end. Not for me. Another siren, to the south, began to wail, and then another, their sound filling the dark street where they sat on the steps.
“There’s the siren,” Marjorie said unnecessarily. “We shouldn’t stay here.”
I can’t do anything else, Polly thought. My drop’s broken, and the retrieval team didn’t come.
“The bombers will be here any minute. Can you walk, do you think, Polly?” Marjorie asked, and when she didn’t answer, “Shall I try to find someone to help?”
And expose them to the dangers of the raid that would begin in a few minutes? Polly was already endangering Marjorie, who was selflessly trying to help her. And the bomb that had destroyed St. George’s wasn’t the last one that would be dropped. There would be more parachute mines and HEs and deadly shrapnel tonight. And the next night. And the next.
And Marjorie and Miss Snelgrove and the old man who sat me down on the curb at St. George’s are in as much trouble as I am. The only difference is that they don’t know the date of their deaths. The least she could do was not get them killed for trying to help. “No,” she said, forcing her voice to sound steady, “I’m all right.” She got up from the steps. “I can make it to Charing Cross. Which way is it?”
But when Marjorie pointed down the darkened street and said, “That way. We can cut through Trafalgar Square,” she had to clench her fists and hold them tightly at her sides to keep from grabbing Marjorie’s arm for support.
You can do this, she told herself, willing her legs to support her. You saw it before, on the way to St. Paul’s. But she hadn’t known then that she was trapped here.
You have to do it.
It won’t look anything like it did that night.
She needn’t have worried, it was too dark to see anything. The lions, the fountains, the Nelson Monument were only outlines in the blackness. But Polly kept her eyes carefully fixed ahead, concentrating on reaching the station, finding a token in her handbag, getting on the descending escalator.
Charing Cross didn’t look as it had that night either, filled with celebrating people. It looked like every other tube station Polly’d been in since she got here, jammed with passengers and shelterers and running children.
And it was safe. It had been hit on September tenth, but wouldn’t be hit again till the twenty-ninth of December. And on the noisy, crowded platform, conversation would be impossible. She wouldn’t have to answer Marjorie’s questions, to keep up the pretense that she was all right.
But Marjorie didn’t look for an unoccupied space where they could sit. She didn’t even spare a glance for the shelterers. She went straight down to the Northern Line and toward the northbound tunnel. “Where are you going?” Polly asked.
“Bloomsbury,” Marjorie said, pushing her way through the tunnel. “That’s where I live.”
“Bloomsbury?” There were raids over Bloomsbury tonight. But the sirens had already gone. The guard wouldn’t let them out of the station when they got there. “Which is