should have told them not to say anything about my being back, she thought, but she’d have had to explain why, and she’d been afraid he might emerge from his office at any moment.
Thank goodness she hadn’t gone blithely in and made her report. He already thought her project was too dangerous. He’d been protective of his historians since she was a first-year student, but he’d been absolutely hysterical about this project. He’d insisted on her drop site for the Blitz being within walking distance of Oxford Street, even though it would have been much easier to find a site in Wormwood Scrubs or on Hampstead Heath and take the tube in. It also had to be within a half-mile of both a tube station and whatever room she let. “I want you to be able to reach your drop site quickly if you’re injured,” he’d said.
“They did have hospitals in the 1940s, you know,” she’d said. “And if I’m injured, how exactly will I walk half a mile?”
“Don’t make jokes,” he’d snapped. “It’s possible to die on assignment, and the Blitz is an exceptionally dangerous place,” and launched into a twenty-minute lecture on the perils of blast from high-explosive bombs, shrapnel, and sparks from incendiaries. “A woman in Canning Town got her foot entangled in the cord of a barrage balloon and was dragged into the Thames.”
“I am not going to be dragged into the Thames by a barrage balloon.”
“You could be struck by a bus which couldn’t see you in the blackout, or murdered by a mugger.”
“I scarcely think—”
“Criminals thrived in the Blitz. The blackout provided them with cover of darkness, and the police were too busy digging bodies out of the rubble to investigate. The death of a victim found dead in an alley was simply put down to blast. I don’t want to read your name in the death notices in the Times. A half-mile radius. That’s final.”
And that hadn’t been the only restriction. She was forbidden to let a room in any house hit by a bomb before the end of the year, even though she’d only be there through October, and the drop site had to be one that hadn’t been hit at all, which eliminated three sites that would have worked nicely, but that had been destroyed in the last big raid of the Blitz in May 1941.
It was no wonder the lab still hadn’t found a site. I hope they locate one before Mr. Dunworthy finds out I’m back, she thought. Or someone tells him. She doubted if Mr. Purdy would—he didn’t even seem to realize she’d been gone—and hopefully Michael Davies would be too busy attempting to get his date changed and Merope’d be in too much of a hurry to get her driving permission for them to mention that they’d seen her.
She felt bad about ducking out on her promise to speak to Mr. Dunworthy about Merope going to VE-Day, but it couldn’t be helped. And it wasn’t as if time was an issue. Merope’d said she still had several months left to go on her evacuee assignment. And I’ll only be gone six weeks, Polly thought. I’ll go see him as soon as I’m safely back and persuade him to let her do it.
If it was even necessary. He might already have changed his mind by then. In the meantime, Polly needed to keep out of Mr. Dunworthy’s way, hope the lab came up with a drop site soon, and be ready to go through the moment they did. To that end, she went to Props to get a wristwatch—this one radium-dialed, since the one she’d had last time hadn’t been and had been nearly useless—a ration book and identity card made out in the name of Polly Sebastian, and letters of recommendation to use in applying for work as a shopgirl.
“What about a departure letter?” the tech asked her. “Do you need anything special?”
“No, the same one I had last time will work—the Northumberland one. It needs to be addressed to Polly Sebastian and have an October 1940 postmark.”
The tech wrote that down and handed her thirty pounds.
“Oh, that’s far too much,” she said. “I’ll have the wages I earn after the first week, and I don’t expect my room and board to be more than ten and six a week. I’ll only need ten pounds at the most.” But the tech was shaking his head.
“It says here that you’re to take twenty pounds for unforeseen emergencies.”