this is an alley, and this is a side door in a warehouse? she thought, remembering the cobwebbed black door in the drop. What if there’s no one on the other side?
There was another explosion. I can’t stay here, she thought, and began to grope her way back over to the stairs. A bomb hit nearly at the head of the stairs, and then two more, in rapid succession.
She turned back to the door. “Let me in!” she called, pounding on the door with both fists, and then, when there was still no answer, taking off a shoe and pounding on the door with it, trying to make herself heard over the din of the raid.
The door opened. The sudden brightness from inside blinded her, and she put up her hand, still holding her shoe, to shield her eyes, and stood there squinting at the tableau inside. People sat against the walls on blankets and rugs, and a dog lay at the feet of one of the men. Three older women sat side by side on a high-backed bench, the middle one knitting—or rather, she had been knitting. Now she, like all the others, was staring at the door and at Polly. An aristocratic-looking elderly gentleman in the far corner had lowered the letter he was reading to look at her, and three fair-haired little girls had stopped in the middle of a game of Snakes and Ladders to stare at her.
There was no expression on any of their faces, no welcoming smiles—even from the man who’d let her in. No one moved or made a sound. They were frozen, as if they’d suddenly stopped in midsentence, and there was a feeling of fear, of danger in the room.
The thought flashed through her mind, This isn’t a shelter. The man who brought me here wasn’t a real warden. He could have stolen that ARP helmet, and these people are only pretending to be shelterers. But that was ridiculous. The man who’d let her in was obviously a clergyman. He was wearing a clerical collar and spectacles, and this wasn’t Dickens’s London. It was 1940.
It’s me. There must be something wrong with the way I look, she thought, and realized she was still holding her shoe in her hand. She bent to slip it on, then looked back up at the assembly, and what she’d seen before must have been a trick of the light or her overactive imagination because now the scene looked perfectly normal. The white-haired woman smiled pleasantly at her and took up her knitting; the aristocratic gentleman folded his letter, returned it to its envelope, and put it in his inside coat pocket; the little girls returned to their game; and the dog lay down and put its head on its paws.
“Do come in,” the clergyman said, smiling.
“Shut the door,” a woman shouted, and someone else said, “The blackout—”
“Oh,” Polly said, “sorry,” and turned to shut the door.
“You’ll get us all fined,” a stout man said grumpily.
Polly pushed the door shut, and the clergyman barred it, but apparently not fast enough. “What are you trying to do?” a scrawny woman with a sour expression demanded. “Show the jerries where we are?”
And so much for the fabled cheerful camaraderie of the Blitz, Polly thought. “Sorry,” she said again, looking around the shelter for a place to sit. There was no furniture except for the bench. Everyone else sat on the stone floor or on blankets, and the only vacant spot was between the stout man who’d growled at her to shut the door and two young women in sequin-adorned dresses and bright red lipstick, who were busily gossiping. “I beg your pardon, may I sit here?” she asked them.
The man looked annoyed, but grunted assent, and the young women nodded, scooted closer together, and went on chatting. “… and then he asked me to meet him at Piccadilly Circus and go dancing with him!”
“Oh, Lila, he didn’t!” her friend said. “You’re not going to, are you?”
“No, of course not, Viv. He’s far too old. He’s thirty.”
Polly thought of Colin and suppressed a smile.
“I told him, you need to find someone your own age.”
“Oh, Lila, you didn’t,” Viv said.
“I did. I wouldn’t have gone out with him at any rate. I only go out with men in uniform.”
Polly took off her coat, spread it out, sat down on it, and looked around at the room. It was obviously one of the shop or warehouse cellars pressed into service as