address of the shelter, but the only thing posted was a list of what to do in case of a poison gas attack.
She debated saying she’d got lost in the fog and asking where she was, but given the odd way they’d looked at her when she came in, she decided to listen to their conversations instead and hope they’d let fall some clue, though Lila’s mention of meeting someone hadn’t been any help. She could take the tube to Piccadilly Circus from anywhere, including the East End. And now she was explaining why she only dated soldiers—“It’s my way of doing my bit for the war effort”—and the women on the bench were discussing knitting patterns.
Polly focused on the clergyman, hoping he or the formidable-looking woman—whom he addressed as Mrs. Wyvern—would mention the name of his church, but they were discussing flower arrangements. “I thought lilies might be nice for the altar,” he said.
“No, the altar will be yellow chrysanthemums,” Mrs. Wyvern said, and it was clear who was running things, “and the side chapel bronze dahlias and—”
“Mice!” the littlest girl crowed.
“Yes,” her mother said. “Cinderella’s fairy godmother turned the mice into horses and the pumpkin into a beautiful carriage. ‘You may go to the ball, Cinderella,’ she said. ‘But you must be home by the stroke of midnight.’”
“If that pill of a floorwalker hadn’t made us stay after and do the display windows,” Viv grumbled, “we’d have been able to go to the ball.”
Floorwalker? Display windows? That meant Viv and Lila were shopgirls. But if that was the case Polly had been wrong about what shopgirls in 1940 wore and would have to go back through to Oxford and get a sequined dress before she went to apply for a position.
If she could find the drop again. She had no idea where it was from here.
“It wasn’t only the floorwalker,” Lila said. “It was your insisting we go home and change clothes first.”
“I wanted Donald to see my new dance frock,” Viv protested, and Polly breathed a sigh of relief. Those weren’t their work clothes after all. But it was too bad Viv hadn’t mentioned where they’d gone home to.
It’s got to be Stepney or Whitechapel, Polly thought. The explosions were directly overhead. There was a whoosh and the muffled crump of an explosion very nearby, and then a horrid sound—a cross between a cannon going off in one’s ear and a sledgehammer. “What is that?” Polly said.
“Tavistock Square,” the stout man said calmly.
“No, it isn’t,” the man with the dog corrected him. “It’s Regent’s Park.”
“The anti-aircraft guns,” the clergyman explained, and the white-haired knitter nodded in confirmation.
The anti-aircraft guns? But they hadn’t begun till the eleventh. And supposedly when they had, the contemps had been terrified by the unfamiliar noise and then relieved and overjoyed, shouting, “Hurrah! That’s givin’ it to ’em!” and “At least we’re givin’ a bit of our own back!” But these people hadn’t noticed them any more than they noticed the bombs. The little girls were engrossed in “Cinderella,” and the dog hadn’t even opened his eyes, so this couldn’t be their first night. Which meant the guns had to have started on the eighth or the ninth.
Another gun started up with a deafening, bone-rattling poom-poom-poom. “That’s Tavistock Square,” the dog owner said, and, as another, even louder, joined in, “And that’s ours.”
The stout man nodded agreement. “Kensington Gardens.”
Which meant she was in Kensington, thank goodness, or very near it. But it also meant that just because the raids had been mainly over Stepney and Whitechapel, it didn’t mean Kensington hadn’t been bombed as well. Colin had been right—there were lots of stray bombs. And lots of errors in people’s memories, as witness the date the guns had begun. It had probably seemed like days before the guns had started up to the people in the shelters, even though it had only been a day or two after the Blitz began.
Which is why historians must do on-site research, Polly thought. There were simply too many errors in the historical record. Though she wouldn’t tell Mr. Dunworthy that when she checked in. Or that Kensington had been bombed on the tenth. Or how she’d been out on the streets in the middle of a raid. Actually, she’d better not tell him anything, except what her address was and where she was working.
She wished the newsagent hadn’t shut his door before she had a chance to buy a newspaper so she could check the advertisements