He walked straight to Polly and held out his newspaper to her with grave courtesy. “Would you care for my Times, dear child?” he asked her. He spoke quietly—but not so quietly that everyone in the room couldn’t hear him, she noted—and his voice was as refined as his appearance.
“I—” Polly said.
“I’m quite finished with it.” He held it out.
“Thank you,” she said gratefully, and the incident was over. Mrs. Rickett retreated sullenly to the bench, the white-haired woman took out her knitting again and began counting rows, the rector went back to his book, and Lila whispered, “Don’t pay Mrs. Rickett any mind. She’s an old cat,” and went back to talking about the dance she and Viv were missing.
The gentleman had managed to completely defuse the situation, though Polly wasn’t certain how. She shot him a grateful look, but he’d retreated to his corner again and was reading a book. She looked down at the newspaper in her hand. He’d folded it open to the “Rooms to Let” section for her. She started through the listings, looking for permissible addresses. Mayfair. No, too expensive. Stepney, no. Shoreditch, no. Croydon, no, definitely not.
Here was one. Kensington. Ashbury Lane, which might work. What was the address? Please not six, nineteen, or twenty-one, she said silently. Eleven. Excellent—an allowed address, within her budget, and near Oxford Street. Now if it was only near a tube stop. “Convenient to Marble Arch,” the advertisement read. Which had taken a direct hit on September seventeenth.
She mentally crossed it off and continued down the list. Kensal Green. No, too far out. Whitechapel, no.
“The raid seems to be letting up,” Lila said.
The racket did seem to be diminishing. The explosions sounded farther off, and one of the guns had stopped firing. “Perhaps the all clear will go early tonight, Viv,” Lila said, “and we can still go to the dance,” but the moment she spoke, the barrage started up again.
“I hate Hitler,” Viv burst out. “It’s so utterly unfair, being trapped in this place on a Saturday night.”
Polly looked up sharply. Saturday? It’s Tuesday. But even as she thought it, she was seeing the evidence that had been in front of her all along—the dance Lila and Viv had been planning to go to, the guns that hadn’t started till Wednesday and that no one had remarked on, the braced ceiling, the Snakes and Ladders game, the embroidered tea cloth—all signs they’d been coming here for more than three days. The clergyman and the woman’s discussion of the order of service for Sunday. For tomorrow.
She’d misread all the clues, just as she had on the street when she’d thought it was early morning. The guns hadn’t started till the eleventh, after all, and of course the raids had sounded like they were overhead. Kensington had been bombed on Saturday. But if it’s Saturday, she thought, I’ve already missed four days. And the crucial first few days of the Blitz when the contemps were adjusting to it. That’s why they were all so calm, so settled in. They’d already adjusted.
And I missed it, she thought furiously. Badri said he expected two hours of slippage, not four and a half days. And it was actually even more than that. Tomorrow was Sunday. She wouldn’t be able to look for work till Monday.
Which means I can’t start work till Tuesday, by which time I’ll have lost an entire week of observing shopgirls, and I only have six.
It can’t be the fourteenth, she thought. She snatched up the newspaper and paged through it, looking for the front page. I didn’t have enough time to begin with.
But it was. “Saturday, 14 September 1940,” the masthead read, and below it, appropriately enough, “Late Edition.”
For want of a nail, the shoe was lost. For want of a shoe, the horse was lost. For want of a horse, the rider was lost. For want of a rider, the kingdom was lost.
—PROVERB
Saltram-on-Sea—29 May 1940
IT WASN’T REALLY A FOOT OF WATER. IT WAS ONLY ABOUT four inches, but it covered the hold. Mike could see why the Commander had asked him if he could swim.
“Nothing to worry about,” the Commander said, seeing Mike’s reaction. “Just need to get the bilge pump started.” He splashed unconcernedly through the water and lifted a trapdoor. “She’s been sitting here all winter. An hour or two out in the Channel, and she’ll be as good as new.”