not be all that bad. Douglas, look at that lieutenant who just got on! Isn’t he handsome?”
“Where?” Paige said, standing on tiptoe to see.
“What do you think you’re doing?” Reardon demanded. “You’ve already bagged one. Don’t be greedy.”
“I was only looking,” Paige said.
“You’re not allowed to look. You’re engaged,” Reardon said. “Will he be here tonight?”
“No, he rang up night before last and said he wouldn’t be back for a week at the least,” Paige said.
“But that was before,” Reardon said. “Now that the war’s over—oh, Lord, there are more people boarding! We’ll pop!”
“We must try to get off at the next stop,” Paige said. “I can’t breathe.”
They nodded and when the train stopped again and a large man wearing a tin hat and an ARP armband began pushing toward the doors, they followed in his wake, squeezing between sailors and Wrens and navvies and teenaged girls.
“I can’t see what station it is,” Reardon said as the train slowed.
“It doesn’t matter,” Paige said. “Only get off. I’m being squished. I feel like a pilchard in a tin.”
Reardon nodded and bent down to look out the window. “Oh, good, it’s Charing Cross,” she said. “It looks like we’re going to Trafalgar Square after all, Douglas.”
The doors opened. “Follow me, girls!” Reardon shouted gaily. “Mind the gap!”
She scrambled off, and Paige did, too, calling, “Coming, Douglas?”
“Yes,” she said, attempting to squeeze past the Home Guard, who for some reason had launched into “It’s a Long Way to Tipperary.” “Sorry, this is my stop. I must get off here,” she said, but they didn’t budge.
“Douglas! Hurry!” Reardon and Paige were shouting from the platform. “The train’s going to leave.”
“Please,” she shouted, trying to make herself heard over their singing. “I must get through.”
The door began to close.
I am ashamed to say I told him it was the fault of the Germans.
—WINSTON CHURCHILL, ON HIS GRANDSON’S GETTING THE MEASLES
Backbury, Warwickshire—May 1940
BINNIE AND THE REST OF THE EVACUEES GREETED THE news that they were quarantined with an outburst of wild behavior that made Eileen want to flee for the drop before the children’s supper was half over.
“I was corn-teened for a month,” Alice announced. “Rose n’me couldn’t play outside or nothin’.”
“We ain’t gonna be quarantined for a month, are we, Eileen?” Binnie asked.
“No, of course not.” Measles only lasted a few days, didn’t they? That’s why they called them the three-day measles. Alice must be mistaken.
When Dr. Stuart came back that night, Eileen asked him how long the quarantine was likely to last. “It depends on how many of the children catch them,” he said. “If Alf were to be the only case, which is unlikely, it will end a fortnight after his rash disappears, so three or four weeks.”
“Three or four weeks? But they only last three days.”
“You’re thinking of German measles. These are red measles, which last a week or longer after the rash first appears.”
“And how long does it take for the rash to appear?”
“From three days to a week, and in some cases I’ve seen the rash last up to eight days.”
And knowing Alf, he would be one of those cases. A week plus eight days plus a fortnight. They would be quarantined for a month. If no one else caught them. So she obviously couldn’t wait until the quarantine was over. She had to go now. She wondered what the penalty for breaking quarantine was in 1940. During the Pandemic it would have got one shot, but surely that wouldn’t be the situation with a childhood disease. Just in case, though, she waited till everyone was asleep and Samuels was snoring heavily in the porter’s chair, which he’d dragged over in front of the front door, then tiptoed down the back stairs to the kitchen.
The door was locked. So were the French doors in the morning room, the windows in the library and dining room, and the side door leading off the billiards room.
“And the keys are here in my pocket,” Samuels said when she confronted him the next morning, “and that’s where they’re going to stay. That Hodbin brat could get out of one of Houdini’s traps, he could. I’m not letting him spread measles all over the neighborhood. If it is measles. I say he’s shamming so he can keep home from school.”
Eileen was inclined to agree with him. Alf not only drank all the broth she carried up for his breakfast, but asked for more, and when she came up for the tray, Una said he was