Buckingham Palace. “It exploded in the Quadrangle just outside the King and Queen’s sitting room,” she said. “They might have been killed!”
“Oh, my,” Miss Hibbard said, knitting. “Were they hurt?”
“No, though they were badly shaken. Luckily, the Princesses were safely in the country.”
“Rapunzel was a princess,” Trot, on her mother’s lap, looked up from the fairy tale her mother was reading to say.
“No, she wasn’t,” Irene said. “Sleeping Beauty was a princess.”
“What about the Queen’s dogs?” Mr. Simms asked. “Were they at the palace?”
“The Times didn’t say,” Miss Laburnum said.
“Of course not. Nobody thinks of the dogs.”
“There was an advertisement in the Daily Graphic last week for a gas mask for dogs,” the rector said.
“I think Basil Rathbone’s handsome, don’t you?” Viv said.
Lila made a face. “No, he’s much too old. I think Leslie Howard’s handsome.”
An anti-aircraft gun started up. “There goes the Strand,” Mr. Dorming said, and, as it was followed by the heavy crump of a bomb off to the east, and then another, “The East End’s getting it again.”
“Do you know what the Queen said after the palace was hit?” Miss Laburnum said. “She said, ‘Now I can look the East End in the face.’”
“She’s an example to us all,” Mrs. Wyvern said.
“They say she’s wonderfully brave,” Miss Laburnum said, “that she isn’t afraid of the bombs at all.”
Neither were they. Polly’d hoped to observe their adaptation to the Blitz as they progressed from fear to a determination not to give in to the nonchalant courage American correspondents arriving in mid-Blitz had been so impressed by. But they’d already passed those stages and reached the point where they ignored the raids completely. In eleven days flat.
They didn’t even seem to hear the crashes and bangs above them, only occasionally glancing up when an explosion was particularly loud and then going back to whatever they’d been talking about. Which was often the war. Mr. Simms reported the count of downed German and RAF aircraft every night; Miss Laburnum followed the royal family, recounting every visit “our dear Queen” made to bombed-out neighborhoods, hospitals, and ARP posts; and Miss Hibbard was knitting socks for “our boys.” Even Lila and Viv, who spent most of their time discussing film stars and dances, talked about joining the WRENs. And Leslie Howard, who Lila thought was so handsome, was in the RAF. He’d be killed in 1943 when his plane was shot down.
Mrs. Brightford’s husband was in the Army, the rector had a son who’d been injured at Dunkirk and was in hospital in Orpington, and they all had relatives and acquaintances who’d been called up or bombed out—all of which they discussed in a cheerful, gossipy tone, oblivious to the raids, which came in waves, intensifying, subsiding, then intensifying again. Not even Mr. Simms’s terrier, Nelson, seemed particularly bothered by them, though dogs’ ability to hear high-pitched noises was supposed to make it worse for them.
“Oh, that’s silly,” Lila was saying. “Leslie Howard’s far handsomer than Clark Gable.”
“‘… and the witch said, “You must give Rapunzel to me,” ’” Mrs. Brightford read. “‘And she took the child from her parents…’”
Polly wondered if Mrs. Brightford had refused to be separated from her little girls or if they’d been evacuated and then come home again. Merope had said more than 75 percent of them had been back in London when the Blitz began.
“Sounds like it’s moving off to the north,” Mr. Simms said.
It did seem to be moving off. The nearest of the anti-aircraft guns had stopped, and the roar of the planes had diminished to a low hum.
“And the cruel witch locked Rapunzel in a high tower without any door,’” Mrs. Brightford read to Trot, who was nearly asleep. “‘And Rapunzel—’”
There was a sudden, sharp knock on the door. Trot sat up straight.
It’s someone else caught out on the street by the warden, Polly thought, looking over at the door and then at the rector, expecting him to let them in.
He didn’t move. No one moved. Or breathed. They all, even little Trot, stared at the door, their eyes wide in their white faces, their bodies braced as if for a blow.
That’s how they looked when I was standing outside knocking that first night, Polly thought. That’s the expression they had on their faces in the moment before the door opened, and they saw it was me.
She’d been wrong about their having adjusted to the raids. This terror had been there all along, just beneath the surface. She thought suddenly of the