the drowned wreckage were a half-burnt placard saying On Sale, a sodden glove, a charred clothes hanger.
At the rear of the store Polly could see a fireman playing a hose on the timbers, though the fire was long since out. Two other firemen wound a heavy hose onto a wooden reel, and a fourth walked toward the fire pumper still standing in the middle of the street. A middle-aged woman in trousers and a tin hat was stringing a rope around the area. There was broken glass everywhere, and brick dust, and when Polly looked up Oxford Street, it was shrouded in thick smoke.
She picked her way through the broken glass, stepping over hoses and between puddles. This is pointless, she thought. There’s no way any of the stores will be open, let alone hiring. But two workmen were putting up a banner over Peter Robinson’s main doors that read We’re Open. Don’t Mind Our Mess, as if they were under construction. And she could see a woman going into Townsend Brothers. Polly crunched through the glass behind her, stopping at the door to straighten her jacket and pick glass fragments out of the soles of her shoes before she went in.
She needn’t have bothered. Two shopgirls were sweeping up more glass inside, and a third was showing lipsticks to the woman Polly had followed in. There was no one else on the floor, and no one in the lift except for the lift operator, who asked her, “Didja see what Jerry did to John Lewis?” as she slid the gate across.
There was no one shopping on the fifth floor either. They obviously don’t need any additional help, Polly thought, but the moment she walked into the personnel manager’s office, he offered her the position of junior shop assistant in the lingerie department and escorted her personally down to the third floor to a pretty, brown-haired young woman. “Where is Miss Snelgrove?” the manager asked her.
“She telephoned she’d be late, Mr. Witherill,” she said, smiling at Polly. “She said there was a UXB in the Edgware Road, and they’d cordoned the entire neighborhood off, so she had to go through the park, and—”
“This is Miss Sebastian,” Mr. Witherill cut in. “She will be working the gloves and stockings counter.” And to Polly, “Miss Hayes will show you where things are and explain your duties. Tell Miss Snelgrove to report to me the moment she comes in.”
“Don’t mind him,” Miss Hayes said after he’d left. “He’s a bit nervy. We’ve had three girls give notice this morning, and he’s worried Miss Snelgrove might have legged it as well. She hasn’t, more’s the pity. She’s our floor supervisor and very particular,” she confided, lowering her voice. “I think she’s the reason Betty quit, though she said it was because of what happened to John Lewis. Miss Snelgrove was always on at her about something. Have you worked in a department store before, Miss Sebastian?”
“Yes, Miss Hayes.”
“Oh, good, then you’ll have had some experience with stock and things,” she said, stepping behind the counter. “And you needn’t call me Miss Hayes when it’s only us. Call me Marjorie. And you’re…?”
“Polly.”
“Where did you work, Polly?”
“In Manchester, at Debenham’s.” She’d picked Manchester because of its distance from London and because she knew there was a Debenham’s there. She’d seen a photo of it gutted in a raid in December. But it would be just her luck to have Marjorie say, “Really? I’m from Manchester.”
She didn’t. She said, “Do you know how to write up sales?”
Polly did. She also knew how to do sums, use carbon paper, work an adding machine, sharpen pencils, and every other possible task Research and Mr. Dunworthy—who believed historians should be prepared for every possible contingency—thought a shopgirl might conceivably need to know.
The money had been the most difficult to learn. Really, their monetary system had been insane, and she’d expected that to give her the most trouble at work, but Marjorie told her all of Townsend Brothers’ cash transactions were handled by the financial office upstairs. All Polly had to do was place the money and the bill in a brass tube, send it shooting along a system of pneumatic chutes, and it came back moments later with the correct change. I needn’t have learned all those guineas and half-crowns and farthings, she thought.
Marjorie showed her how to bill a sale to a customer’s account and write up a delivery order, which drawers the different sizes of gloves and silk