All Clear

“Planespotting … I never thought of that,” Eileen said. “Polly, listen, I’ve just had an idea—uh-oh, Miss Snelgrove at eleven o’clock,” she whispered. “I’ll see you tonight.” And she hurried off.

“Miss Sebastian,” Miss Snelgrove said.

“Yes, ma’am. I was only—”

“Miss Hayes will be returning to work today, and I’d like you to be here to assist her, so if you wouldn’t mind waiting to take your lunch break till two—”

“I’m happy to,” Polly said, and meant it. Marjorie was coming back to work. Polly’d been afraid she’d been too traumatized by her experience to stay in London, but she was coming back.

And when she arrived, she was nearly her old rosy-cheeked self. I was right, Polly thought. I didn’t alter the end result. Everything’s worked out just as it would have if Marjorie’d never been injured.

“I’ll wrap your parcels for you till your arm’s better,” she told Marjorie, “though you can no doubt do better with one hand than I can with two. I never have got the hang of it, and now that the paper and string are rationed—”

But Marjorie was shaking her head. “I’m not staying. I only came to tell everyone goodbye.”

“Goodbye?”

“Yes. I’ve handed in my notice.”

“But—”

“I … the nurses in hospital were so kind to me. I wouldn’t have made it if it weren’t for them, and it made me think about what I was doing to help win the war. I couldn’t bear to see Hitler come marching down Oxford Street because I hadn’t done all I could.” She took a deep breath. “I’ve joined the Royal Army Nursing Service.”

There are six evacuated children in our house. My wife and I hate them so much that we have decided to take away something for Christmas.

—LETTER,

1940

London—November 1940

I KNOW EXACTLY WHERE I CAN GET A MAP, EILEEN THOUGHT, hurrying out of Townsend Brothers and up Oxford Street to the tube station to catch a train to Whitechapel. Alf Hodbin has one. His planespotting map. Why didn’t I think of it before?

She could get it from him and locate Gerald’s airfield—she was nearly positive she’d recognize the name when she saw it—and Polly and Mike would stop looking at her as though she were an imbecile for not remembering. And they could go to the airfield, find Gerald, and go home.

If Alf still has the map, she thought. And if he’d give it to her. He might well refuse, especially if he sensed how badly she needed it. Hopefully he and Binnie would still be in school and she could get it from their mother instead and not have to worry about Alf’s refusing or about the children following her and finding out where she lived. Though it wouldn’t matter—she wouldn’t be here that much longer.

She looked at her watch. It was just one. She should be able to get to Whitechapel well before school let out. But Alf and Binnie had constantly played truant in Backbury, and Mrs. Hodbin didn’t seem the type who’d see to it that they went to school. And if they were there …

I’m going to have to bribe them, she decided. But with what?

I know, she thought, and took a train to the Tower of London, where she bought a book on beheadings at the first souvenir shop she could find and a film-star magazine for Binnie, then set out for Whitechapel.

Which proved nearly impossible to get to. The District Line was shut down. Polly said there weren’t any daytime raids today, Eileen thought nervously, going back upstairs to take a bus, but the damage turned out to have been from a raid the night before—damage which became apparent as she neared Whitechapel. There was a massive crater in the middle of Fieldgate Street and, a bit farther on, the wreckage of a warehouse lying across the road.

Polly’d said the East End had been badly bombed, but Eileen hadn’t expected it to be this bad. On every street at least one of the clapboard tenements had collapsed inward in a heap of wood and plaster. Others had toppled sideways onto the next tenement and the next and the next, like a line of falling dominoes.

Eileen was grateful there weren’t any raids today. She didn’t know how Polly and Mike stood them. “You’ll get used to them,” Polly’d said. “A few more weeks, and you won’t even hear them,” but it wasn’t true. She still jumped every time she heard the crump of an HE and flinched at the poom-poom-poom of the anti-aircraft guns. Even the wail of the sirens sent her into a panic. If there had been raids in the East End today, she wasn’t certain she could have summoned the courage to come, map or no map.