“But what about the retrieval team? How will they find us?”
“I’ll tell Miss Snelgrove which unit I’ve been assigned to,” Polly said. The next morning Polly gave her notice at work and went to the Works Board. She filled up a registration form and eventually had her name called by a stern woman with a pince-nez.
“I’m Mrs. Sentry. Please be seated,” the woman said without looking up from the form. “I see your last employment was as a shop assistant with a department store. I assume you can do sums. Can you type?”
If she said yes, she would end up in Whitehall, typing requisition forms for the War Office. “No, ma’am,” she said. “I was hoping to be assigned to a rescue squad.”
Mrs. Sentry shook her head. “You’re far too slight to do the lifting involved.”
“Well, then, some other sort of Civil Defence work.”
Mrs. Sentry looked at her over her pince-nez. “My job is to match you with the job for which you’re best suited. Are you married?”
“No, ma’am.”
Mrs. Sentry wrote “single” on the form below “good at sums.” “Are you good at puzzles?” she asked. “Acrostics, crosswords, that sort of thing?”
Oh, God, Polly thought, she’s planning to send me to Bletchley Park. That’s why she asked me if I was married. I can’t go to Bletchley Park. It’s the last place I should be.
“I’m not good at puzzles at all,” she said, “or sums, really. My supervisor at Townsend Brothers was always having to correct my sales slips. And I’m not married, but I do have obligations. My cousin and I have two war orphans living with us.”
“How old are the children?”
How old do they have to be to keep me from going to Bletchley Park? Polly thought, wondering if she dared lie about their ages, but Mrs. Sentry looked the type who’d check. “Alf’s seven and Binnie’s twelve,” she said. “Their mother was killed in a raid.”
And it was a good thing she’d told the truth because Mrs. Sentry was looking suspiciously at her. “What did you say your name was?”
Oh, no, she knows Alf and Binnie. They’ve tried to steal her handbag in the tube station.
“Polly Sebastian,” she said.
“Sebastian,” Mrs. Sentry said thoughtfully. “You look extremely familiar. Have we met before?”
It was Stephen Lang all over again. What if she knew me as a FANY? Polly thought. She didn’t look familiar, but …
But this wasn’t 1944. Even if I did meet her then, it hasn’t happened yet.
“I’m almost certain we’ve met before,” Mrs. Sentry was saying, “but I can’t think where … It was at Christmas …”
I hope she wasn’t at the pantomime, Polly thought, recalling that episode with Theodore.
“Could it have been when you were at Townsend Brothers Christmas shopping?” she asked to throw her off the scent.
“No, I shop at Harrods. It was something to do with a theater …” She frowned, trying to remember.
Polly had to get her to assign her to a job before she did. If she remembered Theodore’s screaming, “I don’t want to go home!” she was likely to decide Polly was an unfit mother and ship her off to Bletchley Park after all. “If I could be assigned to an ARP post or an anti-aircraft gun crew—”
“I know where I saw you. In a play in the tube station at Piccadilly Circus. A Christmas Carol. When you said ‘anti-aircraft gun,’ I remembered you having to shout over them. You played Belle, didn’t you?”
“Yes,” Polly said, relieved that at least it hadn’t been the pantomime.
“You were simply wonderful,” Mrs. Sentry said, beaming at Polly through her pince-nez, no longer stern. “I can’t tell you how much the play meant to me. I’d been feeling rather glum about the war and everything, but seeing it brought back the Christmases of my girlhood—the family all together, reading Dickens round the fire. It gave me hope that we’ll see Christmases like that again when this war is over. And it made me determined to do my bit to see that we do. Why didn’t you say on your application that you were an actress?”
“I’m not,” Polly said. “That was only an amateur troupe. We put on plays in the shelters, but they weren’t—”
But Mrs. Sentry wasn’t listening. “I have just the job for you. Wait here.” She stood up, hurried over to a file cabinet, extracted a sheet of paper, and hurried back. “It’s perfect. And you’ll be able to stay here in London with your family. Let me just write down the address for you,” she said, and printed “ENSA” on a card.
ENSA was the Entertainments National Service Association. It put on shows and musical revues for the soldiers.
Mrs. Sentry handed the address to her. “You’re to go to the Alhambra and report to Mr. Tabbitt. It’s just off Shaftesbury Avenue, near the Phoenix.”
Which was the theater where the pantomime had been.
“I’m so glad I remembered where I’d seen you,” Mrs. Sentry said. “If you hadn’t given that performance in Piccadilly …”
I’d have the address of an ARP post to report to instead of a theater, Polly thought disgustedly.
But there was no point in trying to talk Mrs. Sentry out of this. She was looking far too pleased with herself. She’d have to come back and speak to someone else and, in the meantime, hope Mr. Tabbitt wouldn’t want her.
Which I doubt he will, she thought. ENSA does musical revues, not plays, and I can’t sing or dance. But when she told that to Mr. Tabbitt, who turned out to be a large, beefy man who looked like he belonged on a rescue squad, he said, “Neither can anyone else in this cast.”
She’d interrupted a rehearsal, and the chorus girls standing hands on hips on the stage above them hooted derisively when Mr. Tabbit said that, and one of them—with a mop of black curls—retorted, “We’re only trying to live up to our name, ducks. ENSA: Every Night Something Awful.”
Mr. Tabbitt ignored her. “What professional stage experience have you had?” he asked Polly.
“None. I told you, there’s been an error. I was supposed to be assigned to an ARP post.”
“This is far more dangerous than the ARP,” the curly-haired chorus girl said. “The audience were throwing turnips at the Amazing Antioch the other night.”
“Turnips?” one of the other chorines said.
“No one’s willing to waste a tomato, you see,” the first chorus girl explained, and one of the other chorines said, “I keep hoping they’ll throw something good, like oranges.”
“Or ration stamps,” a redhead put in.
“Five-minute break,” Mr. Tabbitt snapped, and the girls sauntered off the stage.
“Sorry,” he said, turning back to Polly. “You were saying something about a mistake?”
“Yes. I was supposed to be assigned to the ARP. If you ring up the Board and tell Mrs. Sentry that you don’t want me, I’m certain she’ll send over—”
“Who says I don’t want you?” he said. “I assume you can memorize lines. Lift your skirt.”
“What?”
“Lift your skirt. I want to see your legs.”
“But—”
“And don’t go all maiden aunt on me. This isn’t the Windmill. I’m not asking you to take off your clothes. Come on, then.” He motioned her to raise her skirt. “Let’s see them.”
She lifted her skirt to her knees and then her hips. He nodded briefly and then bellowed, “Hattie!” and the curly-haired chorine came back onstage, eating a sandwich. “Take her backstage and see if she’ll fit into the ARP warden costume. If she does, bring her back, and we’ll run through the skit.”
Hattie nodded.
“Go along now,” he said to Polly. “You said you were supposed to be assigned to the ARP, and now you are.”
He turned back to Hattie and snatched the sandwich out of her hand. “And have her try on your costumes as well, since you won’t be able to fit into them if you keep eating like that.”
“Oh, that’s such a clever line. You should put it in the show,”
Hattie said, and led Polly backstage.
“And tell her the rules!” Mr. Tabbitt shouted after them.
“No smoking backstage—fire regulations,” Hattie said, leading Polly through an obstacle course of ropes and flats. “No drinking. No pets.”
This is just like Mrs. Rickett’s, Polly thought, following her down a rickety-looking iron spiral staircase.
“No male admirers allowed in your dressing room, if you had a dressing room of your own, which you won’t. You’ll be in here with Lizzie, Cora, and me.”
She opened a door on a tiny, untidy room with a single makeup mirror and then shut it again and led Polly down the corridor to an even tinier room crammed with costumes.
Hattie rummaged through them and came up with a tin helmet, an ARP armband, and a dark blue sequined bathing suit. “Here, try this on.”
“This is the ARP warden’s costume?” Polly said.
“Yes, and be careful getting into it. I sewed on all those sequins myself. You don’t happen to know how to sew, do you?”
“No. I can’t act either. As I told Mr. Tabbitt, there’s been a mistake. I was supposed to be assigned to—”
“The ARP, I know.” Hattie thrust the bathing suit at her. “Go on, try it on.”
Polly stepped out of her skirt and wriggled into the bathing suit.
“A perfect fit,” Hattie pronounced. “And you needn’t worry about people throwing turnips at you with those legs. Tabbitt will definitely keep you.”
Polly’s dismay must have shown in her face because Hattie said, “If you truly want to be a real air-raid warden instead of a stage one, though personally I can’t imagine why anyone would, you’d best go back to the Works Board before Tabbitt sees you in that costume. Once he does, he’ll have your name put on the bill, and once that’s printed, you’ll never get away, what with the paper shortage. You’ll be stuck at ENSA for the duration.”
Just like Bletchley Park, Polly thought. “I’ll tell him I sent you home to let out the seams and learn your lines,” Hattie said, handing her a script, “and that you’ll be at rehearsal at three tomorrow.”
“Thank you,” Polly said, stepping out of the costume and scrambling into her own clothes. “You don’t know what this means to me.” She hurried out the stage door and back to the Board, hoping Mrs. Sentry had gone off duty, but she was still there. She’d have to come back early the next morning.
“Well?” Eileen asked when she arrived home. “Were you assigned to a rescue squad?”
“No. To ENSA, putting on shows for the troops.”
“Singin’ and dancin’, you mean?” Alf asked.
“Yes.”
“Do you even know how?” Binnie asked.
“No, but that doesn’t appear to be an impediment.”
“You won’t have to go to Egypt to entertain the troops, will you?” Eileen asked worriedly.
“No, I’ll be performing at the Alhambra here in London.”
“Oh, good,” Eileen said, looking relieved, and as soon as she and Polly were alone, she said. “The Alhambra wasn’t hit, was it?”
“No,” Polly said, though she didn’t know that for certain. She knew that no theater had been bombed during a performance, but that still left before and after performances and during rehearsals, and the Alhambra looked like an absolute firetrap.
But she wasn’t about to tell Eileen that. “The job’s not definite yet,” she said. “I may be assigned to an ARP post instead.”
She went to the Works Board early the next morning to see to it that she was. Mrs. Sentry, thankfully, wasn’t there. She picked out the most sympathetic person she could find and laid out her case, but all she got was a not-at-all-sympathetic lecture on the importance of every service job—“Each task, no matter how humble or seemingly insignificant, is vital to the war effort”—and the impossibility of being reassigned to an ARP post “unless you have authorization from the commander of the unit. You haven’t, have you?”
Not yet, Polly thought, and went to every ARP post in Bloomsbury and Oxford Street and Kensington.
All of them were “fully staffed at the moment.” “Perhaps in six months,” the warden at the Notting Hill post told her.
The Blitz will only last four, she thought, frustrated, and asked to speak to the post commander.
“She won’t be in till three o’clock,” the warden told her.
But by three she needed to be at rehearsal, and it was already after one. She had two hours to find a post that would take her. She couldn’t keep going from post to post. She needed to talk to someone who’d know which posts were shorthanded, someone who—
Mr. Humphreys at St. Paul’s, she thought. He’d know all the Civil Defence personnel in the area. He might even be able to talk one of them into taking her on.
She hurried to the tube station, caught the train to St. Paul’s, and raced up the stairs and out of the station toward the cathedral.
And was appalled all over again. She hadn’t been here since Mike’s memorial service, and in the meantime, work crews had cleared away the charred hulks of the buildings on Paternoster Row and Newgate and Carter Lane, leaving St. Paul’s standing all alone in a flat gray wasteland.
“It looks like a pinpoint bomb went off here,” Polly murmured as she hurried up the street, and thought suddenly of Oxford. Was this what it looked like?
“Watch where you’re going,” a female voice said, and she came out of her reverie just in time to avoid colliding with a woman in a WAAF uniform.
“Sorry,” Polly said, hurrying around her and up the hill. She ran across the courtyard, up the steps, and into the cathedral.
There was no one at the desk or in the south aisle. What if Mr. Humphreys isn’t here today? she thought, starting up the nave, but he was in the north transept, standing with a trio of sailors in front of the piled sandbags which covered Captain Faulknor’s memorial.
“Being in His Majesty’s Navy, you’ll be interested in this,” Mr. Humphreys said, though the sailors showed no sign of it. They looked bored and fidgety. “Captain Faulknor was one of our greatest naval heroes, though he’s not so well known as Sir Francis Drake or Lord Nelson. He—”
“Mr. Humphreys,” Polly said, hurrying over. “I’m sorry to interrupt, but I—”
“Miss Sebastian,” he said, turning in mid-gesture. “I’ve been hoping you’d come in! How fortuitous that you’re here today.”
He turned back to the sailors. “Gentlemen, if you’ll excuse me for a moment, I need to speak with Miss Sebastian. I’ll be back directly.” He dragged Polly off toward the dome.
“There’s someone I want you to meet,” he said, leading her into the choir. “He’s a great admirer of The Light of the World, just as you are. He spends hours and hours looking at it.”
“I’m afraid I’m in rather a hurry today—” she began, but Mr. Humphreys wasn’t listening.
“I saw him come this way when we were in the nave.” He led her into the apse. The altar was still blocked off for repairs. “Oh, dear,” he said, looking around at the ladders and scaffolding. “He’s not here. I’m certain I saw him—”
“Mr. Humphreys, I have a favor to ask,” Polly cut in. “I was hoping you could help me get taken on as an ARP warden.”
“A warden? That’s no job for a young lady,” he said, still looking vaguely around. “It’s dirty, dangerous work, what with the raids and all. And out in the winter cold all night. You’d catch your death.”
I’m going to catch my death no matter what I do, she thought.
“Being a warden’s no more dangerous than being on the fire watch,” she said, but Mr. Humphreys was still looking for this person he wanted her to meet.
“I do hope he hasn’t left,” he fretted, starting back along the choir aisle. “I did so want you to meet him. I’ve told him all about you. Such a nice gentleman. Do you know what he said the first time he saw The Light of the World? He said, ‘He looks as though he could forgive anything.’ So inter
esting, isn’t it, what people see? Each time one looks at it, one sees something diff—”
“If not an air-raid warden, then some other Civil Defence job—”
“Mr. Hobbe—that’s the gentleman I want you to meet—has only just got out of hospital.” He peered into the dim recesses of the south transept. “He’s had rather a hard time of it, I’m afraid. He was wounded in a bomb blast, a head wound, and he’s still not entirely recovered. Let me just check the north transept,” he said, though Mr. Hobbe obviously wasn’t there—they’d just come from there.
The sailors weren’t there either. They must have seen their chance and fled.
“Mr. Hobbe is almost as fond of Captain Faulknor’s memorial as he is of The Light of the World,” Mr. Humphreys said, which Polly doubted. She wondered if he’d fled, too.
“Last week I found him here after the sirens had gone,” Mr. Humphreys went on obliviously, “sitting against one of the pillars, looking at Captain Faulknor’s statue.”
Which is impossible, Polly thought. It’s covered in sandbags.
“And when I began to tell him about Captain Faulknor’s tying the two ships together, he knew all about it. ‘It bound them into one,’ he said—”
“I think Mr. Hobbe must have gone home,” Polly said, “and I must go, too. If you could just tell me the name of someone I could speak to about getting hired on by Civil Defence, I—”
“But he can’t have gone home. I don’t believe he has one. I think it may have been destroyed in the same bomb blast. I’ve found him here at night several times since then.”
“At night?”
“Yes, and that first night, when I said I’d have one of the watch accompany him home—he’s not well, and I hated to think of him out in the blackout—I asked him where he lived, and he said, ‘It doesn’t exist.’ ”
“It doesn’t—?”
“Yes, dreadful, isn’t it, to think of him bombed out in this weather, with only a shelter to—”
“You said he’s been coming in every day,” Polly said. “For how long?”