Connie Willis
All Clear
TO ALL THE
ambulance drivers
firewatchers
air-raid wardens
nurses
canteen workers
airplane spotters
rescue workers
mathematicians
vicars
vergers
shopgirls
chorus girls
librarians
debutantes
spinsters
fishermen
retired sailors
servants
evacuees
Shakespearean actors
and mystery novelists
WHO WON THE WAR.
You will make all kinds of mistakes; but as long as you are generous and true, and also fierce, you cannot hurt the world or even seriously distress her.
—WINSTON CHURCHILL
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I want to say thank you to all the people who helped me and stood by me with Blackout and All Clear as one book morphed into two and I went slowly mad under the strain: my incredibly patient editor, Anne Groell, and my long-suffering agent, Ralph Vicinanza; my even longer-suffering secretary, Laura Lewis; my daughter and chief confidante, Cordelia; my family and friends; every librarian within a hundred-mile radius; and the baristas at Margie’s, Starbucks, and the UNC student union who gave me tea—well, chai—and sympathy on a daily basis. Thank you all for putting up with me, standing by me, and not giving up on me or the book.
But most especially, I want to thank the marvelous group of ladies who were at the Imperial War Museum the day I was there doing research on the Blitz—women who, it turned out, had all been rescue workers and ambulance drivers and air-raid wardens during the Blitz, and who told me story after story that proved invaluable to the book and to my understanding of the bravery, determination, and humor of the British people as they faced down Hitler. And I want to thank my wonderful husband, who found them, sat them down, bought them tea and cakes, and then came to find me so I could interview them. Best husband ever!
Well, he hasn’t come yet, sir, he’s more than a bit late tonight.
—LONDON PORTER TO ERNIE PYLE, REFERRING
TO THE GERMAN BOMBERS
London—26 October 1940
BY NOON MICHAEL AND MEROPE STILL HADN’T RETURNED from Stepney, and Polly was beginning to get really worried. Stepney was less than an hour away by train. There was no way it could take Merope and Michael—correction, Eileen and Mike; she had to remember to call them by their cover names—no way it could take them six hours to go fetch Eileen’s belongings from Mrs. Willett’s and come back to Oxford Street. What if there’d been a raid and something had happened to them? The East End was the most dangerous part of London.
There weren’t any daytime raids on the twenty-sixth, she thought. But there weren’t supposed to have been five fatalities at Padgett’s either. If Mike was right, and he had altered events by saving the soldier Hardy at Dunkirk, anything was possible. The space-time continuum was a chaotic system, in which even a minuscule action could have an enormous effect.
But two additional fatalities—and civilians, at that—could scarcely have changed the course of the war, even in a chaotic system. Thirty thousand civilians had been killed in the Blitz and nine thousand in the V-1 and V-2 attacks, and fifty million people had died in the war.
And you know he didn’t lose the war, Polly thought. And historians have been traveling to the past for more than forty years. If they’d been capable of altering events, they’d have done it long before this. Mr. Dunworthy had been in the Blitz and the French Revolution and even the Black Death, and his historians had observed wars and coronations and coups all across history, and there was no record of any of them even causing a discrepancy, let alone changing the course of history.
Which meant that in spite of appearances, the five fatalities at Padgett’s Department Store weren’t a discrepancy either. Marjorie must have misunderstood what the nurses said. She’d admitted she’d only overheard part of their conversation. Perhaps the nurses had been talking about the victims from another incident. Marylebone had been hit last night, too, and Wigmore Street. Polly knew from experience that ambulances sometimes transported victims to hospital from more than one incident.
And that people one thought had been killed sometimes turned up alive.
But if she told Mike about having thought the theater troupe was dead, he’d demand to know why she hadn’t known St. George’s would be destroyed and conclude that was a discrepancy as well. Which meant she needed to keep him from finding out about the five casualties at Padgett’s till she’d had a chance to determine if there actually were that many.
Thank goodness he wasn’t here when Marjorie came, she thought. You should be glad they’re late.
And thank goodness her supervisor had taken Marjorie back to hospital, though it meant Polly hadn’t had a chance to ask her what exactly the nurse had said. Polly had offered to take Marjorie there herself so she could ask the hospital staff about the fatalities, but Miss Snelgrove had insisted on going, “So I can give those nurses a piece of my mind. What were they thinking? And what were you thinking?” she scolded Marjorie. “Coming here when you should be in bed?”
“I’m sorry,” Marjorie had said contritely. “When I heard Padgett’s had been hit, I’m afraid I panicked and jumped to conclusions.”
Like Mike did when he saw the mannequins in front of Padgett’s, Polly thought. Like I did when I found out Eileen’s drop in Backbury didn’t open. And like I’m doing now. There’s a logical explanation for why Marjorie heard the nurses say there were five fatalities instead of three, and for why no one’s come to get us. It doesn’t necessarily mean Oxford’s been destroyed. Research might have got the date the quarantine ended wrong and not arrived at the manor till after Eileen had left for London to find me. And the fact that Mike and Eileen aren’t back yet doesn’t necessarily mean something’s happened to them. They might simply have had to wait till Theodore’s mother returned from her shift at the aeroplane factory. Or they might have decided to go on to Fleet Street to collect Mike’s things.
They’ll be here any moment, she told herself. Stop fretting over things you can’t do anything about, and do something useful.
She wrote out a list of the times and locations of the upcoming week’s raids for Mike and Merope—correction, Eileen—and then tried to think of other historians who might be here besides Gerald Phipps. Mike had said there was an historian here from some time in October to December eighteenth. What had happened during that period that an historian might have come to observe? Nearly all the war activity had been in Europe—Italy had invaded Greece, and the RAF had bombed the Italian fleet. What had happened here?
Coventry. But it couldn’t be that. It hadn’t been hit till November fourteenth, and an historian wouldn’t need an entire fortnight to get there.
The war in the North Atlantic? Several important convoys had been sunk during that period, but being on a destroyer had to be a ten. And if Mr. Dunworthy was canceling assignments that were too dangerous …
But anywhere in the autumn of 1940 was dangerous, and he’d obviously approved something. The intelligence war? No, that hadn’t really geared up till later in the war, with the Fortitude and V-1 and V-2 rocket disinformation campaigns. Ultra had begun earlier, but it was not only a ten, it had to be a divergence point. If the Germans had found out their Enigma codes had been cracked, it clearly would have affected the outcome of the war.
Polly looked over at the lifts. The center one was stopping on third. They’re here—finally, she thought, but it was only Miss Snelgrove, shaking her head over the negligence of Marjorie’s nurses. “Disgraceful! I shouldn’t be surprised if she had a relapse with all her running about,” she fumed. “What are you doing here, Miss Sebastian? Why aren’t you on your lunch break?”