“How all occasions do inform against us,” Polly thought. “Would you have a railway map, then?”
“No, he confiscated those as well. To keep them from falling into German hands. You know, in case of invasion. Though if they’ve got as far as Oxford Street, I shouldn’t think they’d need maps, would you?”
“No,” Polly said, but that wasn’t what worried her. What worried her was that the Ministry of War had come in last week. What did they know that had made them think invasion was coming now? Hitler had called off Operation Sea Lion at the end of September and postponed the invasion till spring.
What if he didn’t? Polly thought. What if this is a discrepancy?
It could be a disastrous one. By spring he’d decided to abandon the invasion altogether so he could concentrate on attacking Russia. If instead he invaded now …
“Are you all right?” Ethel asked her.
“Yes. If you haven’t any railway maps, what about an ordinary map of England?” she asked.
“No, he took those as well. I take it someone in your family’s a planespotter?”
“Yes,” Polly said, latching on to the explanation. “He’s twelve.”
“My little brother spends all his time scanning the skies for Heinkels and Stukas.”
“So does my nephew,” Polly said, and worked the conversation around to airfields. She got several more names from her and another one on her lunch break, though none had two words of which the second began with a P.
But when she returned to her counter, there was good news. Miss Snelgrove had told Doreen that Marjorie was being released from hospital and would be coming back to Townsend Brothers soon. Which meant this was just like her other assignment—it had looked like she’d altered events, but in the end things had worked out.
She should have had more faith in time-travel theory and in the complexity of a chaotic system.
And she should have remembered her history lessons. The code for the D-Day invasion had been broken by the Nazis, which could have been catastrophic for the Allies—but when the wireless operator had shown Field Marshal Rundstedt the Verlaine poem, he’d ignored it. “I hardly think the Allies will announce the invasion over the wireless,” he’d said.
And there were hundreds of examples like that scattered throughout history. “All’s well that ends well,” Polly thought, quoting Shakespeare and Sir Godfrey, and focused on quizzing Sarah Steinberg, whose brother was in the RAF, about airfields.
By the end of the day, she’d obtained a dozen names. She tried them out on Eileen when she came back from Bethnal Green, with no luck. Eileen hadn’t been able to get an identity card either. “The clerk in Bethnal Green told me I had to go to the National Registration office, but it isn’t open on Monday.”
“It’s probably just as well,” Polly said. “Mrs. Rickett serves trench pie on Monday night.”
“What’s that?”
“No one knows. Mr. Dorming’s convinced she makes it out of rats.”
“It can’t possibly be that bad,” Eileen said. “And at any rate, I don’t care. I can bear anything now that I’ve found you and Mike. I’d be willing to eat sawdust.”
“That would be Mrs. Rickett’s victory loaf, which we have on Thursdays,” Polly said. She tried to give Eileen some money for lunch, but she refused it.
“We’ll need all our money for our train fare to the airfield,” Eileen said, and went off to see if Selfridges had an ABC.
It didn’t. And neither did the Daily Herald’s office. When Polly got off work, Eileen and Mike were both waiting for her outside the staff entrance, and they reported no luck in finding one.
And no luck with the drop. “I stayed there till two,” Mike said, “and nary a shimmer of a shimmer.”
He’d spent the rest of the afternoon at the Herald, going through July and August editions for airfield names. As soon as they got to Notting Hill Gate and the emergency staircase—which was colder than ever—he tried them on Eileen. “Bedford?”
“No,” Eileen said. “I’m convinced it was two words.”
“Beachy Head?”
“That sounds a bit like it … no.”
“She thinks the second word begins with a P,” Polly said.
He checked his list. “Bentley Priory?”
Eileen frowned. “No … it wasn’t Priory. It was Paddock or Place or …” She frowned, attempting to remember.
He checked the list again. “No Ps,” he said. “How about Biggin Hill?”
Eileen hesitated. “Perhaps … I’m not certain … I’m so sorry. I thought I’d know it when I heard it, but now I’ve heard so many … I’m not certain …”
“It would be a logical choice,” Mike said. “It was in the thick of the Battle of Britain.”
“So was Beachy Head,” Polly said. “And Bentley Priory. And that’s the one nearest Oxford. Perhaps we should try that first.”
“But it’s not just an airfield, it’s the RAF command center,” Mike said, “which means security will be tighter. Biggin Hill’s closest. I say we try that first and then the other two. Now, what about messages we can send? Did you tell Eileen my idea, Polly?”
“Yes,” she said, and to prevent Eileen from launching into an account of mystery novels which hadn’t been written yet, she continued, “How’s this for an ad?
‘Historian seeks situation involving travel. Available immediately’?”
“Great,” Mike said, scribbling it down. “And we can do variations of your ‘Meet me in Trafalgar Square or Kensington Gardens or the British Museum.’ ”
“There are lots of notices looking for soldiers who were at Dunkirk,” Eileen mused. “What about ‘Anyone having information regarding the whereabouts of Michael Davies, last seen at Dunkirk, contact E. O’Reilly,’ and Mrs. Rickett’s address?”
Mike wrote their suggestions down. “What about crosswords?” He pointed at the Herald’s puzzle. “I could compose one with our names in the clues, like ‘This bird wants a cracker.’ Or ‘What an Italian tower might say if asked its name?’ ”
“Absolutely not,” Polly said.
“Because they’re bad puns?”
“No, because a crossword nearly derailed D-Day.”
“How?”
“Two weeks before the invasion, five of the top-top-secret code words appeared in the Daily Herald’s crossword puzzle: ‘Overlord,’ ‘mulberry,’ ‘Utah,’ ‘sword,’
and I forget the other one. The military was convinced the Germans had tumbled to the invasion and was ready to call the entire invasion off.”
“Had they?” Eileen asked. “Tumbled to it?”
“No. The puzzle’s author was a schoolmaster who’d been doing them for years. He told the military his students and dozens of other people composed the clues and that they’d have no way of knowing which puzzle they’d be in, and in the end they decided it was just a bizarre coincidence.”
“And was it?” Mike asked.
“No. Forty years later the Herald published a story about it, and a man who’d been one of the schoolmaster’s students confessed he’d overheard two Army officers talking and had co-opted the words for clues with no idea what they meant.”
“But the puzzle incident wasn’t till 1944,” Mike said. “It isn’t likely British Intelligence would be reading crossword puzzles now—”
“In which case the retrieval team won’t be either. I think they’re much more likely to read personal ads. There are lots of ‘losts.’ Perhaps we could do something with that.”
“Like ‘Lost: historian. Reward for safe return’?”
“No,” Polly said, “but we could say we’d lost something and give our name and address. Here’s one. ‘Lost: pair of brown carpet slippers on Northern Line platform, Bank Station. If found—’ ”