“‘Hie you, make haste!’” Sir Godfrey’s clarion voice rang out. “‘See this dispatch’d with all the haste thou canst,’” and Nelson shot through the door.
Everyone laughed.
“Nelson, come back!” Mr. Simms shouted, and ran after him. He called down from the top of the steps, “No damage I can see,” and the rest of them trooped up the steps and looked around at the street, peaceful in the dim gray predawn light. The buildings were all intact, though there was a smoky pall in the air, and a sharp smell of cordite and burning wood.
“Lambeth got it last night,” Mr. Dorming said, pointing at plumes of black smoke off to the southeast.
“And Piccadilly Circus, looks like,” Mr. Simms said, coming back with Nelson and pointing at what was actually Oxford Street and the smoke from John Lewis. Mr. Dorming was wrong, too. Shoreditch and Whitechapel had taken the brunt of the first round of raids, not Lambeth, but from the look of the smoke, nowhere in the East End was safe.
“I don’t understand,” Lila said, looking around at the tranquil scene. “It sounded like it was bang on top of us.”
“What will it sound like if it is on top of us, I wonder?” Viv asked.
“I’ve heard one hears a very loud, very high-pitched scream,” Mr. Simms began, but Mr. Dorming was shaking his head.
“You won’t hear it,” he said. “You’ll never know what hit you,” and stomped off.
“Cheerful,” Viv said, looking after him.
Lila was still looking toward the smoke of Oxford Street. “I suppose the Underground won’t be running,” she said glumly, “and it’ll take us ages to get to work.”
“And when we get there,” Viv said, “the windows will have been blown out again. We’ll have to spend all day sweeping up.”
“‘What’s this, varlets?’” Sir Godfrey roared. “‘Do I hear talk of terror and defeat? Stiffen the sinews! Summon up the blood!’”
Lila and Viv giggled.
Sir Godfrey drew his umbrella like a sword. “‘Once more into the breach, dear friends, once more!’” he shouted, raising it high. “‘We fight for England!’”
“Oh, I do love Richard the Third!” Miss Laburnum said.
Sir Godfrey gripped the umbrella handle violently, and for a moment Polly thought he was going to run Miss Laburnum through, but instead he hooked it over his arm. “‘And if we no more meet till we meet in heaven,’” he declaimed, “‘then joyfully, my noble lords and my kind kinsmen, warriors all, adieu!’” and strode off, umbrella in hand, as if going into battle.
Which he is, Polly thought, watching him. Which they all are.
“How marvelous!” Miss Laburnum said. “Do you think if we asked him, he’d do another play tomorrow? The Tempest, perhaps, or Henry the Fifth?”
Open for business. And we do mean open.
London-18 September 1940
IT TOOK POLLY TWO HOURS TO GET TO OXFORD STREET. Since Oxford Circus and Bond Street stations would both be closed from the attack on Oxford Street, she’d intended to take the tube to Piccadilly Circus, but the Circle Line trains weren’t running at all, and when she attempted to take the District and then the Piccadilly, she couldn’t get beyond Gloucester Road and had to leave the station and find a bus. But it only went as far as Bond Street, where a huge pile of rubble blocked the street. She had to walk the rest of the way, dodging barricades and a roped-off area with a notice saying Danger: Gas Leak.
Oxford Street was awash in water from the firemen’s hoses and shattered glass. It took her another quarter of an hour to reach the gutted John Lewis, and when she did, it was much, much worse than she’d envisioned from the photos. The great brick arches gaped emptily onto a vast, blackened expanse of charred beams and girders, dripping with water. It looked less like a burned building than the wreck of some massive ocean liner. Here and there among 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.