Connie Willis - All Clear

Certainly none of these people showed any sign of going home any time soon, and once the train got past Holborn, it should be—

“Come on, ducks!” a burly merchant marine shouted in her ear. He grabbed her around the waist, thrust her into the conga line ahead of him, and forced her hands onto the waist of the soldier in front of her.

“No! I haven’t time for this!” she cried, but it was no use. The marine had an iron grip on her waist, and when she tried to plant her feet firmly on the ground and refuse to go, he simply picked her up and held her out before him.

She was carried remorselessly back into Trafalgar Square and across it by the snaking “dunh duh dunh duh”-ing dancers. They were heading straight back to the National Gallery. “You don’t understand!” she shouted. “I’ve got to get to the Underground station! I must—”

“Here then, let her go. That’s a good chap,” a man’s voice said, and she felt herself grabbed by the waist and plucked neatly out of the conga line. The marine and the rest of the line danced past her and away.

“Thank you,” she said, turning to look at her rescuer, but before she got a good look at his face—she scarcely had time to register the fact that he was a soldier and that he was wearing a clerical collar—there was a loud explosion over by the fountain.

“Sorry, I believe I know who did that,” he said, and strode off through the crowd, presumably to rescue someone else.

“Thank you again, whoever you are,” Mary said, and set off for the tube station again, this time keeping to the very edge of the square and the street.

The little man in the bowler was still standing outside leading cheers. “Three cheers for Dowding!” he shouted.

He’s going to run out of heroes to cheer, she thought, squeezing past him to the entrance, but she was wrong. As she ran down the stairs, she heard him shout,

“Three cheers for the firespotters! Three cheers for the ARP! Three cheers for all of us! Hip hip hurrah!”

Father, we thought we should never see you again.

—SIR J. M. BARRIE, THE ADMIRABLE CRICHTON

London—Winter 1941

THEY LASTED LESS THAN A FORTNIGHT AT MRS. RICKETT’S, even though Alf and Binnie had proved quite adept at keeping their parrot out of sight—and earshot—of the landlady.

Mrs. Bascombe was a quick study, and it only took Alf a day to teach her not to do her air-raid imitations except when the actual sirens were going and not to screech,

“ ’Itler’s a bloody bastard!” at anyone who came near her cage.

But she was, unfortunately, also quick to pick up whatever she happened to overhear and to repeat it in a dead-on imitation of their voices—which explained how Alf and Binnie had been able to keep the masquerade of their mother’s still being alive going for so long.

But that skill also led to Mrs. Rickett’s hearing what she thought was Binnie saying, “What is this swill? It tastes bloody awful,” and using her key to get in, expecting to find, as she told Eileen, cooking going on in the room. And finding herself instead face-to-face with the beady-eyed Mrs. Bascombe.

“Not to worry,” the parrot had said in a spot-on imitation of Alf’s voice. “We’ll ’ide ’er. The old witch’ll never find out,” and all five of them had found themselves out of a place to live and forced to take up residence in Notting Hill Gate Station for the next two nights.

Polly told the station guard that Mrs. Bascombe was a prop in the troupe’s new play, and Sir Godfrey, coming in behind them, exclaimed, “Good God! Don’t tell me they’ve decided to do Treasure Island!”

And when Miss Laburnum saw it, she said, “Oh, it would be perfect for Peter Pan!”

“It’s not staying,” Polly said, and asked if anyone knew of a vacant flat. No one did, and Polly wasn’t able to find anything in the “To Let” ads in the Times Sir Godfrey lent her.

“There’s ’eaps of ’ouses nobody lives in ’cause the people what lived in ’em are dead,” Binnie suggested.

“We know how to get into ’em,” Alf said.

“We are not breaking into dead people’s houses.”

“Not all of ’em are dead,” Binnie protested. “Some of ’em are just empty.”

“We are not breaking into any houses.”

“Wait, that gives me an idea,” Eileen said. “I remember one of Lady Caroline’s friends telling her they were having difficulty finding someone to stay in their London house and look after it, and the situation’s probably worse now, with the bombing.”

She turned to the To Hire column. “Listen to this. ‘Wanted, live-in caretaker.’ The address is in Bloomsbury.”

Eileen went to see the estate agent listed in the ad the next day and came back to Townsend Brothers jubilant. “When I told him we had two children and a parrot

—”

“You told him?” Polly said.

“Yes, and he said, ‘I’ve had four of the houses in my charge blitzed in the past month. Two children and their pet can scarcely do more damage than that.’ ”

I wouldn’t say that, Polly thought. These are the Hodbins.

“The house is in Millwright Lane,” Eileen said. “Is that a safe address?”

Polly didn’t know whether the list of addresses had been good to the end of the Blitz or only through December, but at least it wasn’t near the British Museum or in Bedford Square. And she thought most of the attacks in Bloomsbury had been in the autumn.

But it was still London. “I think we should take Alf and Binnie to the country,” she told Eileen. “You researched the statistics on children who stayed in London.

You know they’d be much safer there.”

“But that means you’d have to leave Townsend Brothers. How would the retrieval team find us?”

The retrieval team’s not coming, Polly thought.

“We could put messages in the newspapers like the ones we put in before,” she said. “Telling them where we’d gone.”

“No, the best lead they have is Oxford Street.”

“We could go to Backbury, then. Or I could stay here and you go—I’m the one with the deadline. And then if the retrieval team comes, I can tell them where you are.”

“No, there’s twice the chance of finding us with two of us. We’re not splitting up. We’re staying here,” she said, and the next day she told Polly she’d spoken to the estate agent and taken the position.

“But what about your National Service?” Polly objected.

“When I tell them about my caretaking job and about the Hodbins, they’ll have to give me something here.”

Polly hoped she was wrong, that they’d assign her to something safely out of London, but they didn’t. They gave her a job with the ATS, driving military officers.

Which is safer than working on an anti-aircraft gun crew, Polly thought. Or in a munitions factory. Factories were frequently targeted by the Luftwaffe.

And the house they moved into was near Russell Square, which was safe. But the house next door had been reduced to rubble and the one across from it had had its roof smashed in. “That means ours won’t be hit,” Alf said.

Binnie nodded wisely. “Bombs never ’it the same spot twice.”

Polly knew from experience that that wasn’t true, but she didn’t contradict them. Nowhere in London was safe, but at least this wasn’t the East End, which continued to be hammered; the house had a sturdy-looking cellar; and even Eileen’s and her own cooking was better than Mrs. Rickett’s, “though I’m beginning to sympathize with her,” Eileen said after a week. “How exactly does one produce meals for a family of four with one pound of meat and eight eggs a week?”

“We can get you some birds to cook,” Binnie said. “There’s lots of pigeons here.”