Connie Willis - All Clear

“You’d better tell them you can’t do it,” he said.

He gave both of them a peck on the cheek, said, “I’ll call as soon as I know anything,” and took off. If he could get an express to Dover, he could be there by midnight and on the main road to Saltram-on-Sea by dawn and maybe be able to hitch a ride with a farmer heading up the coast early.

But Polly had been right. The trains were jammed, and as the agent informed him when he bought his ticket, military personnel were being given first priority.

“I’m willing to stand in the corridor,” Mike said.

“First priority is standing in the corridor,” the ticket agent said. “I can get you out on the 2:14 Tuesday.”

“Tuesday?”

“Sorry, sir. It’s the best I can do. The holidays, you know. And the war, of course.”

Of course. “You don’t have anything sooner than Tuesday?”

“No, sir. I can get you on the 6:05 to Canterbury tomorrow. You might be able to get a train to Dover from there.” And after Mike had attempted unsuccessfully to buy a ticket off several people in the queue for the 9:38 to Dover, that was what he opted for, a move he regretted almost immediately.

Since the train went before the tube began running in the morning, he couldn’t go back to Notting Hill Gate to spend the night, and there wasn’t anywhere in Victoria to sleep. He had to sit up all night on an unbelievably uncomfortable wooden bench.

And once he got on the train, he was even sorrier. Not only did it turn out to be a local, and even more packed than the Lady Jane had been on the way back from Dunkirk, but less than five miles out of London it was shunted onto a siding while three troop trains and a freight train loaded with military equipment passed.

After nearly an hour and a half, the train started up again, went half a mile, and stopped again, this time for no reason at all. “Air raid,” a soldier close to the window said, looking out. “I hope the jerries aren’t out hunting trains today. We’re sitting ducks, aren’t we?” after which everyone spent the next few minutes looking up at the ceiling and listening for the deadly hum of approaching HE 111s.

“I’d rather be back on the front line than here,” another soldier said after a few minutes. “Waiting about for the blow to fall, and not a bloody thing you can do about it.”

Like Polly, Mike thought. It must have been hell for her when she realized her drop wouldn’t open, and worse keeping it to herself these last weeks while he and Eileen talked about options she knew wouldn’t work. But the worst must have been not being able to do anything about it. His lying there in the hospital worrying about what had happened to the retrieval team and whether he’d messed things up by saving Hardy had been bad enough. He couldn’t imagine what it would have been like if he’d already been to Pearl Harbor, even if it was a year from now, or, like the day the V-1s started, three and a half years off.

It didn’t matter when it was. It was still heading straight at you. Like the German Army getting closer and closer to Dunkirk, and you sitting there helplessly on the beach, listening to the guns in the distance, and hoping to God a ship would show up and take you off before the Germans got there, and nothing for you to do in the meantime but wait.

Which is what all three of them would have been doing right now if he hadn’t got Daphne’s letter. Thank God it had come when it did. He couldn’t have stood just sitting there cooling his heels. It was a hell of a lot easier to fire a machine gun at the Zeroes or hand up ammunition than to just sit there and be shot at, a hell of a lot easier to take a leaky launch over to Dunkirk than to sit on a beach waiting for the Germans to come.

Or the Japanese. He’d assumed, when he found out Gerald hadn’t come through, that his roommate Charles hadn’t either, but what if he had? What if he was in Singapore, and his drop wouldn’t open, and the Japanese would be there any minute, and he didn’t dare leave Singapore for fear he’d miss the retrieval team?

Charles won’t be in Singapore, Mike told himself, because as soon as I find them, I’ll tell them they’ve got to pull him out. I’ll go with them to get him if I have to.

But that wouldn’t take anywhere near as much courage as Charles having to sit there at the country club in his dinner clothes and listen to radio bulletins describing the Japanese Army’s approach.

When he’d read that book Mrs. Ives had given him in the hospital, he’d thought Shackleton was the hero, taking off in a tiny boat and braving Antarctic seas to bring help, but now he wondered if it hadn’t taken more courage to stay on that barren island and watch the boat disappear, and then wait as weeks and months went by, with no guarantee that anybody was ever coming, while their feet froze and the food ran out and the weather got worse and worse.

Back when he’d been scanning the newspapers, looking for the names of airfields, there’d been a story about an old woman being dug out of the wreckage of what had been her house and the rescue crew asking her if her husband was under there with her. “No, the bloody coward’s at the front!” she’d said indignantly.

He’d laughed when he read it, but now he wasn’t so sure it had been a joke. Maybe England was the front, and the real heroes were the Londoners sitting in those tube stations night after night, waiting to be blown to smithereens. And Fordham, lying there in the hospital in traction. And everyone on this train, waiting patiently tube stations night after night, waiting to be blown to smithereens. And Fordham, lying there in the hospital in traction. And everyone on this train, waiting patiently for it to begin moving again, not giving way to panic or the impulse to call Hitler and surrender just to get it over with. He was going to have to rethink the whole concept of heroism when he got back to Oxford.

If he got back to Oxford. At this rate, he wasn’t sure he’d even make it to Canterbury, let alone Saltram-on-Sea.

He did, but it took him two more days of delayed departures, waits on sidings, and fruitless trips to garages. He ended up hitching rides in a half-track, a sidecar, and a turnip truck.

The truck was driven by a pretty land girl who’d grown up in Chelsea and was now slopping hogs and milking cows on a farm a few miles west of Saltram-on-Sea.

“The work ruins your hands,” she said when he asked her how she liked it, “and I despise getting up before dawn and smelling of manure, but if I didn’t have something to do, I’d go mad with worry. My husband’s serving in the North Atlantic, escorting convoys, and sometimes I don’t hear from him for weeks at a time.

And I feel as though I’m contributing something.”

She smiled at him. “There are four of us girls, and we all get along famously, so that helps, and Mr. Powney’s not nearly so gruff as some of the other farmers.”

“Wait—you work for Mr. Powney?”

“Yes. Why?”

“I can’t believe it,” he said, laughing. “Does he have a bull?”

“Yes, why? Have you heard of it? It hasn’t killed anyone, has it?”

“Not that I know of.”

“Well, I wouldn’t be surprised if it had. It’s the worst, most ill-tempered bull in England. How do you know of it?”

He explained about having waited around for Mr. Powney to come back from buying it so he could get a ride. “And I finally have.”

“Well, I wouldn’t be too glad about that just yet, if I were you,” she said. “This lorry has the worst tires in England.”

She wasn’t exaggerating. They had two flats between Dover and Folkestone, and there was no spare. They had to take the tire off both times and patch it—the second time in a driving sleet—and then reinflate it with a bicycle pump.