“None. I told you, there’s been an error. I was supposed to be assigned to an ARP post.”
“This is far more dangerous than the ARP,” the curly-haired chorus girl said. “The audience were throwing turnips at the Amazing Antioch the other night.”
“Turnips?” one of the other chorines said.
“No one’s willing to waste a tomato, you see,” the first chorus girl explained, and one of the other chorines said, “I keep hoping they’ll throw something good, like oranges.”
“Or ration stamps,” a redhead put in.
“Five-minute break,” Mr. Tabbitt snapped, and the girls sauntered off the stage.
“Sorry,” he said, turning back to Polly. “You were saying something about a mistake?”
“Yes. I was supposed to be assigned to the ARP. If you ring up the Board and tell Mrs. Sentry that you don’t want me, I’m certain she’ll send over—”
“Who says I don’t want you?” he said. “I assume you can memorize lines. Lift your skirt.”
“What?”
“Lift your skirt. I want to see your legs.”
“But—”
“And don’t go all maiden aunt on me. This isn’t the Windmill. I’m not asking you to take off your clothes. Come on, then.” He motioned her to raise her skirt.
“Let’s see them.”
She lifted her skirt to her knees and then her hips. He nodded briefly and then bellowed, “Hattie!” and the curly-haired chorine came back onstage, eating a sandwich. “Take her backstage and see if she’ll fit into the ARP warden costume. If she does, bring her back, and we’ll run through the skit.”
Hattie nodded.
“Go along now,” he said to Polly. “You said you were supposed to be assigned to the ARP, and now you are.”
He turned back to Hattie and snatched the sandwich out of her hand. “And have her try on your costumes as well, since you won’t be able to fit into them if you keep eating like that.”
“Oh, that’s such a clever line. You should put it in the show,” Hattie said, and led Polly backstage.
“And tell her the rules!” Mr. Tabbitt shouted after them.
“No smoking backstage—fire regulations,” Hattie said, leading Polly through an obstacle course of ropes and flats. “No drinking. No pets.”
This is just like Mrs. Rickett’s, Polly thought, following her down a rickety-looking iron spiral staircase.
“No male admirers allowed in your dressing room, if you had a dressing room of your own, which you won’t. You’ll be in here with Lizzie, Cora, and me.”
She opened a door on a tiny, untidy room with a single makeup mirror and then shut it again and led Polly down the corridor to an even tinier room crammed with costumes.
Hattie rummaged through them and came up with a tin helmet, an ARP armband, and a dark blue sequined bathing suit. “Here, try this on.”
“This is the ARP warden’s costume?” Polly said.
“Yes, and be careful getting into it. I sewed on all those sequins myself. You don’t happen to know how to sew, do you?”
“No. I can’t act either. As I told Mr. Tabbitt, there’s been a mistake. I was supposed to be assigned to—”
“The ARP, I know.” Hattie thrust the bathing suit at her. “Go on, try it on.”
Polly stepped out of her skirt and wriggled into the bathing suit.
“A perfect fit,” Hattie pronounced. “And you needn’t worry about people throwing turnips at you with those legs. Tabbitt will definitely keep you.”
Polly’s dismay must have shown in her face because Hattie said, “If you truly want to be a real air-raid warden instead of a stage one, though personally I can’t imagine why anyone would, you’d best go back to the Works Board before Tabbitt sees you in that costume. Once he does, he’ll have your name put on the bill, and once that’s printed, you’ll never get away, what with the paper shortage. You’ll be stuck at ENSA for the duration.”
Just like Bletchley Park, Polly thought. “I’ll tell him I sent you home to let out the seams and learn your lines,” Hattie said, handing her a script, “and that you’ll be at rehearsal at three tomorrow.”
“Thank you,” Polly said, stepping out of the costume and scrambling into her own clothes. “You don’t know what this means to me.” She hurried out the stage door and back to the Board, hoping Mrs. Sentry had gone off duty, but she was still there. She’d have to come back early the next morning.
“Well?” Eileen asked when she arrived home. “Were you assigned to a rescue squad?”
“No. To ENSA, putting on shows for the troops.”
“Singin’ and dancin’, you mean?” Alf asked.
“Yes.”
“Do you even know how?” Binnie asked.
“No, but that doesn’t appear to be an impediment.”
“You won’t have to go to Egypt to entertain the troops, will you?” Eileen asked worriedly.
“No, I’ll be performing at the Alhambra here in London.”
“Oh, good,” Eileen said, looking relieved, and as soon as she and Polly were alone, she said. “The Alhambra wasn’t hit, was it?”
“No,” Polly said, though she didn’t know that for certain. She knew that no theater had been bombed during a performance, but that still left before and after performances and during rehearsals, and the Alhambra looked like an absolute firetrap.
But she wasn’t about to tell Eileen that. “The job’s not definite yet,” she said. “I may be assigned to an ARP post instead.”
She went to the Works Board early the next morning to see to it that she was. Mrs. Sentry, thankfully, wasn’t there. She picked out the most sympathetic person she could find and laid out her case, but all she got was a not-at-all-sympathetic lecture on the importance of every service job—“Each task, no matter how humble or seemingly insignificant, is vital to the war effort”—and the impossibility of being reassigned to an ARP post “unless you have authorization from the commander of the unit. You haven’t, have you?”
Not yet, Polly thought, and went to every ARP post in Bloomsbury and Oxford Street and Kensington.
All of them were “fully staffed at the moment.” “Perhaps in six months,” the warden at the Notting Hill post told her.
The Blitz will only last four, she thought, frustrated, and asked to speak to the post commander.
“She won’t be in till three o’clock,” the warden told her.
But by three she needed to be at rehearsal, and it was already after one. She had two hours to find a post that would take her. She couldn’t keep going from post to post. She needed to talk to someone who’d know which posts were shorthanded, someone who—Mr. Humphreys at St. Paul’s, she thought. He’d know all the Civil Defence personnel in the area. He might even be able to talk one of them into taking her on.
She hurried to the tube station, caught the train to St. Paul’s, and raced up the stairs and out of the station toward the cathedral.
And was appalled all over again. She hadn’t been here since Mike’s memorial service, and in the meantime, work crews had cleared away the charred hulks of the buildings on Paternoster Row and Newgate and Carter Lane, leaving St. Paul’s standing all alone in a flat gray wasteland.
“It looks like a pinpoint bomb went off here,” Polly murmured as she hurried up the street, and thought suddenly of Oxford. Was this what it looked like?
“Watch where you’re going,” a female voice said, and she came out of her reverie just in time to avoid colliding with a woman in a WAAF uniform.
“Sorry,” Polly said, hurrying around her and up the hill. She ran across the courtyard, up the steps, and into the cathedral.
There was no one at the desk or in the south aisle. What if Mr. Humphreys isn’t here today? she thought, starting up the nave, but he was in the north transept, standing with a trio of sailors in front of the piled sandbags which covered Captain Faulknor’s memorial.