All Clear

Imperial War Museum, London—7 May 1995

BY FIVE TILL TEN, THE GROUP HE WAS WAITING FOR STILL hadn’t arrived at the museum, and it was pouring rain. The American couple had given up trying to set him up with their daughter and gone off to find “someplace dry” and have “a decent cup of coffee, if there is such a thing in this country, Calvin,” which was a blessing, but there was no sign of any other visitors.

What if they all went to the exhibit at St. Paul’s instead? he thought. Or what if this isn’t the right day? What if the exhibit doesn’t begin till tomorrow? Or began yesterday?

At one minute till, an elderly museum guard appeared, unlocked the doors, and let him come inside the lobby to wait. “Today is the first day of the ‘Living Through the Blitz’ exhibition, isn’t it?” he asked the guard.

“Yes, sir.”

“And it’s a special Free Day for civilians who were involved in war work?”

“Yes, sir,” the guard said warily, as if he suspected him of attempting to pass himself off as one of those survivors. “You purchase your exhibition ticket over there.”

He nodded stiffly toward the still-unoccupied ticket desk. “Admission to the museum and the permanent collections is free. The museum will be open shortly. Till then you’re welcome to go into the gift shop.” The guard pointed to where it stood just past the ticket desk.

“Thank you. I’ll just look round the lobby,” he said, pointing up at the high ceiling, where a Spitfire and a V-1 and a V-2 rocket all hung suspended. As soon as the guard had gone, he went back over to the window to see if anyone was coming.

No one was. He read the Upcoming Lecture and Events poster. “June 18—‘So Few: The Battle of Britain,’ ” it said. “June 29—‘Unsung Heroes of World War II.

A slide presentation of civilians who gave their lives to win the war, from American bandleader Glenn Miller to decoding genius Dilly Knox and Shakespearean actor Sir Godfrey Kingsman.’ ”

The car park was still nearly deserted. He looked at the clock behind the ticket desk. Ten past. They’re all at St. Paul’s, he thought, and wondered if he should give up and go there, but it would take him at least half an hour to get there by tube, and in the process he might miss them both places. He decided to give it ten more minutes.

At a quarter past they all arrived at once. Two large vans pulled up and began disgorging a score of elderly women. They were too far away for him to be able to see their faces clearly, and as they started for the steps, they opened out umbrellas and ducked under them, so he couldn’t see them till they were nearly at the top of the steps.

And what if one of them was Merope? He hadn’t thought of that possibility till this moment, he’d been so intent on finding someone who’d known Polly, who would have a clue to where she’d gone after she left Mrs. Rickett’s. If she’d left Mrs. Rickett’s. If she and Merope hadn’t been killed as well that night.

But their names hadn’t been in the casualties lists, and even if they had, it wouldn’t necessarily mean anything.

They weren’t at Mrs. Rickett’s that morning, he told himself, had been telling himself every single day since he’d stood in front of the gaping hole that had been the boardinghouse. They were safely in a shelter, and after they were bombed out, they moved to another boardinghouse. Or, if Polly joined an ambulance crew, into quarters at her post, and one of these women here today will know where.

His first impulse when he’d seen the wrack of timbers and plaster that had been Mrs. Rickett’s had been to stay there in 1941 and find them—correction, his first impulse had been to start digging through the rubble for Polly with his bare hands—but the bomb had hit days or possibly even weeks before, and every day he spent looking for them then was one he wouldn’t be able to come to again. And one of those days might be the day he had to pull her out because if he didn’t, she’d be killed.

And he knew too well from being at Notting Hill Gate, on Lampden Road, and in Oxford Street, that being in the same general temporal-spatial location wasn’t enough. He had to know exactly where she was before he went to get her.

And one of these women can tell me that. They’ll have been on the same ambulance crew as Polly or shared the same air-raid shelter or the same flat.

But what if Merope walked through those museum doors? What if he hadn’t rescued Polly and her, and she was still here fifty years later?

If she is, there’s no way she’d come to something like this, he told himself. The war’s the last thing she’d want to be reminded of. But he posted himself next to the doors so he could get a good look at each woman as she came in, bracing himself as they reached the top of the steps and paused to lower their umbrellas and shake the water out of them and he could see their faces for the first time.

The first ones through were all discussing the weather. “What a pity it had to rain today!” one of them said, and the other replied, “But it will be good for my roses. Poor things, they’ve been absolutely parched.”

He wondered if they were here for the exhibition after all. They were the correct age—in their seventies and eighties—and they were all dressed as for a special occasion in frocks and hats—including one enormous one with an entire herbaceous border on it. And one very elderly, very frail-looking lady was wearing white gloves.

But they looked as though they were going to a garden party, not a World War II reunion. And it was impossible to imagine them ever having done anything less genteel than pour tea, let alone put out incendiaries, dig bodies out of rubble, or man anti-aircraft guns.

This isn’t them, he thought. They’re all at St. Paul’s, and this is the Women’s Institute of Upper Matchings on their monthly outing. He was about to turn away when the frail-looking one pointed a white-gloved finger up at the V-1 and said, “Oh, my God, look at that! It’s a doodlebug. One of those chased me all the way down Piccadilly.”

“I do hope it isn’t armed,” the woman who’d come in with her said, and then squealed, “Whitlaw!” and flung her arms around a grim-looking woman. “It’s me!

Bridget Flannigan. We were in the same WAAF brigade!”

“Flanners! Oh, my God! I don’t believe it!” And the grim-looking woman broke into a broad smile.

They were clearly the women he was looking for, after all. But another van had arrived, and they were pouring into the lobby too quickly for him now, shaking out They were clearly the women he was looking for, after all. But another van had arrived, and they were pouring into the lobby too quickly for him now, shaking out their umbrellas, shedding raincoats, talking excitedly. He stood by the door till they were all inside and then made a circuit of the noisy lobby, scanning the faces of the ones he’d missed as they called to one another across the room and greeted each other with cries of delight, oblivious to him as he worked his way through the crowd, searching their faces, looking for Eileen.

He caught snatches of their conversations as he moved among them:

“No, she couldn’t come, poor dear. Her rheumatism, you know …”

“Are you still married to your American—what was his name? Jack?”

“Jack? Lord, no, I’ve had two husbands since then …”

“… were not, you were a dreadful driver. Remember that poor American admiral you ran over?”

“He wasn’t an admiral! He was only a commander, and he had no business looking the wrong way like that. If Americans drove on the proper side of the road, they’d know which way to look when they were crossing …”

“Ladies!” a large, florid-faced woman with iron-gray hair in front of the door to the museum shouted. “Ladies!” She was holding name badges and a sheet of gold stars. “Ladies! Attention please!” she cried, to no avail. The women were intent on locating old friends, finding familiar faces.

Like I am, he thought, working his way past the name-badge woman and over to the corner where the four women he hadn’t got a close look at yet were passing around snapshots, he assumed of children and grandchildren. He pulled out his notebook and pretended to take notes on the V-1 and the Spitfire while he scanned their faces.

Don’t let any of them be Merope, he prayed.

They were all huddled over the snapshots, their faces hidden, and it took several moments before they raised them again and he was able to see their faces.

Merope wasn’t here. That meant he hadn’t failed, at least not yet, that there was still time to find someone who could tell him where Polly was after March 1941, and he could find her and Merope and pull them both out. And this was the place to find that someone. These women had all done war work, and most of them would have been in London during the Blitz. One of them was bound to have known Polly.

Beginning with the group he’d just been watching. They’d finished looking at the snapshots and were discussing the war.

He edged nearer to hear what they were saying and to find a way to insinuate himself into the conversation. “Do you remember when we went to that dance at Biggin Hill?” the one who’d been passing around the snapshots was asking the woman next to her. “And that RAF pilot—what was his name?”

“Flight Officer Boyd. I certainly do. He kept begging me to go out to see his plane,” she said, even though it was difficult to believe any man had ever begged her to go anywhere. She was a stout, washed-out-looking woman, and her face was a railway map of wrinkles. “And I said good girls didn’t go out alone in the dark with men they’d only just met, and he said there was a war on and we might both be dead by tomorrow—”

“Original,” the woman next to her said.

“My particular favorite was ‘It’s your patriotic duty,’ ” a third woman said, and the others nodded. “Think of it as doing your bit.”

Somehow I don’t think this is the right moment to break in, he thought, and looked studiously up at the Spitfire.

“So did you go with him?” one of the women was asking.

The first woman looked offended. “No. I told him I wasn’t about to fall for an antiquated line of chat like that, and I didn’t intend to go anywhere with him, and a good thing I refused, too. A few moments later his plane took a direct hit. Blown to bits. They couldn’t even make out where it had been. It had vanished without a trace.

“I saved his life,” she said. “I told him that. ‘You should be grateful I’m a good girl,’ I told him. ‘If I weren’t, we’d both be dead.’ ”

“And was he grateful?” the second woman asked dryly.

“I knew a girl who vanished without a trace,” the woman next to her said.

So do I, he thought. And it was clear he wasn’t going to find out whether these women had known Polly just by eavesdropping. He approached them, notebook in hand. “What was her name?” the woman was saying. “It began with an S. You remember, Lowry, she was hit by an HE. Totally vaporized—”

“I’m sorry to interrupt, ladies,” he said. “I’m Calvin Knight. I’m here to do a story on the opening of the exhibition, and I was wondering if I might interview you.

You all did war work during World War Two, is that right? Were you all in London?”

“She was,” the white-haired one with the lace collar said, pointing at the one who’d spoken of the girl vanishing without a trace, “and these two”—she pointed at the crone and the one with the photographs—“were WAACs.”

“Women’s Auxiliary Army Corps,” the crone said. “We were radio operators.”

“And what did you do?” he asked the lace-collared one.

“Well,” she said, dimpling, “until just a few years ago I couldn’t tell you. I was in Intelligence.”

“She was a spy,” the crone said. “But I had an even more exciting job. I drove a mortuary van.”

“During the Blitz?”

“No, I’m younger than this lot. I was still at school in Surrey during the Blitz. I didn’t join up till July of ’forty-four.”

Which was too late. Polly would already have been driving an ambulance near Croydon by then. And her deadline would already have passed. “Were the two of you in London during the Blitz?” he asked the WAACs.

“No, we were stationed at Bagshot Park,” the first one said, and the second handed him the snapshot he’d supposed was of her grandchildren. It wasn’t. It was a black-and-white photograph of two slim, pretty girls in uniform, one fair, one dark, perched, laughing, on a tank. “I’m the blonde,” she said, “and that’s Louise.” She pointed at the curly-haired girl perched next to her in the picture and then at her friend.

“That’s you?” he said, staring at the snapshot. The faded, stout old woman in front of him bore no resemblance at all to the vivid, laughing girl in the photograph.

“Yes,” Louise said, coming round to look at it. “I was a brunette in those days.”

He had assumed he’d recognize Merope if he saw her, even though he hadn’t seen her in eight years and she’d be far older than she’d been then, but now that he saw this snapshot …

There was no resemblance at all between the curly-haired girl in the photo and the dumpy, faded woman in front of him. Too much time had gone by.

Too much time. Merope could be here, right now, in this lobby, perhaps only a few feet away, and he simply hadn’t recognized her. And if she recognized him, would she come up to him and say, “Where were you? Why didn’t you come?”

He was still staring blindly at the snapshot. “Are you all right?” Louise asked him.

“He’s stunned by how little we’ve changed,” her friend said, and the women all laughed good-naturedly.

“She’s quite right. Neither of you’s changed a bit,” he said, recovering himself. He handed the snapshot back to them and asked the four their names, “so I can quote you in the article.”

Thankfully, none of them was named Merope—or Eileen O’Reilly, which had been her cover name. But he couldn’t ask every woman here her name. He remembered the woman with the name tags and went looking to see if she’d managed to pass them out, but he couldn’t find her.

No, there she was, over by the ticket desk, conferring with the woman he’d seen earlier out in the car park. She was probably asking for a microphone.

She’d need it. The noise had risen to a din, and several women had their hands cupped to their ears in an effort to hear, though when he attempted to ask one of them who was wearing an ARP armband whether she’d been in London during the Blitz, she said, “I beg your pardon, I couldn’t hear you. I’m deaf in that ear.”

And in the other one as well. When he shouted, “Were you in London during the Blitz?” she said, “List? What list?”

He bellowed at her for a bit longer till he got her maiden name out of her—Violet Rumford—then moved on through the crowd, eavesdropping on their conversations, attempting to catch their names, but a large number seemed to be calling one another by nicknames—“Stodders” and “B-1” and “Foxtrot”—and the rest by their last names.

The name-badge woman had apparently given up on attempting to get either a microphone or the entire group’s attention and was moving among the crowd, passing them out. Good.

He worked his way over to her. “Print your name on the badge and fix this gold star in the corner,” she was saying, handing the women badges and pens, “and then go through that door.”

But not until I’ve had a chance to read your names, he thought.

“Which names should we put?” a woman in a pink feathered hat asked. “Our name now or our name during the war?”

“Both,” the organizer said. “And write the name of the service you were with below it.”

Thank you, he thought, and followed in her wake, reading the women’s names as they printed them. Pauline, Deborah, Jean. Netterton, Herley, York. No Eileen, no O’Reilly, though the woman in charge evidently hadn’t given all of the women the same instructions. Several had printed only one name, and only a few had listed the service they’d been in. ARP, WAAF, WVS.

They were beginning to drift out of the lobby into the museum. He needed to purchase his ticket, but there were still several ladies who hadn’t put their tags on yet.

Walters, Redding …

The third woman’s hand shook with palsy when she wrote her name, and when she pinned it to her breast, he couldn’t decipher it, though the first letter might be an O. He’d have to corner her once they got inside and find out.

The fourth woman, a tiny creature who looked like she might break in two, still hadn’t finished printing her name, though he didn’t see how she could possibly be Merope, whom he remembered as being taller. But he’d grown since then, and people had still shrunk with age in this era, hadn’t they? “Did she say we were supposed to put what unit we were in?” the woman asked.

“Yes,” Walters and the one with the unreadable name tag said in unison and then laughed, and Unreadable Name Tag said, “Walters? Is that you?”

Walters gaped at her. “Oh, my goodness!” she cried. “I can’t believe this!” She flung her arms around her. “Geddes!”

Geddes. Good. It had been a G, not an O.

“We were stationed at Eastleigh together,” Geddes was telling Redding. “We were Atta Girls.”

“Air Transport Auxiliary,” Walters explained. “We ferried new planes to their airfields for the RAF.” And if they’d been stationed at Eastleigh, they hadn’t been anywhere near London and couldn’t have known Polly.

“What did you do in the war?” Walters was asking Redding.

“Nothing so romantic, I’m afraid,” she said. “I was a land girl. I spent the war shoveling pig muck in Shropshire.”

Which eliminated her too. That left the tiny woman who’d finally finished printing her name and pinned her badge on. “Mrs. Donald Davenport,” it read, and below it, “Lt. Cynthia Camberley.”

He let out a breath he hadn’t realized he’d been holding. Merope wasn’t here.

Thank God. But he still had no idea where Polly had been, and he still hadn’t found anyone who might know. And Camberley, who hadn’t said if she’d been in London during the Blitz, was already going in with the others. He started after her, remembered he hadn’t bought a ticket, and raced over to the desk, but by the time he got it and went in, they’d vanished.

Directly inside the door was a bright red signpost with arrows pointing to various exhibits: “The Battle of the North Atlantic,” “The Holocaust,” “Living Through the Blitz.” He followed the last arrow down a corridor to a doorway piled high with sandbags. A bucket of water stood in front of the sandbags with a stirrup pump in it. Above the door was written, “ ‘This was their finest hour.’ Winston Churchill,” and, as he passed through the doorway, an air-raid siren began to warble.

He was in a short corridor lined with framed black-and-white photographs: a burnt-out church, rows and rows of barrage balloons over London, a street of bombed houses, the dome of St. Paul’s floating above a sea of smoke and flames. At the end of the corridor was another doorway, across which hung a heavy black curtain.

From somewhere beyond it, he could hear a drone of planes and the crump of bombs. He went through the curtain.

Into total blackness. “Look out in the blackout,” a recorded voice said. He peered into the darkness, searching for Camberley. He couldn’t see her, but as his eyes adjusted, he could make out two round white lights with black bars across them which must be an automobile’s headlamps, and on the floor, a white-lined pathway leading to another curtained door, dimly illuminated by the headlamps. And just going through it, Camberley. He started toward her.

“Connor?” a woman’s voice called from behind him. He turned around and then remembered his name wasn’t Connor here and stopped, hoping the darkness had hidden his involuntary reaction. That was how the Nazis caught British spies, he thought, by suddenly calling them by their real name.

He continued following Camberley.

“Connor?” the woman’s voice said again, and he felt a hand on his arm. “I thought that was you. What a lucky coincidence! What are you doing here?”

Nothing could be seen but the tops of the towers of the palace, and even those only from a good way off.

—SLEEPING BEAUTY