“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.