No, she thought. If I decide I need to go tonight, I’ll have to be there by midnight, and it will take me the better part of an hour to get there. “We can’t meet at midnight!” she shouted, but her voice was drowned out by a schoolboy on the step above her blowing enthusiastically on a toy horn.

“The National Gallery steps at midnight,” Paige echoed. “Or we turn into pumpkins.”

“No, Paige!” she called. “We need to meet before—”

But Reardon, thank goodness, was already saying, “That won’t work. The Underground only runs till half past eleven tonight, and the Major will have our heads if we don’t make it back.”

Half past eleven. That meant she’d need to start for the drop even earlier.

“But we only just got here,” Paige said, “and the war’s over—”

“We haven’t been demobbed yet,” Reardon said. “Till we are—”

“I suppose you’re right,” Paige agreed.

“Then we meet on the National Gallery steps at a quarter past eleven, agreed? Douglas?”

No, she thought. I may need to be gone before that, and I don’t want you waiting for me and ending up being late getting back.

She needed to tell them to go on without her if she wasn’t there. “No, wait!” she called, but Reardon was already to the top of the escalator and stepping off into an even larger crowd. She turned back to say, “Follow me, girls,” and disappeared into the mêlée.

“Wait! Reardon! Paige!” Douglas called, pushing up the moving stairs to catch Paige, but the boy with the horn was blocking her way. By the time she reached the top of the escalator, Reardon was nowhere to be seen, and Paige was already nearly to the turnstiles. “Paige!” she called again, and started after her.

Paige turned back.

“Wait for me!” Douglas called, and Paige nodded and made an effort to move to the side but was swept on through.

“Douglas!” Paige shouted and pointed to the stairs leading up to the street.

She nodded and started that way, but by the time she reached Paige, she was halfway up the steps and clinging madly to the metal railing. “Douglas, can you see Reardon anywhere?” Paige shouted down to her.

“No!” she called, bracing herself against the noisy, laughing crowd, which was carrying them inexorably up the stairs to the street. “Listen, if one of us isn’t there on the steps when it’s time to leave, the others shouldn’t wait!”

“What did you say?” Paige shouted over the din, which was growing even louder. Just above them a man in a bowler shouted, “Three cheers for Churchill!” and the crowd obligingly bellowed, “Hip hip hurrah! Hip hip hurrah! Hip hip hurrah!”

“I said, don’t wait for me!”

“I can’t hear you!”

“Three cheers for Monty!” the man shouted. “Hip hip—”

The cheering crowd pushed them up out of the stairway, rather like a cork from a bottle, and spewed them out onto the packed street. And into an even louder din. Horns were honking and bells were ringing. A conga line snaked past, chanting, “Dunh duh dunh duh dunh UNH!”