In the meantime, the Magruders proved conclusively they hadn’t had the measles before, no matter what their mother had said, and Eddie and Patsy also broke out. By the evacuation of Dunkirk, Eileen had nineteen patients in varying degrees of spottiness and/or recovery.
Alf was thrilled about the ongoing rescue. “The vicar says they’re going over in fishing boats and rowboats to get our soldiers,” he reported happily. “I wish I could go.”
I wish I could, too, Eileen thought. Michael Davies is in Dover reporting on the evacuation right now.
“They’re gettin’ strafed and bombs dropped on ’em and everything,” Alf said, which at this point seemed infinitely preferable to caring for a score of feverish, fretful, molting children. Once the rash went away, their skin developed brownish, peeling patches. “Now you really look like a corpse,” Alf told Binnie. “If you was at Dunkirk, they’d think you was dead and leave you behind on the beach, and the jerries’d kill you.”
“They would not!” Binnie shrieked.
“Out,” Eileen ordered.
“I can’t go out,” Alf said reasonably. “We’re under quarantine.”
He was quite literally bouncing off the walls. Eileen found several portraits askew and Lady Caroline and her hunting dogs sprawled flat on the floor, and when she ordered them out of the ballroom, they retreated to Lady Caroline’s bathroom, a fact Eileen didn’t discover till water began dripping from the library ceiling.
“Alf and us were playing Evacuation from Dunkirk,” a sopping-wet Theodore explained.
The next time the vicar called up to the nursery window to ask if there was anything they needed, Eileen said yes rather desperately. “Something to amuse the ones who aren’t ill. Games or puzzles or something.”
“I’ll see what the Women’s Institute can come up with,” he said, and the next day delivered a basket full of donated books (Little Lord Fauntleroy and The Child’s Book of Martyrs), jigsaw puzzles (St. Paul’s Cathedral and “The Cotswolds in Spring”), and a Victorian board game called Cowboys and Red Indians, which inspired the Hodbins to lead the children on a whooping war-painted rampage through the corridors.
“And yesterday I caught Alf playing Burned at the Stake,” she called down to the vicar on his next visit, “with Lady Caroline’s Louis Quinze hat stand and a box of matches.”
He laughed up at her. “I can see stronger measures are required.”
He was as good as his word. The next day the basket he brought contained ARP armbands, a logbook, and an official RAF chart showing the distinctive silhouettes of Heinkels, Hurricanes, and Dornier 17s. Alf promptly became an ace aeroplane spotter, lecturing everyone on the difference between a Dornier 17 and a Spitfire-“See, it’s got eight machine guns on the wings”-and hanging out in the ballroom window and shouting, “Enemy aircraft at three o’clock,” every time a plane appeared and diving to record the number, type, and altitude in the logbook. The only plane most days was the plane carrying the post to Birmingham, but that didn’t discourage him, and comparative peace reigned for several days.
It was, of course, too good to last. Soon, Alf began flying bombing sorties through the kitchen. And the sickroom, and torturing Binnie. When she suggested Beauty for her name-“You know, like in Sleeping Beauty”-Alf hooted, “Beauty? Beast, more like! Or Baby, ’cause that’s what you are, bawlin’ when you was ill and beggin’ Eileen not to leave. You made ’er swear and everythin’.”
“I never,” Binnie said indignantly. “I don’t even like her. She can go this minute for all I care.”
I would if I could, Eileen thought, but while she’d been intent on taking care of her evacuees, Samuels had boarded up all the doors except the one in the kitchen, moved his chair in front of that, and nailed shut the windows in every room but the ballroom, which was always full of children. And she only had ten more days. If no one else came down with the measles.
But if they did, surely Oxford would attempt to pull her out. She was surprised they hadn’t already. Now that most of the children had recovered and Binnie was out of danger, Una and Mrs. Bascombe could easily handle the situation, but there was no sign of the retrieval team and no message from them. “No letters have come for me, have they?” she asked Samuels.
“No,” he said. Which must mean the quarantine was nearly over, and none of the other children were going to get the measles. Eileen began counting the days.
Two days before the quarantine was to be lifted, Lily Lovell came down with a roaring case, and ten days later Ruth Steinberg, and two weeks after that Theodore. “At this rate, we’ll still be quarantined at Michaelmas,” Samuels grumbled.
Eileen wasn’t sure she could make it. Alf nearly fell out of the window trying to identify a plane, and Binnie began holding air-raid drills standing at the top of the main stairway and giving her imitation of an air-raid siren. “That ain’t the siren for air raids, you slowcoach,” Alf told her. “You’re doin’ the all clear. This is the air raid,” and let loose a bloodcurdling up-and-down yowl that Eileen thought would break Lady Caroline’s crystal.
“They simply must go outside and run off some of their energy before they wreck the house,” she told Mrs. Bascombe. “It wouldn’t be breaking quarantine if they stayed on the front lawn. If anyone came we could come inside straightaway.”
Mrs. Bascombe shook her head. “Dr. Stuart will never allow it-”
There was an unearthly wail from the stairway. “Air raid!” Theodore shrieked, giggling, and the children thundered through the kitchen toward the cellar steps, knocking a pan full of cakes off the table and onto the floor where Alf, wearing his ARP armband and a colander-helmet, stepped in the middle of it.
“Exactly how many more days is it till the end of quarantine?” Mrs. Bascombe asked, helping Eileen pick up cakes.
“Four,” Eileen said grimly, reaching for one that had gone under the flour bin.
“All clear!” Binnie shouted from the cellar door, and the children roared back through the kitchen and up the stairs again, shrieking.
“No running!” Mrs. Bascombe called futilely after them. “Where’s Una got to? Why isn’t she watching them?”
“I’ll go find her,” Eileen said, dumping the last of the trampled cakes onto the baking pan and going upstairs. Knowing Alf and Binnie, she might be tied to a chair or locked in a closet.
She wasn’t. She was lying on Peggy’s cot in the ballroom. “I think I’ve caught the measles,” she said. “I feel so hot, and I have an awful headache.”
“You said you’d had them.”
“I know. I thought I had. I must have been wrong.”
“Perhaps it’s only a cold,” Eileen said. “Oh, Una, you can’t have the measles!”
But she did. Dr. Stuart confirmed it on his visit, and Una broke out the next day. Mrs. Bascombe, determined not to let the quarantine be prolonged yet another month by Eileen’s catching them, took over Una’s nursing herself and forbade Eileen to go anywhere near her, which was just as well. She might have throttled her.
The children had to be kept quiet so as not to disturb Una-a nearly impossible task. Eileen tried telling fairy stories to the children, but Alf and Binnie interrupted constantly and questioned every aspect of the story. “’Ow come they didn’t just lock the door when the bad fairy tried to come to the christenin’?” they asked when she attempted to tell “Sleeping Beauty,” and “’Ow come the good fairy couldn’t undo the whole spell ’stead of makin’ ’er sleep a ’undred years?”
“Because she came too late,” Eileen said. “The spell was already cast. She didn’t have the power to undo it.”
“Or p’raps she weren’t very good at spells,” Alf said.
“Then how come she’s the good fairy?” Binnie demanded.
“Rapunzel” was even worse. Binnie wanted to know why Rapunzel hadn’t cut off her hair herself and climbed down it, and Binnie promptly tried to demonstrate on Rose’s braids.
Why did I wish she was her old self again? Eileen thought and announced they were going to do lessons instead.
“You can’t!” Binnie protested. “It’s summer!”
“These are the lessons you missed when you were ill,” Eileen said. She made the vicar bring their schoolbooks, and he must have sensed she was near the breaking point, because he brought her a basket of strawberries and Agatha Christie’s The Murder of Roger Ackroyd.
“I thought it might prevent The Murder of Alf and Binnie Hodbin,” he said. He also brought the post. And the war news. “The RAF’s holding its own, but the Luftwaffe has five times their number of planes, and now the Germans have begun attacking our airfields and aerodromes.”
