“We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it,” Mike said.
Eileen was still looking anxious.
Eileen was still looking anxious.
“Don’t worry. If the retrieval team’s here, they can go back through to Oxford and get you all the passes and papers you need. Or they may decide it’s easier to set up another drop closer to London. Look, I’ll call you as soon as I know what the plan is.”
“How much money do you think you’ll need?” Polly asked, digging in her shoulder bag. “Never mind. Take this.” She handed him some money.
“What about you two?” he asked.
“I’ve kept back enough for our tube fares, and we’ll be paid the day after tomorrow.”
She handed him a handwritten list. “Here are the raids on London and the southeast for the next week. The Luftwaffe was concentrating mostly on the Midlands and the ports in December, so it’s not a very long list, and I’m sorry I don’t know more about the raids on southeastern England. I didn’t have those implanted. Oh, and when you get to Dover, you need to be especially careful. It was under bombardment for nearly the entire war. The list I made for you only goes to the twentieth.
If you think you’ll be gone longer than—”
He shook his head, folded up the paper, and put it in his pocket. “We’ll be back in Oxford long before that.”
“Oh! Wouldn’t it be heaven if we were home by Christmas?” Eileen said rapturously.
“It would,” Mike said, “but first I’ve got to get to Saltram-on-Sea, which means I’ve got to get to Victoria Station before the Underground shuts down. Are there any raids tonight, Polly?”
“Yes,” she said, “but not till 10:45.”
“Then if I want to be out of London before they start, I’d better get going.”
“Do you want us to go with you to Victoria?” Polly asked.
“No, you need to be here where the retrieval team can find you, in case they gave up on me. Is your play group still putting on The Admirable Crichton?”
“No, now we’re in rehearsals for A Christmas Carol.”
“You’d better tell them you can’t do it,” he said.
He gave both of them a peck on the cheek, said, “I’ll call as soon as I know anything,” and took off. If he could get an express to Dover, he could be there by midnight and on the main road to Saltram-on-Sea by dawn and maybe be able to hitch a ride with a farmer heading up the coast early.
But Polly had been right. The trains were jammed, and as the agent informed him when he bought his ticket, military personnel were being given first priority.
“I’m willing to stand in the corridor,” Mike said.
“First priority is standing in the corridor,” the ticket agent said. “I can get you out on the 2:14 Tuesday.”
“Tuesday?”
“Sorry, sir. It’s the best I can do. The holidays, you know. And the war, of course.”
Of course. “You don’t have anything sooner than Tuesday?”
“No, sir. I can get you on the 6:05 to Canterbury tomorrow. You might be able to get a train to Dover from there.” And after Mike had attempted unsuccessfully to buy a ticket off several people in the queue for the 9:38 to Dover, that was what he opted for, a move he regretted almost immediately.
Since the train went before the tube began running in the morning, he couldn’t go back to Notting Hill Gate to spend the night, and there wasn’t anywhere in Victoria to sleep. He had to sit up all night on an unbelievably uncomfortable wooden bench.
And once he got on the train, he was even sorrier. Not only did it turn out to be a local, and even more packed than the Lady Jane had been on the way back from Dunkirk, but less than five miles out of London it was shunted onto a siding while three troop trains and a freight train loaded with military equipment passed.
After nearly an hour and a half, the train started up again, went half a mile, and stopped again, this time for no reason at all. “Air raid,” a soldier close to the window said, looking out. “I hope the jerries aren’t out hunting trains today. We’re sitting ducks, aren’t we?” after which everyone spent the next few minutes looking up at the ceiling and listening for the deadly hum of approaching HE 111s.
“I’d rather be back on the front line than here,” another soldier said after a few minutes. “Waiting about for the blow to fall, and not a bloody thing you can do about it.”
Like Polly, Mike thought. It must have been hell for her when she realized her drop wouldn’t open, and worse keeping it to herself these last weeks while he and Eileen talked about options she knew wouldn’t work. But the worst must have been not being able to do anything about it. His lying there in the hospital worrying about what had happened to the retrieval team and whether he’d messed things up by saving Hardy had been bad enough. He couldn’t imagine what it would have been like if he’d already been to Pearl Harbor, even if it was a year from now, or, like the day the V-1s started, three and a half years off.
It didn’t matter when it was. It was still heading straight at you. Like the German Army getting closer and closer to Dunkirk, and you sitting there helplessly on the beach, listening to the guns in the distance, and hoping to God a ship would show up and take you off before the Germans got there, and nothing for you to do in the meantime but wait.
Which is what all three of them would have been doing right now if he hadn’t got Daphne’s letter. Thank God it had come when it did. He couldn’t have stood just sitting there cooling his heels. It was a hell of a lot easier to fire a machine gun at the Zeroes or hand up ammunition than to just sit there and be shot at, a hell of a lot easier to take a leaky launch over to Dunkirk than to sit on a beach waiting for the Germans to come.
