Excerpt of Baby Got Back by Rachel Kramer Bussel

Kate looked up from her lacework and cocked her head toward the window. Crump. She set aside her evening’s contribution to her wartime wardrobe, got down on all fours and crawled over to the windows. Crump. She carefully poked her head through the makeshift blackout curtains. A blush of distant light down toward the Southend railway bridge. Crump. Crump, crump, crump. The rosy domes of light flashed brighter and took on orangey hues as they marched closer, following the train tracks.

Kate stood up, raised her skirts and hopped to the wall, undoing her garter belts on the way. She’d dressed to go out just in case the girls came by, but that wasn’t going to happen— and now, timing was everything. She bent forward, braced her back against the wall and carefully rolled down her last pair of silk stockings while calling over her shoulder. “Mrs. Brown?” Things were so informal now that the War was into its fourth year. “Elizabeth Brown? Elizabeth, it’s an air raid!”

Her elderly neighbor just had time to acknowledge Kate’s warning when the sirens started wailing. Kate hurried to her bedroom and squirmed out of her undies while adjusting her makeup in the mirror. A bit more lip rouge, and just a touch of color to the cheeks. There. She snagged her long winter mantle on the way out the door and hurried down the stairwell and into the street.

Now all the sirens were blaring—almost drowning out the crump, crump, crump of the approaching bombs. It was only six o’clock but between the low cloud cover and the blackout, the only light was from the east, where a hellish false dawn proclaimed the first Zeppelin strikes of the evening. Amazing how the Jerry pilots could see through that soup.

The streets were beginning to fill, but Kate moved ahead of the pack, nodding to the warden in his white-painted helmet as he waved her ahead with his dark lantern. “On you go, Miss, on you go.”

Kate stepped inside the reinforced concrete entrance to the Underground, just past the gaze of the warden, and paused. Getting off in wartime London anymore was all about timing. When to hurry, when to dally, when to commit.

It wasn’t like the early days, when Khaki Fever reached epidemic proportions. Uniformed lads off to war, all bold and bashful, having it off with eager strangers in trams, omnibuses, taxis, on the street—in the early morn, broad daylight and advancing dusk. Rationing and restricted travel took care of all that—and of course, most of the lads were over there now. Returning soldiers were either being invalided out or hurrying home to wives. Of course there were the Americans, but the young ones were far too brash for her taste, and the men were full of dirty French tricks—besides, they’d all been kept out of the City for the last few months, and all the girls she knew, herself included, were getting more than a mite peckish. Must be some big offensive in the works.

God, how she missed it all—that is, until the organized response to the Hun bombing raids.

Someone jostled her hard out of her reverie and she spun around into the arms of a dapper old cove in tweed overcoat and derby hat. “Oh, excuse me, Miss, are you quite all right?” He had a nice voice, with a touch of fin-de-siècle public school tempered by a lifetime of travel and private clubs. Kate lingered a moment in his arms, enveloped in his unbuttoned great coat and a manly fog of tobacco and port and masculine sweat with fading notes of lime bay rum. She smiled. Well, he wasn’t all that old—maybe late forties, early fifties. He was just a mite shorter than she was, but when she’d spun about she’d raised up on her tiptoes, and once she’d settled down the height difference was negligible. Still, drat and double drat, didn’t she just wish she’d worn her flats? He held her close and she could absolutely feel his hardness pushing into her lap. No, he wasn’t all that old at all.