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.