Billy Boyle Read Online Free PDF

common,” I said.
    She ignored that opening. “As soon as the first American mission set up in Grosvenor Square, I was posted here. That was five months ago, and there really wasn’t much to do before General Eisenhower arrived. Now, things are different.”
    “You’re making coffee as well as tea?”
    That got a bit of a smile. “I’ve been taken off coffee duty, thank goodness,” Daphne said. “I always managed to make it too weak or burn it or something.”
    “Pretty smart move on your part.”
    She raised her eyebrows and tapped her fingernails on the table, a bit surprised. “You may be able to make yourself useful, Lieutenant Boyle,” Daphne said. “No one else ever suspected.”
    “You never know,” I said, giving her a wink as I got up to get some food. I came back with a full plate of powdered eggs and toast that smelled almost good. We talked more, which means she spoke, I ate like a horse, listened, and learned. She and her sister had both joined up when the war broke out. Daphne chose the Women’s Royal Naval Service and her sister, Diana, went into something called the First Aid Nursing Yeomanry, known as the FANYs. I asked her why they had enlisted, and with raised eyebrows, she just said, “One must do one’s duty, mustn’t one?” I just smiled and stuffed some eggs into my mouth.
    Their brother was in North Africa fighting Rommel on the Egyptian frontier. She was worried about him. And she didn’t like being called a WREN, but there was nothing she could do about that either. She didn’t like lollygagging around the cafeteria with a guy on a long-term coffee break any better, and as soon as I finished my plate we were back on the tour. She gave me the layout of the place and introduced me to people I ought to know and whose names I forgot, one after the other.
    Finally she showed me my desk, across the room from her own. It had a pile of books and briefing papers on it that looked like more reading than I did in all of high school. Then she showed her merciful side and told me to go home and sleep. She reminded me that the mess room of the U.S. Army HQ, European Theater of Operations, was the only place I could count on for coffee and “Yank food.” I told her that was fine, since we hadn’t had tea in Boston since we threw it all in the harbor. She looked blankly at me for a moment and then laughed. It was like sunlight hitting the water.
    I thought about that laugh on the walk back to the hotel and forgot to look right instead of left and almost got run over by a London cab. Safely across the street, I decided it felt good to stretch my legs and I wouldn’t be able to sleep now anyway, after all that joe. I walked back to the hotel, just so I could trace my steps back to it, then crossed the street into Hyde Park. It was huge, with wide crushed-stone paths leading in all directions. The green spaces between the paths were filled with gardens, shoots of vegetable plants sprouting up everywhere: a giant Victory Garden. I crossed a bridge spanning a long, narrow pond and found myself on a wide pathway called Rotten Row, for some very old historical reason, I hoped. I followed it and found myself back at Hyde Park Corner, which I had seen from the jeep that morning. I wandered some more and ended up at the back of a crowd stacked up outside a tall wrought-iron fence. It was Buckingham Palace itself, and I caught the tail end of the changing of the guard, gray-coated British troops marching back to their barracks and looking very imperial. I followed them for a while through St. James’s Park, and ended up back at Big Ben and Parliament. I stood there like a tourist back home gawking at the Old North Church, waiting for the bells to ring. It was the half hour, and I let the sounds wash over me, almost feeling the vibrations in my feet. How could people just walk around me, talking to each other, and not stop and listen? I kicked myself mentally for being such a rube in the city and