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as though she weren’t thinking about herself at all, but about some other person who was Poppy Deveen and who was trying so hard to keep her life together in the middle of the hell the world had become. The children away – and she ached with the misery of missing them, her serious, sensible Lee and little Josh, who always seemed to be so cocky and self contained, but who was (as who could know better than Poppy?) so often frightened inside – and David, in whom all her security and peace rested, away again on impossible trains and so tired that she could have wept for him, and no phone call from Robin this morning and God knows what had happened to her, and now Mrs Crighton –
    But she didn’t weep and stopped the academic thinking, because it was a waste of time and she had work to do, and said as briskly as she could, ‘That’s very good of you, Maria, I do appreciate it. I’ll be back by five, I promise. And if you can find any of your friends and neighbours who’d be interested in helping out, do tell them. I really don’t think I can recruit people from the West End any more.’
    ‘I’ll say not,’ Maria said sturdily. ‘Toffee-nosed bitches like that. ’Oo needs ’em?’
    So much, thought Poppy wearily, for the Dunkirk spirit and all of us pulling together to win the war and all the rest of it. It was just the same as it had been last time, with middle – and upper-class people working in canteens and behaving as though they were doing a huge favour to the exhausted ordinary soldiers who were going through hell to protect them, and the resentment that had caused in the rank and file, and she closed her eyes and looked back almost twenty-five years to the eager girl she had been in her FANY ’s uniform and her determination to help win the War to End All Wars, driving her ambulance around France – and opened them again to look at today’s reality.
    It had all seemed rather unimportant at first, a very flat anticlimax to all the worry. Once Chamberlain had made his announcement of war and that first siren warning of a raid had turned out to be a false alarm, nothing much had happened. All those months of the Phoney War when the children had come back to London from being evacuated and David had spent his time as usual in his Fleet Street office and Robin atthe London Hospital had seemed so happy and useful, though it was a pity she had to work so hard; Poppy had thought with deliberate optimism that it would be all right this time, a sensible war, over by Christmas. But she had known in her heart that it wasn’t to be that way, and when the bad times came and the Germans went pushing through Holland and Belgium, and Poland had fallen and then eventually Dunkirk had happened to waken everyone up to what it was to be like, and the fear of invasion had gripped even the most optimistic, she had rallied fast and got herself as organized as she could. The children had to be sent off to Norfolk again, with the usual fussing and flailing from Joshy but Lee’s calm acceptance to sweeten the wretched business, and they had checked the strength of the shelter in the back garden at Norland Square and started to persuade Goosey to go with the children to Norfolk. Not that anyone had for a moment expected she would; for Goosey, dearly as she loved the children, the place she had to be was Norland Square. Hadn’t she lived there for more than forty years? It would take more than a nasty little jumped-up Hun like that creature with the silly moustache to get her out of it, she had said firmly – and that had been that.
    Her mother had been no better; Poppy had gone to Mildred’s house in Leinster Terrace and begged her to go to the country, in case of bombing, but she had refused to hear of it.
    ‘I am seventy-four, Poppy, and therefore living on extra time. If it is meant for me to die in an air raid, then so be it. I can’t leave here – Queenie would never go and how could I leave her? I have my own