“Will they cut their heads off?” the girl asked. “Like they did Anne Boleyn?”
“No, now they hang them.”
“Oh,” she said, disappointed. “I did so want to see them.”
The ravens or the cut-off heads? Polly wondered.
“They’re good luck, you know,” the girl said. “So long as there are ravens at the Tower, England can never fall.”
Which is why, when they’re all killed by blast next month, the government will secretly dispose of the bodies and substitute new ones.
“It’s so unfair!” The girl pouted. “And on our honeymoon!”
Honeymoon? Polly was glad Colin wasn’t here to hear that. It would give him ideas.
The boy pored over the map for several moments and then said, “We could go to Westminster Abbey.”
They’re here sightseeing, Polly thought, amazed. In the middle of the Blitz.
“Or we could go to Madame Tussaud’s Waxworks,” the boy was saying, “and see Anne Boleyn and Henry VIII’s other wives.”
No, you can’t. Madame Tussaud’s was bombed on the eleventh, Polly thought, and then, I should go sightseeing. She couldn’t look for a job till tomorrow, and she couldn’t observe life in the shelters till tonight. And once she began working, she’d have almost no time to travel about London. This might be her only opportunity.
And there might be a restaurant open near Westminster Abbey or Buckingham Palace. I can see where the bomb hit the north end of the palace and nearly killed the King and Queen, she thought, walking back to the tube station. Or perhaps she should go see something that wouldn’t survive the Blitz, like the Guildhall or one of the Christopher Wren churches that would be destroyed on the twenty-ninth of December.
Or I could go see St. Paul’s, she thought suddenly. Mr. Dunworthy adored St. Paul’s. He was always talking about it, and perhaps if she told him she’d been to see it and all the things he’d raved about-Nelson’s tomb and the Whispering Gallery and Holman Hunt’s The Light of the World-and told him how beautiful she thought they were, she might be able to talk him into letting her stay an extra week. Or at least prevent him from canceling her assignment.
No, wait, Mr. Dunworthy had said an unexploded bomb had buried itself under St. Paul’s in September. But that had been early on the twelfth, which was this past Thursday, and he’d said it had taken them three days to dig it out, so it would have been removed on the fourteenth-yesterday. So the cathedral would be open again.
She started toward the Central Line and then changed her mind and took the Bakerloo to Piccadilly Circus instead. She could catch a bus from there and see some of London on the way. And there might be a restaurant in Piccadilly Circus.
There were more people in Piccadilly Circus than there had been on Oxford Street-soldiers, and elderly men hawking newspapers next to sandwich boards reading Latest War News-but there was nothing open here either. The statue of Eros in the center of the Circus had been boarded up. The Guinness clock and the giant signs advertising Bovril and Wrigley’s Chewing Gum were still there, though not in their full electric glory. Their lightbulbs had been taken out when the blackout began.
Polly went a short way down Shaftesbury and Haymarket, looking for an open cafй, then came back to the Circus and found a bus to St. Paul’s. She climbed aboard and up the narrow spiral staircase to the open upper deck so she could have a good view. She was the only one up there, and as soon as the bus started off, she could see why. It was freezing. She dug her gloves out of her pockets and pulled her coat closer about her, debating whether to go back down. But up ahead she could see Trafalgar Square, so she stayed where she was.
The broad plaza was nearly empty, and the fountains were shut off. Five years from now it would be crammed to bursting with cheering crowds celebrating the end of the war, but today even the pigeons had abandoned it. The base of Nelson’s monument was swathed in a Buy National War Bonds banner, and someone had stuck a Union Jack behind one of the bronze lions’ ears. She looked at its paws, trying to see if they’d fallen victim to shrapnel, but that apparently hadn’t happened yet. Then she craned her neck up to look at Nelson, high atop his pillar, his tricorn hat in his hand.
Hitler had planned to take the memorial-lions and all-to Berlin after the invasion and have it set up in front of the Reichstag. He’d also planned to have himself crowned emperor of Europe in Westminster Abbey-he’d written it all down in his secret invasion plans-and then begin systematically eliminating everyone who got in his way, including all of the intelligentsia. And, of course, the Jews. Virginia Woolf had been on the “elimination” list, and so had Laurence Olivier and C. P. Snow. And T. S. Eliot. And Hitler had come incredibly close to carrying his plans out.
The bus drove past the National Gallery and started down the broad Strand. There were many more signs of the war here-sandbags and shelter notices and a large water tank outside the Savoy for fighting fires. She didn’t see any damage. That will change tonight, she thought. By this time tomorrow nearly every shop window they were passing would have been shattered, and there’d be an enormous crater in the spot the bus was driving over. It was a good thing she’d come today.
The bus turned onto Fleet Street. And ahead, for a brief moment, was St. Paul’s. Mr. Dunworthy had spoken of its pewter-colored dome, standing high on Ludgate Hill above the city, but she could only catch intermittent glimpses of it between and above the newspaper offices lining Fleet Street. They’d all be hit several weeks from now, so badly that only one newspaper would manage to get out an edition the next morning. Polly smiled, thinking of its headline: “Bomb Injured in Fall on Fleet Street.”
St. Bride’s was just ahead. Polly leaned forward to look at its wedding-cake steeple, with its decorated tiers and arched windows. On the twenty-ninth of December, those windows would be alight with fire. So would most of the buildings they were passing now. This entire part of London’s old City had burnt that night in what history would call the Second Great Fire of London, including the Guildhall, and eight Wren churches.
But not St. Paul’s, she thought, even though the reporters watching from here that night had thought it was doomed. The American reporter Edward R. Murrow had even begun his radio broadcast, “Tonight, as I speak to you now, St. Paul’s Cathedral is burning to the ground.” But it hadn’t. It had survived the Blitz, and the war.
But not the twenty-first century, Polly thought. Not the terrorist years. Nothing they were driving past had survived a terrorist with a martyr complex and a pinpoint bomb under his arm. She looked up at the dome again, which she could see looming ahead.
We’re nearly there, she thought, but moments later the bus turned sharply to the right away from it. She leaned over the side to look down at the street. It was blocked off with sawhorses and notices reading This Area Off-Limits.
There must be bomb damage ahead. The bus drove down two streets and turned east again, but that way was blocked, too, with a rope and a hand-lettered notice reading Danger, and when the bus stopped, a black-helmeted policeman came over to confer with the driver, after which he pulled the bus over to the curb, and passengers began to disembark. Was it a raid? She hadn’t heard anything, but Colin had warned her that engine sounds sometimes drowned the sirens out, and everyone seemed to be getting off. Polly ran down the winding steps. “Is it a raid?” she asked the driver.
He shook his head, and the policeman said, “Unexploded bomb. This entire area’s cordoned off. Where were you going, miss?”
“St. Paul’s.”