But if she reported in now, she’d need to go through again after she was hired on at a department store, and she didn’t want to give Mr. Dunworthy additional opportunities to cancel her assignment.
I’ll go tomorrow, after I’ve been hired on, she thought, and checked the alley to make certain it was the right one. It was—she could see the barrels and the chalked Union Jack and “London kan take it” on the wall—and then walked back to Lampden Road to look for an open restaurant.
There was nothing to the north but houses. She walked back down past St. George’s to the curve of the road, but there was nothing that way either except a shut-up confectioner’s, a tailor’s, and an ARP post with sandbags stacked on either side of the door.
I should have offered to pay extra to have my board begin today, she thought, and walked down to Notting Hill Gate Station, hoping the shelter canteens in the Underground stations had been set up by now and were open, but the only sign of food in the entire station was a currant bun being consumed by a small boy on the Central Line platform.
Surely there’ll be a canteen open in Oxford Circus, she thought. It’s a much larger station, but there wasn’t, and Oxford Street was deserted. Polly walked down the long shopping street, looking at the shut shops and department stores: Peter Robinson, Townsend Brothers, massive Selfridges. They looked like palaces rather than stores with their stately gray stone facades and pillars.
And indestructible. Except for the small printed cards in several stores’ windows announcing “safe and comfortable shelter accommodations,” and the yellow-green gas-detecting paint patches on the red pillar postboxes, there was no sign here that there was a war on. Bourne and Hollingsworth was advertising “The Latest in Ladies’ Hats for Autumn,” and Mary Marsh “Modish Dancing Frocks,” and Cook’s window was still calling itself “The Place to Make Your Travel Arrangements.”
To where? Polly wondered. Obviously not Paris, which Hitler had just occupied, along with the rest of Europe. John Lewis and Company was having a sale on fur coats. Not for long, Polly thought, stopping in front of the huge square store, trying to memorize the building and the displays in its wide-fronted windows. By Wednesday morning, it would all be reduced to a charred ruin.
She walked past it toward Marble Arch, noting the stores’ posted opening times and looking for “Shop Assistant Wanted” cards in the windows, but the only one she saw was at Padgett’s, which was on Mr. Dunworthy’s forbidden list even though it wouldn’t be hit till October twenty-fifth, three days after the end of her mission.
She also looked for somewhere to eat, but every restaurant she saw had a Closed Sundays sign, and there was no one to ask. She finally spotted a teenaged boy and girl standing outside Parson’s, but as she started over to them, Polly saw they were poring over a map, which meant they weren’t from here either. “We could go to the Tower of London,” the girl said, pointing at the map, “and see the ravens.”
The boy, who didn’t look any older than Colin, shook his head. “They’re using it for a prison, like in the old days, only now it’s German spies, not royalty.”
“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