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 café, 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