Connie Willis - Blackout

“Lampden Road? You’re on it.”

“Oh,” Polly said, “thank you,” and walked rapidly up the road as if she knew where she were going. The woman was looking after her, her prayer book clutched to her bosom.

I hope she hasn’t read one of those “Report Anyone Behaving Suspiciously” posters, Polly thought.

The woman was right. This was definitely Lampden Road. Polly recognized its distinctive curve from the night before. The church must be nearer to the drop than she’d thought. She crossed a side street and saw the chemist’s on the next corner, and, beyond it, the teashop, which unfortunately wasn’t open. On up the street were the newsagent’s and the greengrocer’s she’d seen last night with the baskets of cabbages outside and “T. Tubbins, Greengrocer,” above the door.

Which meant the drop was only a few yards away in the next alley, even though she thought she’d come much farther in the dark. The warden must have taken her some roundabout way. She turned toward the alley, wondering if she should go through right now and give the lab her address and report on the slippage. Badri had specifically asked her to note how much there was. She wondered if he’d been half-expecting something like this. Four and a half days’ slippage had to be due to a divergence point, and the beginning of the Blitz had been rife with them. That was why she’d arranged to come through on the tenth rather than the seventh.

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 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.