St. James's Park

St. James's Park, the royal park bordering Whitehall and Buckingham Palace, appears in the novel as a brief sanctuary of peacetime normality during the fraught spring of 1940. After lunch on a half-day off, Briony Tallis walks there with her friend Fiona, crossing the river past the Houses of Parliament. They stroll around the lake, buy tea at a stall, and rent deck chairs to listen to elderly men of the Salvation Army playing Elgar adapted for brass band. The scene is dreamlike in its normality: prams drift along the paths, hoods down in full sunlight, and white, soft-skulled babies gape at the outdoor world for the first time. Children who seem to have escaped evacuation run about on the grass shouting and laughing, the band struggles with music beyond its capabilities, and deck chairs still cost twopence. It is hard to believe that barely a hundred miles away is a military disaster.

The Atmosphere of Wartime London

In those days of May 1940, before the story from France is fully understood and before the bombing of the city in September, London has the outward signs but not yet the mentality of war. Uniforms are everywhere, posters warn against fifth columnists, two big air-raid shelters have been dug into the park lawns, and surly officialdom is pervasive. While the girls sit in their deck chairs, a man in an armband and cap comes over and demands to see Fiona's gas mask, which is partially obscured by her cape. Otherwise, it is still an innocent time. The anxieties about the situation in France that have been absorbing the country have for the moment dissipated in the afternoon's sunshine. The dead are not yet present; the absent are presumed alive. Briony's thoughts, however, remain fixed on her own themes: she wonders whether London will be overwhelmed by poisonous gas or overrun by German parachutists before Lola's wedding can take place.

Briony's Guilt and the Threat of War

As the Salvation Army band plays "Bye Bye Blackbird" with far more adeptness than their earlier Elgar, people in deck chairs join in, and some clap in time. Communal sing-alongs have a faintly coercive quality that Briony is determined to resist. Still, the music lifts her spirits, and when Fiona returns with a teacup of water and the band begins a medley of old-time favorites with "It's a Long Way to Tipperary," the two girls begin to talk about work. Fiona draws Briony into gossip about which pros they like and those that irritate them, about Sister Drummond whose voice Fiona can do, and about the matron who is almost as grand and remote as a consultant. They remember the eccentricities of various patients and share grievances—Fiona is outraged that she is not allowed to keep things on her windowsill, Briony hates the eleven o'clock lights-out. Their laughter grows into cackles of hilarity and derision, and heads begin to turn in their direction. Most of those who turn smile indulgently, for there is something about two young nurses in wartime—in their purple and white tunics, dark blue capes and spotless caps—that makes them as irreproachable as nuns.

The Return to Reality

As they walk back toward Parliament Square, Briony is light-headed and still weak in the knees from laughing so hard. She wonders at herself, at how quickly her mood can be transformed. Her worries do not disappear but slip back, their emotional power temporarily exhausted. Arm in arm, the girls walk across Westminster Bridge. The tide is out, and in such strong light there is a purple sheen on the mudbanks where thousands of wormcasts throw tiny sharp shadows. As they turn right onto Lambeth Palace Road, they see a line of army lorries drawn up outside the main entrance of the hospital. They groan good-humoredly at the prospect of more supplies to be unpacked and stowed. Then they see the field ambulances among the lorries, and coming closer they see the stretchers, scores of them, set down haphazardly on the ground, and an expanse of dirty green battle dress and stained bandages. The brisk air of spring does not dispel the stench of engine oil and festering wounds. For a moment, Briony and Fiona stop and look, and then, at the same moment, they begin to run. The park's brief idyll is over, and the war has arrived at their doorstep.