The Best of Connie Willis

Afterword for “Fire Watch”

Like John Bartholomew, I fell in love with St. Paul’s Cathedral the moment I stepped through the west door and saw the church in all its sunny, high-arched golden glory.

I had heard about the fire watch, but didn’t know all that much about it. The note I’d written in the notebook I took with me on the trip said simply, “The priests used to sleep in the crypt of St. Paul’s during the Blitz to put out the fires as they started,” and underneath it the words “Here we lie,” the first line of a poem I had thought I might write from the viewpoint of the earlier heroes who lay buried in St. Paul’s—Nelson and Wellington and General Gordon—commenting on their modern-day counterparts.

But when I actually saw the cathedral and learned how near it had come to being destroyed, I knew I had to write the story that eventually became “Fire Watch.”

“Go away,” I told my husband and the friends we’d come to England with. “Go have tea or something. I need to get this all down,” and for the next two hours frantically took notes on everything I might possibly need: the layout of the crypt, the number of steps up to the Whispering Gallery, the locations of the chapels and The Light of the World and Nelson’s tomb. And then I went home and researched everything I could find about the war and the cathedral and the fire watchers.

I used to tell people that this was when I fell in love with the London Blitz, too, but a few years ago I happened upon a book and realized that that wasn’t true, that my fascination with the Blitz had actually begun much earlier.

The book was Rumer Godden’s An Episode of Sparrows, which my eighth-grade teacher, Mrs. Werner, had read aloud to us every day after lunch. It’s not really a YA sort of book, and I have no idea why she read it to us, except probably for the best of all reasons—because she liked it herself. And I have no memory of how the other kids in the class responded to it. But I loved it.

It’s the story of a little girl, Lovejoy Mason, who plants a garden in the bombed-out rubble of a London church, and many years and readings later, it finally dawned on me that it’s a modern retelling of Frances Hodgson Burnett’s A Secret Garden.

It’s a great book—although, as I say, not exactly one you’d expect to be read to eighth-graders. Lovejoy’s a juvenile delinquent. She’s also illegitimate, her mother’s not exactly a role model, and the book treats of very adult issues like neglect and bankruptcy and unhappy marriages and cancer and death.

But it’s a wonderful book, full of peril and kindness where you’d least expect it. And hope. The best thing about it, though, was that it gave me my first glimpse of the Blitz, that it planted that first seed. A seed just like the cornflower seeds in Lovejoy’s garden, only this one didn’t germinate till the day I walked into the sun of St. Paul’s.

Moral: Teachers, read to your students. Parents, read to your kids. But not what you think they should read or what everybody’s reading or what’s age- and subject-matter-appropriate. Read inappropriate stuff, and stuff other people might think is boring. Stuff you like. You may be planting seeds that will germinate for a really long time. And burst into bloom twenty years later.