Norman Collins

London Belongs to Me

1945. Fontana Books, 1967.

If you had stood there on the summit under the pink hawthorn, looking out over London - almost standing on top of it, as it were, with St. Paul's and Big Ben underneath your feet - you would have seen Bill and Doris going down the long walk on the Regent's Park side...When they arrived at the North Gate they found that they were not the only ones who had thought of going to the Zoo. Simply because it was the first hot day of summer - it would be June tomorrow - half London had turned out to drink bottled lemonade and consume great slabs of Nestle's chocolate and study natural history

It's 1939, the last summer before the outbreak of war, and Londoners - some worried about the looming threat, others largely ignorant of it - are out enjoying themselves.

It was years since she had been there. And the astonishing thing was that the place hadn't altered. It was simply stuck there in time...The bison, in his eighth of an acre of rolling prairie, was leaning up against the bars to have his forehead scratched, and didn't look any older. The sea-lions were the same...They went into the restaurant. And there were the same plates, with the same lion stamped on them...When they came out of the Zoo, they made their way across Primrose Hill again and back to Adelaide Road