Memories of the Blitz

ONLY half a generation has passed since the Lon- don blitz turned the living arrangements of the capital, the slow development of centuries, upside down. Hundreds of thousands of men, women and their children 'went to bed' not in beds at all but in shelters in their gardens, or crowded to- gether in masses upon stone, concrete or earthen floors. They slept only in snatches, in the foulest air. Lavatory accommodation at first hardly existed. They were in continual danger, hearing little but bad news, and with no expectation that these conditions would quickly end.

Yet almost none of the results any reasonable person would have expected, followed, and the preparations ordered by the Government for dealing with the expected dead, wounded and mentally broken proved wildly excessive. There is something profoundly and happily unpredict- able about the nature, and even the physical makeup, of human beings which reduces 'experts' on this as on so many other occasions to explain- ing afterwards why everything turned out quite unlike their expectations.

Constantine Fitz Gibbon, author of The Blitz,, has made a careful study of some of the obvious sources, and produced an authentic impression of life in London during the months from Septem- ber, 1940, to May, 1941. The most striking feature of his book, however, are the direct memories of individual Londoners. Borrowing a tape-recorder from the BBC, Mr. Fitz Gibbon succeeded in catching rhythms and phrases which stand out like sharp splinters of truth.

And this certain thing was coming down which we thought all the time was a parachutist, but it happened to be a mine, which fell partly in the dock and set fire to the paint wells, and then we had Bellamy's Wharf, the egg warehouse. Well, Bellamy's Wharf, as we know, we had a vast lot of people under a shelter there, and also in Globe Wharf. I had a tidy few people in there, and in this shelter this night the top of it was well alight. And I called one of my individuals out on the quiet, and I says to him, I said—Bill, we shalt have to evacuate the people out of this place....

... A little further along I, with another officer, was searching among the debris and after a while my brother officer bent down and pulled some- thing out. He thought it was a piece of bread. But it turned out to be part of a small child, the upper part, the upper limbs of a small child. This so upset us that we came out into the street. There were a number of bodies laying on the footway and in the road. I stood and watched these for a few moments. Eventually some of them stood up, and to my relief they were not all dead. But there were some of them who were dead.

A point on which the author does not comment, but which educationists might ponder, is the ability of 'uneducated' people to explain precisely what happened and their own feelings at the time, compared with the tongue-tied stuttering of the well brought up.

And I mean she was just as dead as she could possibly be, and I was feeling absolutely really numb in a way.

Built around his tape-recordings, Mr. Fitz Gibbon has two or three first-rate set-pieces of description, such as the bombing of Chelsea Old Church and of the Cafd de Paris. He stresses well the part played by natural leaders who, usually in the role of warden, simply took over general responsibility for the safety and well-being of their district, and he pays tribute to the work done by sensible women 'who always appear at last to sort out the chaos when the male authorities have almost given up in despair.' A notable example was the middle-aged beetroot-seller of Islington who took charge of a rest centre holding mainly mothers and babies, making it 'a place of security, order and decency for hundreds of homeless people' in the intervals of selling her beetroots.

As a quick, over-all survey, Mr. Fitz Gibbon's book was well worth doing, but it has certain defects. His net is not widely enough spread. We see a good deal of a few chosen areas, Bermond- sey, Chelsea, West Ham, and are told that it was much the same elsewhere. This, however, was not so. The experience may have been similar, reac- tions were not. It was an entirely different thing to spend a night in what came later to be oddly known as 'fire-watching' in, say, a Fleet Street office. Battersea, or the decayed gentility of a Lancaster Gate boarding-house.

Again, the author is not free from prejudice. It was not from Lansbury, Salter, Silverman and Stokes that the most dangerous pressure for peace by negotiation was coming in the early part of the war. That came from further to the right.

Occasionally, too, he misreads what actually took place. Of the hostility between town and country aroused by the evacuation of 1939, he writes: `Middle-class families in Cheshire or Wilt- shire seem to have been quite astonished that children from Bethnal Green and Bermondsey did not have exactly the same mores, and even clothes, as their own offspring.'

But it was not middle-class families in Wilt- shire who were shocked by a lack of refinement: it was wives of farm labourers living only thirty or forty miles out of London who were horrified to discover that many city children of a com- parable level of life to their own had permanently infested hair, and that some relieved themselves freely about the house or cottage.

The fact that East End pubs were so often blasted, he calls 'a curious rumour,' adding : 'This arose probably because a bombed pub is more of an eye-catcher than a bombed cottage : but it may be something atavistic, connected with thunder- bolts and the evils of drink.' But the cause of this rumour—as of so many other wartime rumours— was simply that it was true. In boroughs such as Bermondsey before its rebuilding, the pubs stood up out of the tiny streets like castles and were the natural victims of blast over a wide area.

In his general picture -of the blitz, Mr. Fitz Gibbon mentions most of the common reactions,

but scattered throughout the text. Perhaps, stimu- lated by his book, I may be allowed to list one or two impressions of the time which others seemed to share.

1. Excitement-exhilaration. Feeling London to be truly the world's centre. Generally said to be; never is. Now at last a decision being made here, and not by Governments—so a chance of its being decided right.

2. A joy in material destruction, accompanied by a sense of man's indestructibility. The sight of

stucco and brick houses just disintegrating, but people being brought alive out of the wreckage.

3. Unexpected beauty. Coming out of a Tube station in a night raid and seeing a small silver fly turning and twisting at the top of a tent of search- light ribbons. The extraordinary blackness of the dust-filled sky on a sunny morning during a heavY raid.

4. A shivering sense, after an hour spent trying to get to work by different routes in a district I knew perfectly, that the war might end, not through the 'crack in morale' feared by those in authority, but because the streets could not be

cleared of rubble. We should all just bog down in dust and brickbats.

To revive old memories sharply is a service Mr. Fitz Gibbon's book will perform for many Lon- doners. The unpublished drawings by Henry Moore are as powerful and tender as those we already know well. But they are all, as is natural for a sculptor, static. The blitz needed, and did not find, another recording artist, perhaps two : a Goya for the scenes of horror, a Daumier for the macabre humour.

TOM HOPK INSON