Read The Love-Charm of Bombs Online
Authors: Lara Feigel
The Love-Charm of Bombs (3 page)
By 26 September 1940 Londoners were gradually becoming accustomed to air raids. It was now clear that the war in Britain had finally begun after a year of false starts.
When war was declared the previous September, the government and public prepared for the immediate bombing of London. Graham Greene and Henry Yorke were not unusual in hastily evacuating their wives and children to the countryside. Both men readied themselves for the deaths they thought could not be long in coming, with Greene drafting his will and Yorke writing his autobiography. Greene prepared for the raids by finding a builder to put plywood under his skylight to prevent broken glass falling inside; throughout London people queued up to have gas masks fitted and attempted to build shelters in their gardens. But these precautions proved premature. The first year of war came to be known as the ‘phoney war’ because the expected invasion and aerial bombardment failed to materialise. Away from home, the Battle of the Atlantic was playing out at sea, but in London it was a period characterised by anticlimactic waiting. By the late autumn of 1939, people had stopped carrying gas masks and there was a ban on recruiting any more ARP wardens.
The war in Europe began in earnest in the spring of 1940. Germany invaded Norway and Denmark in April and the Low Countries and France in May. Allied forces were quickly cut off in Belgium and then evacuated from Dunkirk. The Germans next pushed further into France, occupying Paris by 14 June. This was an unexpectedly dramatic victory which isolated Britain and gave the Germans and other Axis powers an immediate advantage in Europe. On 18 June Winston Churchill, who had now succeeded Neville Chamberlain as Prime Minister, predicted the beginning of the Battle of Britain. Two weeks earlier he had vowed never to surrender, fighting on the beaches, landing grounds, fields, streets and hills. Now he repeated that Britain would fight on, ‘if necessary for years, if necessary alone’, assuring the populace that they would look back on this as their finest hour. At this stage, people were expecting a full invasion. ‘The prospect of invasion of England no longer absurd,’ Hilde Spiel lamented in her diary after the Germans were victorious in Norway; ‘This would mean death.’ Official warnings blended with unofficial rumours suggesting that hundreds of German parachutists were about to land in Britain disguised as monks or nuns, with collapsible bicycles concealed beneath their habits.
The Battle of Britain did materialise that summer, but at first London remained unharmed. There were small daylight raids on coastal towns in the south and east in June and July and then, when the British Foreign Secretary rejected a final offer of peace from Germany on 22 July, the Germans embarked on an air battle, intending to wipe out Britain’s air defences. Initially the Luftwaffe engaged RAF fighter planes in aerial combat. Then in August they attempted to destroy Britain’s fighter defences, attacking airfields and radar stations. By the end of the month 1,333 people had been killed in raids. Nonetheless, these summer attacks were colloquially known as ‘nuisance raids’ and the British remained dismissive of their effects. ‘There are two corrections I want to make to current Nazi propaganda,’ the playwright J. B. Priestley informed the nation in a broadcast on 9 July:
First air raids. There has been a great deal of German raiding lately, but the results, so far from being effective, either as regards military objectives or civilian morale, have been so negligible that the general opinion here has been that these raids can only have been feelers, attempts to discover where the best defences are located.
The Nazis, he implied tauntingly, were not really trying.
However, during the second half of August the German bombers moved progressively inland and began to incorporate the suburbs of London in their attacks. On the night of 18 August bombs fell in Croydon and in Wimbledon, where Hilde Spiel was living. On 22 August the first bombs fell in central London, giving Churchill an excuse to order an air attack on Berlin, which materialised on 25 August. Hitler in his turn used the bombing of Berlin as a pretext to command a more sustained attack on London. On 4 September he announced to the citizens of Germany that in England they were asking scornfully, ‘Why doesn’t he come?’ They would not have to wait much longer. ‘He’s coming! He’s coming!’ When the RAF dropped three or four thousand kilograms of bombs on Germany, Hitler boasted that the Luftwaffe would respond with several hundred thousand kilograms. ‘When they declare that they will increase their attacks on our cities, then we will
raze
their cities to the ground!’ Still defiant, Priestley boasted the next day that Londoners were going on as normal, despite the sirens. There were searchlights at night, making rapidly changing patterns in the sky, and ‘many-coloured flares blazing like sudden comets’. But it was surprising, on the whole, what little difference it made.
He spoke too soon. On 7 September Göring declared that as a result of the provocative British attacks on Berlin ‘the Führer has decided to order a mighty blow to be struck in revenge against the capital of the British Empire’. That night London suffered its first major attack. At five in the afternoon a swarm of planes flew in from Kent towards the London docks. By 6.30 much of the East End was on fire and the streets were strewn with fallen bricks and broken glass. Later on, heavy bombs landed in Chelsea and Victoria while others continued to destroy the East End. Looking back on that night, William Sansom recalled that:
when the western skies had grown already dark the fierce red glow in the East stuck harshly fast and there was seen for the first time that black London roofscape silhouetted against what was to become a monotonously copper-orange sky.
As a full-time auxiliary fireman, Henry Yorke was engaged in defending London from the start of the raids, risking his life night after night at the docks. ‘I’ve fought fires every night since Saturday,’ he wrote to Rosamond Lehmann on 11 September,
have had three in one day and the two longest, Surrey Commercial Docks and St Paul’s, lasted 12 hours without a relief. The Docks one was the worst, bombed continuously from 9pm to 3am in the middle of a timber yard alight and completely out of control. I was lucky to get out.
Elizabeth Bowen, Graham Greene and Rose Macaulay had longer to wait before they were directly involved, but by the third day of the Blitz the bombs were falling indiscriminately across London and no area seemed safe. ‘I hear little by little of the various bomb-damages in London,’ Macaulay told her sister on 8 September; ‘Hoxton again was badly hit, even streets in Kensington and round Paddington.’
On 9 September, just around the corner from the area Greene was patrolling as an ARP warden, Virginia Woolf’s Bloomsbury home in Mecklenburgh Square was hit by a high explosive (HE) and an unexploded bomb. Woolf went to London to survey the damage and found that the square was roped off to the public but she could peer in from behind. A house thirty yards away from theirs was completely ruined. ‘Scraps of cloth hanging to the bare walls at the side still standing,’ she reported; ‘A looking glass I think swinging. Like a tooth knocked out – a clean cut.’ The Woolfs started making urgent plans to move the Hogarth Press and all its equipment out of the house, but a week later the unexploded bomb exploded and the house and with it the Press was destroyed. ‘ “We have need of all our courage” are the words that come to the surface this morning; on hearing that all our windows are broken, ceilings down, and most of our china smashed,’ Woolf observed in her diary. Bowen and Macaulay, both close friends of Woolf’s, wrote to console her, terrified that their own homes would be next. ‘When your flat went did that mean all the things in it too?’ Bowen asked. ‘All my life I have said, “Whatever happens there will always be tables and chairs” – and what a mistake.’
Churchill urged Londoners to remain resilient. ‘Hitler expects to terrorise and cow the people of this mighty city,’ he announced on the radio on 11 September. ‘Little does he know the spirit of the British nation, or the tough fibre of the Londoners.’ But the heavy raids continued throughout September. Several stations and major buildings in London were hit in the first week of attacks: Somerset House, Whitehall, Westminster Abbey, the Houses of Parliament and Buckingham Palace had all been struck by 15 September, though none of these was seriously damaged. Meanwhile houses and flats throughout London were destroyed by explosion and fire. Gradually people learnt to tell the difference between the sounds of HEs, incendiary bombs, parachute mines (dropped from aeroplanes to detonate at roof level) and defensive guns. Initially, the anti-aircraft guns in London were non-existent but by 10 September guns had been brought in from throughout Britain. Only one shell in 2,000 reached its target but morale improved now that London was heard to defend itself so noisily. William Sansom described how on 11 September guns started up from every side as soon as the enemy bombers came droning down, creating a ‘momentous sound that sent a chattering, smashing, blinding thrill through the London heart’. There had been gunfire before, but nothing like this. ‘A violent medley of angry sounds, urgently accumulating like the barking of a pack of dogs, a rattling of pompoms and a booming of great naval guns.’ At this stage there were raids by both day and night but on 15 September the Germans started concentrating their attacks on the night-time, deterred from daytime sorties by heavy Luftwaffe losses.
Politicians and journalists praised the resilience of Londoners engaged in defending their city. All the civil defence services were learning from experience and improving in efficiency and efficacy. Firemen now knew to keep the stirrup pump unlashed and to have water ready drawn. They had also become less fearful in dealing with fire. In a broadcast on 10 September, J. B. Priestley lauded the ARP services both for their organisation and for ‘the quality of service given by the men and women acting as air wardens, fire fighters, and as members of emergency squads’; this service could not be bought with money and sprang instead ‘out of a deep devotion to and love of this great city and its people’.
But despite a widespread determination to resist the Germans and keep going, Londoners were becoming cumulatively exhausted by the succession of all-night raids. ‘To work or think was to ache,’ Bowen wrote in
The Heat of the Day
. ‘In offices, factories, ministries, shops, kitchens the hot yellow sands of each afternoon ran out slowly; fatigue was the one reality. You dared not envisage sleep.’ Sleeplessness compounded anxiety. No one had any idea where the bombing would lead, or if London would end up flattened. ‘How fantastic life has become,’ Rose Macaulay wrote to her sister on 11 September. ‘I wonder if London will soon lie in ruins, like Warsaw and Rotterdam.’
Increasingly involved in their local battle, Londoners became isolated from the war as it progressed in the outside world. William Sansom recalled how in this period ‘out in the wide world of the war’ Quisling had assumed power in Norway, Germany was extending its power in Romania, and ominously Hitler met Mussolini on the Brenner. Britain itself was involved in raids on western Germany and naval engagements in the Atlantic. ‘But every night in the dark small world of London’s intimate streets these matters receded, and under the urging drone of the bombers, the weaving searchlights, the thunder of bombs and the crack of guns the moments became vivid and active.’ These were
hot, cold, sharp, slow moments of intense being; moments that then extended themselves into hours, that brought with them the exhaustion of cold and sleeplessness, so that the total experience is most remembered as a curious double exposure of tensity and dullness.
Each night of the Blitz was a self-contained moment in itself. And as darkness fell on the evening of 26 September, Bowen, Greene, Macaulay, Spiel and Yorke waited anxiously to see what this particular moment would involve.
1
The blackout on 26 September began officially at 7.26 p.m. It had been a cloudy day after weeks of unreal autumnal sunshine. When the sun did break through in the middle of the afternoon, the trees and lawns in the London parks appeared to Elizabeth Bowen to freeze in the horizontal light. For Bowen, the scene below her white stucco house seemed especially still because Regent’s Park itself was closed. She and her husband Alan Cameron were among only a few residents who had returned since the time bomb fell two weeks earlier. ‘Through the railings I watch dahlias blaze out their colour,’ she wrote in an article entitled ‘London, 1940’. ‘Leaves fill the empty deck-chairs; in the sunshine water-fowl, used to so much attention, mope round the unpeopled rim of the lake.’
Now the clouds had faded into darkness. Throughout London people pulled down black screens, tucking curtains into the corners of windows. The thick layers of cloth offered a sense of protection against the bombs, even if they would do nothing to impede the blast. Gradually, the streets began to empty and civilians waited uneasily inside their houses, prepared to make their way to the shelters if necessary. But for those in the Air Raid Protection services, the ghostly blacked-out streets were a terrain to be paced, surveyed and known. When darkness fell it was time for the ARP wardens to go on duty; for Elizabeth Bowen in Marylebone and Graham Greene in Bloomsbury to patrol their districts, making sure that there were no chinks in the blackout along the way. Both were rendered official by their attire. Greene had a Civil Defence armlet over his own clothes and Bowen was wearing a dark blue ARP uniform coat, although that July the local authorities had decided to save money by discontinuing these. Like all wardens, they were equipped with tin hats, whistles and respirators.