The Bravest Voices

by Ida Cook

  There was. Behind the heavy sheeting that curtained off the sick bay from the rest of the shelter, I found Alice, who was in charge there.

  In answer to my rather bashful, “May I come in?” she cried, “Of course you can, ducks. There’s nothing to be frightened of.”

  So in I went, and Alice took me under her wing from then on. First she gave me a tour of the shelter, which was composed of four very large sections, and explained that during the day, it served as an air-raid shelter for the workers in the factory overhead. At night, those workers who lived nearby brought their families down there. In addition, some people in the immediate vicinity, who had been bombed-out, stayed there.

  Except on occasions when there was a big disaster near, and we would have some “temporaries” down for a night or two, our clientele was composed of “regulars.”

  Alice herself was the first-aid worker in the factory by day, and at night she continued the same work in the shelter, not even commenting on the fact that she was on duty twenty-four hours a day. She dispensed hot drinks, aspirin, bandages and good counsel with impartial good humour. I am sure she would have laughed or been embarrassed if anyone tried to class her as a heroine. But she was one, nevertheless. Just an everyday one, never to be named in any official citation. But in spite of the fact that she was just as much afraid of bombings as anyone else I know, she helped to win the war.

  It was Alice who introduced me to one or two of the regulars, and they accepted me as one of them with an unforced hospitality that I was to find was an outstanding characteristic of Bermondsey. That—and their deep affection for their own bit of battered London. People often talk movingly of mountains or woods or moors. But these amazing women truly loved the familiar, and not very beautiful, streets falling about them in ruins. They shed no tears for them, but they spoke with cheerful determination of replacing them one day.

  As one woman said, “Still, never mind. We’ll build Bermondsey again after the war, even better than it’s ever been.” She found it hard to imagine any improvement on the Bermondsey she knew and loved. But it would go on as one of the constant factors of existence; that she did know. It was nothing to her that all the brazen hordes of Germany’s might were pounding this island into what they fondly supposed was submission. When they found they were wrong and stopped, then we would “build Bermondsey again.”

  Someone who noticed how thrilled and moved I was, said, “There’s nothing like the Bermondsey people, miss. They’re nice, aren’t they?”

  I agreed that they were. And, even on that first evening, I meant by that a whole lot more than she knew. For the life of our shelter and its people was beginning to unroll before me—sketched in simple lines, but coloured in bewildering richness by unconscious courage, unselfishness and a blazing confidence that no bombing could dim.

  That very first evening I was told, quite simply and unemotionally, stories of unflinching courage. No one thought very much of them, really. It was simply that one naturally accepted whatever trial was necessary for the ultimate bringing of victory.

  “It doesn’t matter as long as we beat him,” was the general verdict.

  One of them had said that to the queen when she had come down to Bermondsey a few days before. And the queen had patted her on the shoulder, woman to woman, and said, “That’s the right spirit!”

  This same woman told me how, on the previous day, she had been helping her sister to sweep up what remained of their old father’s home.

  “And while we were sweeping up, Miss Cook,” she explained, “my sister stopped and said to me, ‘Well, Em,’ she said, ‘we must always remember we’d be much worse off under Hitler.’ And it’s true, you know. You have to think of that.”

  I doubt if a correct sense of values has ever been more tellingly expressed. Better destruction than dictatorship!

  One of my most vivid memories of that first night was the five minutes before “Lights Out.” There were prayers for those who cared to join in, but no compulsion on those who did not. Only a courteous request for quiet for a few minutes. In the crowded, rather dimly lit shelter, there was the murmur of a couple of hundred voices repeating the ageless words of the “Lord’s Prayer.” And the not very distant crash of a bomb lent a terrible point to the earnest petition “Deliver us from evil,” breathed from the farthest, shadowy corner.

  Then goodnights, and lights out. I was told to sleep until two o’clock, when I should be wakened to enter on my simple duty of remaining awake and seeing that all was well with the sleeping people.

  “Call me if anyone has a fit or a heart attack or anything,” were Alice’s last encouraging words. “But you’ll manage all right.”

  I lay awake for a long while, listening to unfamiliar sounds. Not the gunfire and the bomb blasts from the outer world; those had become familiar enough in the last few weeks, but the stirring and whispering of a great community settling to sleep in comparative safety while war raged overhead.

  At last I fell asleep. And then it seemed only three minutes before someone was shaking me gently and whispering, “Time to get up.”

  I got off my improvised bed of blankets on wooden slats and put on my shoes, the removal of which was the only concession to undressing. And then I crept quietly out of the sick bay, where I had been sleeping, and made my way through the big shadowy rooms of the shelter to the one bright lamp under which a chair had been set for the night-watcher.

  At first I read. Then I crocheted an interminable blanket, which lasted me through many a night of watching. And then, finally, because your eyes grow very tired about half-past three in the morning, I put down my work and just looked round.

  On every side, lay sleeping people. People who were glad and thankful for a few square feet of concrete on which to make up some sort of bed. People who had no idea that there was any alternative to this, because they knew nothing about the technique of surrender and no one could teach it to them. It required no feat of fancy to imagine that, in time to that concerted, rhythmical breathing, beat the unconquered heart of Britain.

  There were young people and old people; men, women and children. Some wrapped in blankets, some were ambitiously tucked away in something approaching a bed, made up on an old mattress. Some were covered by the most exquisite patchwork quilts.

  I had asked about those quilts earlier in the evening, for the sight of them had jerked my mind back to happy days spent long ago on that holiday in the Catskill Mountains. Strange days of changing values! We should have called the Catskills part of the New World in that faraway time. Now they seemed, in distant, happy retrospect, to be part of the Old World—that Old World of comfort and safety and brightness. The New World, the world to which we were fast becoming accustomed, was this strange, bomb-shattered, noise-torn existence, where we crept underground and pretended to each other that this was the normal state of living.

  I admit my throat grew tight when I first looked on those quilts. I exclaimed, “Those must have come from America! They couldn’t come from anywhere else in the world.”

  I was assured that, indeed, they had come from America.

  “You wouldn’t believe, miss, how good the Americans have been to us,” I was told. “Bales and bales of stuff, and all of it good. Not a rubbishy thing among it. Good enough for anyone. I don’t know what we’d have done without the Americans.”

  I hope some of the good ladies of those sewing parties in Maine and Connecticut, in Boston and Philadelphia, somehow sensed the gratitude with which their gifts were received. Night after night, under their patchwork quilts, slept people they were never to see or know, but to whom the word “American” now took on a personal and special meaning.

  As the night wore on, I made some interesting discoveries. I discovered that more people than not talk in their sleep; that quite a number laugh, some of them chuckling away with a lively, private enjoyment that makes one long to share th
e joke; and that the snore of which the human throat and nose are capable ranges from basso profundo to coloratura soprano.

  I could write quite a learned dissertation on snoring, after my shelter experiences. There is the staccato snore of the nervous person who has not quite cast off all cares in sleep. There is the gradual crescendo snore of the placid sleeper, who goes on with unhurried persistence up the scale, only to start at the bottom again when he has achieved the limit of his range. There is the dolce fa niente snore of the person who dreams pleasantly and with variety; the explosive snore, which makes others groan protestingly in their sleep; the slumbering volcano snore, with its steady, threatening rhythm that never quite achieves eruption; and there is the simple snore for snoring’s sake.

  By five o’clock, all sounds outside had died away, and presently, far away and then coming nearer, the unlovely but welcome sound of the “All Clear.” The tide of war had receded for another 12 or 13 hours. It was time to start waking the early risers.

  I had been given the times and had had my victims pointed out, and I went round shaking one sleeping figure after another, whispering the time and seeing that they did not drop off again. A cheerful, elderly baker. A big, quiet, kindly fellow who worked at the docks. An energetic little grandmother who cleaned offices in the City. I woke each in turn.

  The little cleaner had her grandson with her, and he wept somewhat in protestation at being awakened so early. He was very cheerful in the evenings, specializing in an imitation of Hitler that was very popular; but at half-past five in the morning, his cheerfulness was at a low ebb. In subsequent weeks, I used to have a sweet ready for him as he went past me on his way out of the shelter, carrying his bundle of blankets. He would remove his fist from his eye as he passed me and accept the offer of consolation.

  At six o’clock, up went the lights in the shelter. Everyone dragged themselves to the surface of another day, and then there was a general stir, an exchange of sleepy good-mornings, the folding of blankets and stowing away of bundles. One more night was over, and still we were alive. I rejoined Alice in the sick bay, and drank very hot, sweet tea from an enamel mug; and never did tea taste better.

  It was hardly light when I stumbled out of the shelter and along Tower Bridge Road half-asleep, to wait for my early bus to “The Elephant.” But the world of Bermondsey was awake and humming with activity. There was a lot to be crammed into the few short hours before the bombers came to us again.

  We could count on the siren in the early hours of the evening, and it was not very healthy to go through the streets of East and South-East London after it sounded. So, as the hour of blackout grew earlier and earlier throughout the interminable weeks, so shelter life began at half-past seven, at seven, at half-past six. And, of necessity, it began to take on a much more settled and permanent character.

  No longer was shelter life a temporary state of affairs in which one improvised as one went along. It became a natural state of being, and the evening had to be planned accordingly.

  In our shelter, with a minimum of fuss, there grew up—I might almost say sprang up—a discussion group, a dressmaking class, a weekly class in Bible study, lectures, concerts, film shows, darts matches. And for those who knitted and sewed and crocheted, there were the endless talks and discussions from which emerged the true character of the nation to which I have the honour of belonging.

  Profound truths were presented as natural conclusions; noble sentiments, clothed in very everyday speech, accepted as the ordinary standards; wise vision suddenly shown in simple conversation. I can hear them now!

  Mrs. Gee—best and most valued of friends—saying, as the place shuddered under the infernal assault from above, “Whenever I feel I can’t go on, I think of Mr. Churchill and the weight he carries. And then I feel much better. It’s bad enough for us, but we know we’ve only got to hold on. He’s got to make all the decisions.”

  Mrs. Coffee-shop—we always called her that, and I don’t think I ever knew her real name—shaking her head and saying with a sigh, “I wish my husband would come down here.”

  “Why won’t he?” I asked. “Does he dislike shelter life so much?”

  “Oh, it’s not that,” she explained. “Only he won’t leave the dog. He gets frightened, you know, but of course we can’t bring him down here, so my husband stays with him.”

  The old hop-picker, telling us of the Battle of Britain, as seen from the Kentish hop-fields: “Anyone that’s seen what I’ve seen wouldn’t ever refuse to put their hand in their pocket for an air force all their lives. Falling out of the sky, they was—just falling out of the sky. And often enough, our boys coming down by parachute as their own planes caught on fire. They’d pick themselves up almost before you could ask ’em if they was all right, and off they’d go crying, ‘Give me another machine, and let me get at ’em again.’ Ah, what boys!”

  And then, the same old woman telling how her own two sons were killed at Dunkirk within three minutes of each other. One was shot through the mouth and his brother, hearing him cry out, went back for him and was killed beside him.

  “They was such good boys,” she told me. “Such good boys. Always brought their money home every Friday night, they did. Killed within three minutes of each other. Both of them gone. But, there, perhaps it was best that way. They were that fond of each other. My Bill wouldn’t have wanted to come home without my Harry.”

  She sank into thought for a moment. And then she added, rather proudly, “The sergeant himself came and told me about it when he got back. Very nice, he was. ‘Don’t cry, Ma,’ he said. ‘We know what you’re feeling. We’d been a long time together and we wasn’t pals, we was brothers. We couldn’t stay to bury them—there wasn’t time. But we did the best we could,’ he said. ‘We left them side by side, with their hands touching.’”

  In the welter of horror and haste that was Dunkirk, someone paused to put the hands of the two dead boys together, so that even in their death, they were not divided.

  “Such good boys they was,” the old woman repeated sorrowfully. “But, there, miss,” she added more cheerfully, “we must all make sacrifices in these days, mustn’t we?”

  I said, I hope with some humility, that we must. And I have often wondered since if the brotherhood of man has ever been more movingly described than in those words, “We did the best we could. We left them side by side, with their hands touching.”

  One of the most striking things about this shelter life of ours was the way in which each thought for all, and a simple and general humanity created a natural community of interests and sympathy. Good humour, good sense and a kindly reasonableness triumphed over nearly all the limitations and shortcomings of a cramped, indeed a primitive, existence. Nerves must have been stretched to the snapping point, and yet I very seldom heard so much as a sharp personal argument in all the nights I spent down there. I think that constituted as big a victory over circumstances as the more obvious courage with which the bombardment was endured.

  Perhaps, of course, the realization that minor differences meant nothing in the face of the terrible major emergency had something to do with it. After all, when death is prowling about overhead, life does seem rather too precious to fritter away on petty disputes. And certainly the reminder of what was waiting for every one of us was pretty constant.

  It was not only the continuous sound of gunfire, nor even the dreadful increasing frequency of the bomb hits, which seemed to make the very earth beneath us shift strangely. It was the stories everyone knew and no one could resist telling.

  Stories concerning the friends, neighbours, relatives of the people down there. Families wiped out, shelters—not so very unlike ours, when you came to think of it—that, in the telling phrase, “had not stood up to a direct hit.” Disasters embracing whole streets, mass funerals where the victims were personally known to half the people in our shelter. It began to seem illogical that, when so m
any people were dying, we were left alive. Measured by nothing more than the simple law of averages, we felt we must be hit soon. Would our shelter “stand up to it”?

  And then there was the evidence of our eyes when we left the shelter in the morning—or sometimes, when it was still too dark to see, just the testimony of tinkling broken glass underfoot or the unnatural crunch of slates that should have been on roofs far above our heads, but were now lying on the pavement along which we groped our way.

  In spite of the dismal frequency of the experience, I never quite got used to the extraordinary sensation of passing a familiar building that had been solid last night and suddenly realizing that through ragged holes in its fabric, one could see the pale light of the morning sky.

  No wonder we began to think increasingly often, “Next time it will surely be us.”

  Of course, we spent a lot of time telling each other that our shelter was especially safe. And the directors of the factory overhead most gallantly contributed their efforts to making us feel this was so. Instead of going home to the less bombed areas where they lived, they frequently took turns sleeping down in the shelter, because, as they casually mentioned, “they felt safe there as anywhere.”

  That made the word go around that there could hardly be any danger. “Shows they have confidence in the place, and they should know. It must be pretty safe. As safe as it can be, that is.”

  As safe as it can be. There was the rub. How safe could any shelter be if a bomb fell in just the right place?

  We knew, and we knew everyone else knew, that nowhere was really safe in the increasing rain of fire and terror that was being poured on London. And when the bombers were overhead—right overhead, I mean—who really thought about how safe their shelter was, I should like to know? I suppose no one who has not actually experienced it can quite imagine the horrific sound of a bomber diving to attack. It combines in its screaming note all the melancholy of a banshee wail with the nerve-rasping warning of a danger-signal.