Rose in the Blitz
Page 14
I didn’t manage it with my mum, so I decided to do it with Rose. I sent her down the escalator after Aunt Cosy into the London of her memory, the London of the wartime Blitz when, for nine months, the city was subjected to nearly nightly bombing raids.
There are three big events in the story that really did happen:
On 7 September 1940, at about five o’clock on a sunny Saturday afternoon, the people of London stopped and stared at the sky as over three hundred German bombers, escorted by over six hundred fighter planes (there to protect the bombers if they were attacked by the British planes), flew over the city to drop their bombs on the docks, factories and warehouses of the East End. The homes of many ordinary people were also destroyed and many hundreds of men, women and children were killed and injured. It was the first big raid of what became known as the Blitz.
On 14 October 1940, at about eight o’clock in the evening, a high-explosive bomb hit the road above the underground station in Balham, South London. It went through the water main and the sewer which flooded the station where the local people were sheltering, believing that they would be safe. Over sixty people were killed, although over three hundred were led to safety. There’s a famous photograph that you can find online of a London bus that fell into the crater.
The night of 10/11 May 1941 became known as the Longest Night. It was the last night of the Blitz (even though London and other cities did continue to suffer raids, it was never quite so bad again) and was generally remembered as the worst. From the time of the first air raid warning at half past eleven on the night of Saturday 11 May, until the all-clear sounded at ten to six on the Sunday morning, nearly fifteen hundred people had been killed and eleven thousand buildings hit, including the Houses of Parliament. An incendiary bomb (the kind that set buildings on fire rather than blew them up) did land on the scaffolding that was covering Victoria Tower (the tower of Big Ben was hit later) and someone did climb up to put it out before the tower went up in smoke. I hope the brave police officer (I don’t know his name) who was really responsible for saving one of London’s best-loved landmarks, wouldn’t mind if he knew that I let Johnny do it instead!
I don’t know if there was a New Year’s Eve dance at Covent Garden in 1940 (though the Opera House was used for dances during the war) or an unexploded bomb on Clapham Common. But I do know that there were many thousands of men (and some women) like Johnny who made their way to Britain from places like British Guiana, the Caribbean and West Africa, to join the fight against Nazism and I wanted to find a way to remember their contribution.
I wanted to find a way of remembering it all, actually.
And now I hope that you’ll remember some of it too.
Rebecca Stevens
Brighton, 2016
Pages 94, 154 and 155: from ‘I’ll Be Seeing You’,
lyrics by Irving Kahal,
music by Sammy Fain (BMG, 1938).
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Text © Rebecca Stevens 2016
First paperback edition published in Great Britain in 20146
This electronic edition published in 2016
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Cover and interior design by Helen Crawford-White
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girl © Mark Owen/Trevillion Images
dog © Wisiel/Shutterstock
skyline © Everett Historical/ Shutterstock
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PB ISBN 978-1-910655-54-2
eISBN 978-1-910655-55-9