The Myth of the Blitz

by Angus Calder

  It was Croydon aerodrome which had been the centre of attack on the 15th. Walking in Putney with her boyfriend that evening, an Observer saw the sky to the south-east ‘full of heavy black smoke clouds’. From Putney Bridge, looking along the river, ‘There was a dull orange glow in the sky, on the horizon, which spurted into great brightness every few minutes.’ But in Streatham nearby, when the siren went that evening, commuters simply walked home from the station at the same pace as usual. At Ealing Broadway, when the All Clear sounded, some 200 people were seen pouring out of public shelters and ‘everyone looked calm and cheerful’ though obviously annoyed at interrupted journeys home. A middle-class man laughed and said: ‘Look at terrified Britain.’ Upper-class folk in Kensington told an old Etonian observer how they had reacted to the sirens. One young woman had felt compelled ‘to hand out brandies to everyone in the flat’; another had filled her handbag, at once, with cigarettes; a man’s reflex had been to take the whisky bottle off the table and put it on the floor.

  On the 16th, young Len England went to report for Mass-Observation on the damage in Croydon. There were several bomb craters near the aerodrome, houses and factories had been damaged, shrapnel had broken roofs over a wide radius and white chalk dust covered the area. But apparently the big fire (seen in Putney) had been in Wandsworth and had involved tyres. The general impression given by people in Croydon was that it had been quite a show, and they’d have been sorry to have missed it. Outside a house in Purley Way which had been severely damaged, an Air Raid Precautions man was clearing up wreckage with a broom. The woman who owned it called out in a mock-serious tone, ‘Don’t you mess about with my flowers, I’m keeping them extra special to give Hitler a bouquet when he comes over.’ Journalists would not have to invent examples of post-raid humour.

  It is interesting to think how differently one might read these and many similar reports, had the Germans later used gas. As the Myth developed, the gas mask became an irrelevance: it is hard to remember that responsible citizens were supposed to carry them, and one’s eye tends to glide over references to people actually doing this. A sudden gas attack in September? Millions caught without their masks? The phlegm and insouciance of the British people would then seem still more tragic than that of the inhabitants of Dresden who had come to believe by 1945 that their city would never be heavily bombed.

  7

  Formulations of Feeling

  Since Munich, what? A tangle of black film

  Squirming like bait upon the floor of my mind

  And scissors clicking daily, I am inclined

  To pick these pictures now but will hold back.

  Till memory has elicited from this blind

  Drama its threads of vision, the intrusions

  Of value upon fact, that sudden unconfined

  Wind of understanding that blew out

  From people’s hands and faces, undesigned

  Evidence of design, that change of climate

  Which did not last but happens often enough

  To give us hope that fact is a façade

  And that there is an organism behind

  Its brittle littleness, a rhythm and a meaning

  Something half-conjectured and half-divined

  Something to give way to and so find.

  Louis MacNeice, ‘The News-Reel’

  ONE COULD NOW proceed deeper into the ‘core’ of Blitz experience – into huge and squalid East End shelters, into mortuaries where attempts were made to identify the dead from fragments of their corpses, into great fires, destruction of beloved buildings, into the maimed lives of victims such as (to pick one at random) the woman in a ‘comfy’ shelter in Clydebank in March 1941, who remembers playing cards with friends as suddenly a bomb not even heard blasted her brother through the door, tore her friends to pieces, smashed a concrete roof down on her mother’s chest, crushed her father, and left her buried under her dead friends for eight and a half hours. ‘I was paralysed from the waist down … my mother was killed … my friends were killed… my father and brother survived.’1

  But many hands, including my own, have illustrated that ‘core’ of horror and not infrequent heroism. Without a sense that at certain places, on certain nights, carnage and wreckage were like that of a town besieged and breached, though almost all the protagonists and victims on the ground were civilians, we might have a Myth of 1940, but no Myth of the Blitz. That civilian ‘morale’ survived exposure to conditions often as frightful as those of battle is what guarantees, mythically, that the British people, as a whole, deserved to save Europe and defeat Hitler. Because they held out and Hitler was eventually defeated, one cannot counterfactually select from contemporary reports by careful observers, not for publication, like the Mass-Observation material just discussed, all the remarks and glimpses of behaviour that suggest poor or volatile morale and dismiss the rest as wishful thinking.

  The jokes of the (mostly) Cheerful Cockneys were incessantly quoted. Photographs established in various ways the normality of ‘good morale’. Photography, of course, is never free of ambiguity. In his memoirs, the great Bert Hardy of Picture Post cheerfully admits to having fabricated stories and pictures for sale to newspapers and magazines before the war. But it seems that, even if he had needed to, he would have been ashamed to fake Blitz pictures when he went into the East End: ‘After having taken so many “laid-on” pictures, I almost hesitated to photograph scenes like the girl in the clothing workshop still at work on her sewing machine, in case it didn’t look “real” enough.’2

  This Picture Post item (see here), however, could be decoded to yield other meanings than Hardy’s own preferred propagandist message, that it illustrated the ‘tremendous’ spirit of the people. Photographers between the wars – including some, like Bill Brandt, often thought of as ‘documentary’ – had been greatly influenced by surrealist practices. The oddity of Hardy’s picture is that the remaining glass in the workshop window might be seen as the angelically shimmering cape of the Air Raid Precautions man outside, whose upper body it covers with apparent exactitude. And this distracts attention from another detail which might strike someone looking for literal rather than surrealist significance: it is true that one woman is working at her machine, but there is no one at the machine next to the glass, nor (we finally notice) at a third machine in the foreground. Why shouldn’t the caption read: ‘East End Workshops can now produce only one third of their previous output, due to raids’?

  When a young Mass-Observer, Jack Atkins, who had left London before the Blitz started, returned towards the end of October, he found Londoners’ morale higher than that in Birmingham, which he had visited: ‘Considering what they have been through they appeared to be remarkably cheerful and friendly. It was much easier to talk to strangers than it had been formerly, and the worse the conditions the more laughter there seemed to be.’ He complained, however, that, ‘All new experiences today seem to be spoiled by Picture Post.’ He hadn’t been in the tubes since their appropriation as deep shelters, but ‘they were exactly like what he had imagined and seen pictures of’.

  Further refinement would occur, with Henry Moore’s celebrated drawings of the tube shelterers. Odoriferous slum dwellers, frightened small businessmen, these cannot be: they are an image of Humanity itself, in heroic repose.

  The mature Lucien Freud might have produced something ‘human’ yet sadly credible out of these sleepers. Not until Bacon’s ‘Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion’ were exhibited in London just before the end of the war would even well-informed lookers at art-works see proof that at least one British artist had held in his vision its horrors: what it does to human bodies, minds and emotions. Bacon’s half-human, half-animal figures cramped into a strangely shaped, low-ceilinged space, more extremely claustrophobic than even the ‘Morrison’ shelters latterly used in Britain, suggest mutilation, anguish, hatred and gluttony.

  An historian cannot damage the Myth without appearing petulantly wilful, becaus
e the Myth soaked deeply into the very first-hand evidence which he must come to at last if he wishes to destroy it. The artist or the writer, who can (most can’t) step outside conventional discourses and paradigms, is in a position to defy the Myth’s status as an adequate and convincing account of human feeling and behaviour. Very few writers during the war, or in nearly half a century since, have come close to the radicalism of Bacon, or even matched the side-step of Louis MacNeice.

  MacNeice’s poem, ‘The News-Reel’, written in mid-war, expresses with both eloquence and caution the challenge and hope involved for citizens as they tried mentally to order their war experiences. The process by which some images are put together as newsreel, others lost on the cutting-room floor, is a metaphor for the working of memory which reminds us that memory is, in plain fact, profoundly affected by cinematic images created and selected by film-makers. MacNeice is ‘inclined’ to hold back from finalising his personal ‘newsreel’ until the ‘organism’ behind the facts appears. Its presence (a quasi-divine one – but MacNeice was neither believer nor idealist) is suggested by that ‘sudden unconfined/Wind of understanding’ which briefly gave hope that ‘fact’ was a façade. There should, the poem implies, be some significance in that sense of uplift which transfigured crisis for many in 1940–41. But we must wait for it to emerge.

  MacNeice, himself a British propagandist during the war, clearly wasn’t convinced that the rapid and largely spontaneous creation of Myth had done the job for good and all. A sceptical, albeit anti-fascist, Ulsterman, he wrote some memorable Blitz poems which stand up better than any others on the subject precisely because they work outside the Myth’s paradigm. In ‘Brother Fire’, written late in 1942 when allied victory had come to seem inevitable and repression of naughty ideas was perhaps less exigent, the blaze of London is ironically acclaimed. In a way we willed it, as children want bonfires:

  Did we not in those mornings after the All Clear,

  When you were looting shops in elemental joy

  And singing as you swarmed up city block and spire,

  Echo your thoughts in ours? ‘Destroy! Destroy!’

  Just before Hiroshima, MacNeice wrote ‘The Streets of Laredo’, a still more sardonic poem, playing off the American ballad, in which ‘Laredo’ is the London of Wren, Bunyan and Blake, now burning. Familiar elements of Myth – the fireman, the Cockney, the architectural past, and the literary heritage – are virtually burlesqued. Finally, ‘The voice of the Angel, the voice of the fire’ tells the narrator:

  O late, very late, have I come to Laredo

  A whimsical bride in my new scarlet dress

  But at last I took pity on those who were waiting

  To see my regalia and feel my caress.

  Now ring the bells gaily and play the hose daily,

  Put splints on your legs, put a gag on your breath;

  O you streets of Laredo, you streets of Laredo,

  Lay down the red carpet – My dowry is death.3

  These macabre poems are grounded in MacNeice’s secularised Calvinism. Consciousness gives us knowledge that time and the universe are vast, and individual fates within them arbitrary: one thing is certain, which is that we all die, and no way of dying, no threat to life, is perhaps more significant than any other. MacNeice’s ‘good nature’ and romantic sentimentalism strive (as in ‘The News-Reel’) to get beyond despair; but when, as in ‘Brother Fire’ and ‘The Streets of Laredo’, he lets the skull beneath the skin emerge clearly, the results are strangely refreshing and bracing.

  They may be contrasted not only with his friend Dylan Thomas’s bombastic consolation in the famous ‘Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Fire, of a Child in London’ (‘After the first death, there is no other’), a poem which does not refer to bombs but in 1945 would certainly have seemed to, but also with T. S. Eliot’s subtle digestion of the Myth into ‘Little Gidding’, the last of the Four Quartets, which came to represent Old Possum’s major war work.

  I have written elsewhere4 about the Quartets as public poems with a propagandist function, and will mostly content myself with summary here. Eliot, a British citizen since 1927, but born in Missouri as a member of a distinguished New England family, had achieved a dominance in ‘English letters’ and a prestige in Church of England circles which interacted with his inherited sense of public duty as he found that the structure of ‘Burnt Norton’ (1935) could be replicated in three further Quartets. The repeated themes of the ‘Quartets’ are ‘universal’, ‘religious’, ‘timeless’ – including Time itself, Art and the search for spiritual health. As many critics have shown, they can be read coherently without any reference to the Second World War at all. ‘Burnt Norton’ has no topical or ‘political’ resonance whatever. But the imagery of ‘East Coker’ (published Easter 1940), ‘The Dry Salvages’ (February 1941) and ‘Little Gidding’ (October 1942) belongs in great part very much to 1939–41.

  ‘East Coker’ opens, usefully for the Myth, by evoking a ‘timeless moment’ in a Deep English village where medieval or Tudor peasants are imagined dancing in communal harmony. Its last section, in which Eliot speaks of the struggle to write good verses, was written during the Phoney War, but expressed an attitude which must have struck readers in mid-1940 as highly appropriate to their situation (my italics):

  … And so each venture

  Is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate

  With shabby equipment always deteriorating

  In the general mess of imprecision of feeling,

  Undisciplined squads of emotion …

  There is only the fight to recover what has been lost

  And found and lost again and again; and now, under conditions

  That seem unpropitious. But perhaps neither gain nor loss.

  For us there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.

  The poet’s attempt, with inadequate personal means, to re-create the splendour found in poetic tradition, is oddly similar to that of Home Guards drilling with broomsticks, ‘trying’ against all odds, submitting to military discipline and leaving ‘the rest’ to Mr Churchill.

  Clearly, Eliot could not have intended this effect – his military imagery relates at most to the experience of a conscript army. But it is impossible to believe that the choice of subject and treatment of ‘The Dry Salvages’ were in no way influenced by Britain’s predicament in 1940. The Battle of the Atlantic – convoys of US supplies defended against U Boats – was of paramount significance. Eliot, though ex-American, had high prestige in literary circles in his native land, as he was fully aware. It in no way derogates from his integrity to suggest that his sudden decision to revert for material to the Mississippi of his earliest childhood and the New England waters of his happiest sailing days was at least partly triggered by a ‘propagandist’ imperative. He wrote ‘The Dry Salvages’ extremely fast. Its first readers would surely have read its fourth section as a most moving prayer for British seamen at risk, for the women who had seen sons and husbands ‘setting forth and not returning’ and for the souls of dead mariners.

  Over 300 British merchant ships were lost to U Boats or air attack in three months down to May 1941. Nor would Eliot’s invocation, in Section III, of Krishna’s advice to Arjuna on the battlefield – the incarnated god says it is Arjuna’s duty to fight, even against his own kin, and the fruits of his action are not his business – have failed to intersect with the thoughts of conscientious Christians worried about the ethics of RAF bombing of Germany.

  It is in ‘Little Gidding’ that Eliot produces a representative working of the Myth to stand beside Churchill’s speeches, the broadcasts of Priestley and Ed Murrow, and famous productions of the Crown Film Unit. The place of the poem’s title, in Northamptonshire, was the site of an Anglican community which briefly gave refuge to Charles I as he fled to surrender to the Scots and was soon after sacked by Parliamentary troops. What the voice of the poem’s first section is overtly saying is that the place represents ‘the world’s end�
��. But so do many others – ‘the sea jaws’ (in which Royal Navy and merchant sailors are drowning), the ‘desert’ of North Africa (in which Britons are fighting Rommel) or a bombed ‘city’:

  But this is the nearest, in place and time,

  Now and in England …

  Here, the intersection of the timeless moment

  Is England and nowhere. Never and always.

  The sound doctrinal point that one might as well pray anywhere is completely overidden by the patriotic surge of ‘England … always’.

  Section II is probably the most powerful, and certainly the most complex, work of poetry related to direct experience of the London Blitz of 1940–41. Eliot served as an air-raid warden early in the Blitz, and as a fire-watcher on the roof of Faber & Faber, the publishing firm of which he was a director. The poem is easily available, in many editions and anthologies, and there is no need here to show, detail by detail, how closely this section refers to phenomena typical of Blitz – from the ‘Dust in the air suspended’ of its opening lyric to the ‘blowing of the horn’ at the end which suggests the siren sounding the All Clear. Yet all is so deftly handled that I know a sensitive reader (and distinguished historian) who was astonished when I demonstrated in a seminar that the ‘patrol’ of the speaker who meets a ‘familiar compound ghost’ in a Dantesque setting replicates that of a warden pacing the London streets after the Luftwaffe had raided and caused fires in ‘three districts’.