The attitude of self-sufficiency was often accompanied by an element of pride. “Every one absolutely determined,” one observer, Humphrey Jennings, wrote, “secretly delighted with the privilege of holding up Hitler.” There was, according to Ziegler, “a strange lightness of heart … Londoners felt themselves an elite.” They were proud of their own sufferings, in the same way that earlier generations of Londoners claimed an almost proprietorial interest in their noxious fogs, in the violence of their streets, in the sheer anonymity and magnitude of their city. In a sense Londoners believed themselves to be especially chosen for calamity. This may in turn help to explain the evident fact that “macabre exaggeration became a hallmark of many Londoners’ conversation,” particularly on the numbers of the dead and the wounded. The innate theatricality of London life affords one explanation; it has been said that there “was never any conflict in the city’s history to match the drama of the Second World War.” London firemen claimed that half their time was spent in dispersing crowds of interested spectators rather than fighting the conflagrations. If it were not for the sheer blank monotony of tiredness and suffering, suffused with the horror of the bombs, one might almost sense a gaiety or delight in destruction itself.
There are other images of these early months. One was of the blackout which plunged one of the most brilliantly illuminated cities of the world into all but total darkness. It became once more the city of dreadful night, and aroused in some inhabitants sensations of almost primitive fear as once familiar thoroughfares became lost in blackness. One of Evelyn Waugh’s characters notes that “Time might have gone back two thousand years to the time when London was a stockaded cluster of huts”; urban civilisation had been established upon light for so long that, in its absence, all customary certainties fell away. Of course there were some who took advantage of the darkness for their own purposes, but for many others the predominant sensation was one of alarm and insufficiency. The lure of shelter under the ground has already been discussed, together with the fear of administrators that London would breed a race of “troglodytes” who would never wish to come to the surface. The reality, however, was both more stark and more prosaic. Only 4 per cent of the city’s population ever used the London Underground for night shelter, largely on account of the overcrowded and often insanitary conditions which they would have found there. In implicit compliance to the tradition of London as a city of separate family dwellings, most citizens elected to stay in their own houses.
And what might they have seen when they emerged at daybreak? “The house about 30 yards from ours struck at one this morning by a bomb. Completely ruined. Another bomb in the square still unexploded … The house was still smouldering. There is a great pile of bricks … Scraps of cloth hanging to the bare walls at the side still standing. A looking glass I think swinging. Like a tooth knocked out-a clean cut.” Virginia Woolf’s description registers the sensation of almost physical shock, as if the city were indeed a living being which could suffer hurt. “A vast gap at the top of Chancery Lane. Smoking still. Some great shop entirely destroyed: the hotel opposite like a shell … And then miles amp; miles of orderly ordinary streets … Streets empty. Faces set amp; eyes bleared.” It might seem that nothing could obliterate these “miles amp; miles” of streets, that London could as it were “soak up” any punishment, yet its citizens were not so sturdy; fatigue, and weariness, and anxiety passed over them in waves. In the following month, October 1940, Woolf visited Tavistock and Mecklenburg Squares where she had lived. She passed a long line of people, with bags and blankets, queuing at eleven thirty that morning for a night’s shelter in Warren Street Underground Station. In Tavistock Square she found the remnants of her old house-“Basement all rubble. Only relics an old basket chair … Otherwise bricks amp; wood splinters … I cd just see a piece of my studio wall standing: otherwise rubble where I wrote so many books.” And then there was the dust, like the soft residue of obliterated experience. “All again litter, glass, black soft dust, plaster powder.”
It was remarked at the time that upon everything lay a fine coat of grey ash and cinders, prompting further comparison between London and Pompeii. The loss of personal history was another aspect of the city bombings; the wallpaper, and mirrors, and carpets were sometimes stripped bare and left hanging in the air of a ruin as if the private lives of Londoners had suddenly become public property. This encouraged a communal feeling and became one of the principal sources of the evident bravado and determination.
The Second World War also created a climate of care. It became a question of saving the children, for example, by a process of mass evacuation from the city to the country. In the months preceding the outbreak of hostilities on 3 September 1939, a policy of voluntary evacuation was drawn up to deal with the movement of approximately four million women and children, yet the curious magnetism of London then began to exert itself. Less than half the families wished, or decided, to leave. Those children about to be sent to reception areas in the country departed reluctantly. The children of Dagenham were despatched on boats and John O’Leary, author of Danger over Dagenham, has recorded “awful silence. The children did not sing.” One of a childhood contingent from Stepney, the writer Bernard Kops, recalled that “this was the place where we were born, where we grew up, where we played and sang, laughed and cried. And now all the grey faces as we passed were weeping. It was strangely quiet.” When they arrived in the country they seemed, and were, quite out of place. A minority were unwashed, lice-ridden and disruptive. Here the old image of the savage rises forcefully. Others “would not eat wholesome food but clamoured for fish and chips, sweets and biscuits” and “would not go to bed at reasonable hours.” They were the unnatural progeny of an unnatural city. And there “were children who refused new clothes and who fought and clung desperately to old and dirty things.” The image of the London child as somehow “dirty” and woeful is here reinforced. Then, within a few weeks, they began to return home. By the winter of 1939 approximately 150,000 mothers and children had come back; by the early months of the following year, half of the evacuees had made their way back to the city. “London was, for me, like a return from exile,” one is reported as saying in Ziegler’s history. “My pet cat met me at the gate, the neighbours welcomed me and the sun shone.” Here is a palpable sense of belonging, of being part of the city, which is the strongest sentiment among Londoners.
In the summer of 1940, when the German forces began to conquer Europe, another attempt was made to remove the children, those of the East End in particular. One hundred thousand children were evacuated but, two months later, 2,500 children were coming back each week. It represents the strangest, and perhaps most melancholy, instinct-the need to get back to the city, even if it becomes a city of fire and death. The curious fact, even during the air-raids themselves, was that the children proved “more resilient” than the adults. Like their predecessors over many eras, like the children depicted by Hogarth in the eighteenth century, they seemed to revel among all the suffering and privation, and in part reclaimed that state of semi-savagery which had been the mark of the street-Arabs of the previous century. One visitor to Stepney after a raid noted that the children were “wild-looking and grimy outwardly, but full of vitality and enthusiasm. One child said, ‘Mister, let me take you to see the last bomb round the corner.’”
In Watson’s Wharf, off Wapping, a gang of children congregated under the name of the “Dead End kids.” Their story is told in East End Then and Now, edited by W.G. Ramsey. They were the unofficial fire-fighters of the East End. “Some of these children were very poor, and dressed in cheap clothes … They were split into sections of four. Each section was responsible for a district on Wapping Island.” They had iron bars and a hand-truck as well as sand buckets and spades to assist them in their work. They roped in time bombs, and tossed them into the Thames; they carried the wounded away from incendiary scenes. One intense night of bombing in Wapping brought them out and, in the words of one witnes
s, “In a moment ten boys rushed up the stairs, ready, as it seemed, to eat fires.” They entered a burning building in order to lead out some horses trapped within, and emerged “with the clothes of some of those boys … smouldering.” Some of them were killed in the fires and explosions but, when casualties depleted their ranks, others willingly filled their places. It is a most extraordinary story which emphasises in vivid and poignant detail the hardiness and self-reliance bred within London children. A little girl from the Elephant and Castle, when asked if she wished to return to the country, said, “No fear.” No fear-that is the key to their self-containment or recklessness.
There was also a different kind of community. Elizabeth Bowen, in her novel of wartime London, The Heat of the Day, suggested that those who had died in the fire and destruction were not forgotten. “These unknown dead reproached those left living not by their own death, which might only be shared, but by their unknownness, which could not be mended now.” The war had revealed the essence of the city’s conditions of solitude and anonymity. “Who had the right to mourn them, not having cared that they had lived?” As a result there was an attempt by the citizens “to break down indifference,” and in some sense to ignore or mitigate the usual restrictions of life in London. “The wall between the living and the living became less solid as the wall between the living and the dead thinned.” So strangers would say, “Good night, good luck” as they passed each other in the evening.
There was also a marked and pervasive sense of unreality, as if the familiar outlines of the city had suddenly changed their aspect and become unknown or intangible. “Everybody and all familiar things and jobs seemed so unreal,” one recalled, “we even spoke differently to each other as if we should soon be parted.” This sense of fragility or transitoriness helped to form the atmosphere in what was called “a besieged city,” and one Londoner who made a brief visit to the countryside professed himself surprised “at buildings unthreatened, at mountains that could not be overthrown.” As a result of his experience “All permanence was astonishing. So unnatural had his own life been, that Nature seemed not to belong to him nor he to Nature.” The city had always been deemed “unnatural” by atavistic moralists, but now that sense was shared by its citizens. It was unnatural to be congregated in a place where bombs would fall; it was unnatural to be part of so vast and manifest a target. Yet this was the condition of their lives; perhaps it was the condition of being human.
The bombings of 1940 culminated in the most celebrated and notorious of all raids, that of Sunday 29 December 1940. The warning was sounded a little after six in the evening, and then the incendiaries came down like “heavy rain.” The attack was concentrated upon the City of London. The Great Fire had come again. The area from Aldersgate to Cannon Street, all of Cheapside and Moorgate, was in flames. One observer on the roof of the Bank of England recalled that “the whole of London seemed alight! We were hemmed in by a wall of flame in every direction.” Nineteen churches, sixteen of them built by Christopher Wren after the first Great Fire, were destroyed; of the thirty-four guild halls, only three escaped; the whole of Paternoster Row went up in flames, destroying some five million books; the Guildhall was badly damaged; St. Paul’s was ringed with fire, but escaped. “No one who saw will ever forget,” William Kent wrote in The Lost Treasures of London, “their emotions on the night when London was burning and the dome seemed to ride the sea of fire.” Almost a third of the city was reduced to ash and rubble. By curious coincidence, however, the destruction was largely visited upon the historical and religious aspects of the old City; the thoroughfares of business, such as Cornhill and Lombard Street, remained relatively unscathed while none of the great financial centres was touched. The deities of the city protected the Bank of England and the Stock Market, like the City griffins which jealously guard its treasure.
One who walked through the ruins the day after the raid recalled that “The air felt singed. I was breathing ashes … The air itself, as we walked, smelt of burning.” There are many accounts of the craters, the cellars opened to the outer air, the shattered walls, the fallen masonry, the gas-mains on fire, the pavements covered with dust and broken glass, the odd stumps of brick, the broken and suspended stairs. “For some days the church walls steamed and smoked,” according to James Pope-Hennessy in an account entitled History Under Fire. Yet the workers, the temporary inhabitants, of the City came back. After the raids, “the whole City seemed to be on the tramp” as the clerks and secretaries and office boys all took circuitous ways through the ruins to their destinations. Many had arrived to find their places of employment “gutted” or absolutely destroyed, and then returned on the following morning “simply because they had nothing better to do.” The power of the City then became manifest in their behaviour; they resembled the prisoners of Newgate who, after it had been fired by the Gordon rioters, returned to wander among the ruins of their cells.
The City had become unfamiliar territory. The area between St. Mary le Bow in Cheapside and St. Paul’s Cathedral reverted to wasteland, where the long grass was crossed by beaten paths bearing the names of Old Change, Friday Street, Bread Street and Watling Street. Signs were nailed up, with the names of these streets and others, to prevent people from losing their way. Even the colours of the city had changed; concrete and granite had “been scorched umber” while church ruins were “chrome yellow.” There are some remarkable photographs, taken by Cecil Beaton in the aftermath of the December raid. Paternoster Row is a mound of broken rubble with odd pieces of ironwork sticking out among the brick and stone; the premises of thirty publishers were destroyed. In the last Great Fire the Row was similarly struck and, according to Pepys, “all the great booksellers almost undone.” Outside the church of St. Giles, Cripplegate, the statue of Milton had been blown off its plinth by the blast of a bomb but the tower and walls of the church survived as they had done almost four hundred years before. It was recorded on 12 September 1545 that “Sant Gylles was burned, alle hole, save the walles, stepall, and alle, and how it came God knoweth”; now, almost by a miracle, they were saved again. There are photographs of many ruined church interiors, with monuments tumbled down, screens fallen into fragments, and cherubs’ heads scattered across the floor; there are photographs of the ruined Guildhall, of the bombed Middle Temple, of craters and falling roofs. It seemed to many that the tangible and textural history of London was without meaning, if its glory could disappear in a night; it was too fragile, and frail, to be relied upon. It was the invisible and intangible spirit or presence of London that survived, and somehow flourished, in the period of devastation.
There were, however, unexpected discoveries. A section of the Roman Wall, hidden for many hundreds of years, was uncovered by the bombing of Cripplegate. An underground chamber paved with tiles emerged below the altar of St. Mary le Bow, and a “Gothic blocked-up doorway” was recovered in St. Vedast’s, Foster Lane, after its bombardment. Roman relics were found by Austin Friars, one of them a tile with the paw-marks of a dog in pursuit of a cat. Behind the organ of All Hallows Church, hitherto concealed by panelling which the bombs destroyed, was found a seventh-century arch formed out of Roman tiles. The parish priest described how “out of the wall adjacent to the arch great fragments fell which had for at least eight hundred years been embedded as the capstones in the strong Norman pillars of that date. Some of these stones were most remarkable … They represent a school of craftsmanship whereof we have no other evidence. They form a portion of a noble Cross which once upreared its head on Tower Hill, before the Norman William conquered London.” The emblematic significance of the discovery was not in doubt; the German bombs had fortuitously uncovered a Saxon cross representing defiance before an invader. So those who believed that the city’s history could be easily destroyed were mistaken; it emerged at a deeper level with the implicit assurance that, like the ancient cross, London itself would rise again. There was even a natural analogy. Air damage to the herbarium in the Natural History Museum mea
nt that certain seeds became damp, including mimosa brought from China in 1793. After their trance of 147 years, they began to grow again.
Yet there was also a curious interval when the natural world was reaffirmed in another sense. One contemporary has described how “many acres of the most famous city in the world have changed from the feverish hum and activity of man into a desolate area grown over with brightly coloured flowers and mysterious with wild life.” The transformation was “deeply affecting.” In Bread Street and Milk Street bloomed ragwort, lilies of the valley, white and mauve lilac. “Quiet lanes lead to patches of wild flowers and undergrowth not seen in these parts since the days of Henry VIII.” The connection here with the sixteenth century is an appropriate one, when this part of London was laid out with gardens and pathways, but the bombed city travelled further back to the time when it was prehistoric marshland. The author of London’s Natural History, R.S. Fitter, suggested after the war that “the profusion of wild flowers, birds and insects to be seen on the bombed sites of the city is now one of the sights of London”; he mentioned “269 wild flowers, grasses and ferns, 3 mammals, 31 birds, 56 insects and 27 kinds of other invertebrates” which had appeared since 1939. Pigs were kept, and vegetables cultivated, in wasteland beside the bombed Cripplegate Church; this earth had been covered with buildings for more than seven centuries, and yet its natural fertility was revived. It is indirect testimony, perhaps, to the force and power of London which kept this “fertility” at bay. The power of the city and the power of nature had fought an unequal battle, until the city was injured; then the plants, and the birds, returned.
After the great fire-raid at the end of December 1940, the attacks were more sporadic but no less deadly. There were raids in January 1941, with a brief cessation in February, but they began again in earnest in March. On 16 April the city was visited by what the Germans described as “the greatest air-raid of all time”; the bombers returned again three nights later. More than a thousand people were killed on each night of the bombardment, which hit areas as diverse as Holborn and Chelsea. London became confused and misshapen, while anxiety and loss of sleep marked the faces of Londoners. It was the crushing sense of unreality, and meaninglessness, which now weighed heaviest; the weariness combined with the destruction to create a light-headedness among the population. “So low did the dive-bombers come,” one witness recalled, “that for the first time I mistook bombers for taxi-cabs.” The heaviest and most prolonged raid of all occurred on Saturday 10 May 1941, when bombs fell in Kingsway, Smithfield, Westminster and all over the City; almost 1,500 were killed. The Law Courts and the Tower of London were attacked, the House of Commons reduced to a shell. The church of St. Clement Danes was destroyed, so devastated that its rector died “from the shock and grief” in the following month. His wife died four months later. This perhaps represents a small amount of suffering, compared to the totality of misery endured during these years, but it marks one pertinent aspect of London’s destruction; certain individuals can become so attached to, or associated with, certain buildings that their destruction provokes death itself. The city and its inhabitants are intertwined, for better or for worse. On the following day “the smell of burning was never so pronounced as on that Sunday morning.” It seemed then that the city could not withstand the onslaught for much longer. An American journalist, Larry Rue, noticed that male workers in the City were travelling to their offices unshaven. “I began to realise,” he wrote, “to what deep depths of their being the 10 May raid had shocked and shaken the people of London. It was just one raid too much.” Yet it was to be the last significant attack upon London for three years.
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