Brilliant_ The Evolution of Artificial Light - Jane Brox [91]
The first extreme regulations were relaxed in mid-October as a middle ground between safety and fear was negotiated. Blackout hours shrank: the blackout now began a half-hour after sunset and ended a half-hour before sunrise. A little sliver of illumination from streetlights—called "glimmer lighting" or "star-lighting"—was permitted at intersections. Civilian drivers were allowed to use headlight masks. The number of roadway casualties fell, though this was also helped by a new speed limit of 20 miles per hour in densely populated neighborhoods during blackout hours. Gas rationing lessened the flow of traffic as well.
Cinemas and theaters were allowed to reopen, and during the war years the cinema proved to be extremely popular. As long as people sat transfixed in the dark caves of the movie houses, they could forget the lightless world outside and the strain of everyday living—the threat of falling bombs, the rationing of tea and eggs, sugar and meat. As the sprockets of the projector precisely reeled the film forward—one frame moving past the light as another advanced toward it—a shutter closed and then opened again in order to stop the light from projecting during the brief moment the frames were in motion. On the screen, the images moved seamlessly as light and shadows illuminated an upturned face, a calculated act of murder, or a chorus line of dancers. But without those dark moments interspersed between the light, the film would appear to be no more than jerky vertical movements. The illusion of constancy viewers had as they gazed at a man eating his shoe or sliding down a banister in tie and tails would be lost.
At Christmastime, 1939, shops were allowed limited lighting, as were some theaters, on condition that all had to batten down during air raid warnings. Museums and galleries, which had previously been closed, opened, too, though most of their valuable works had been shipped to safer places. Pedestrians were allowed to use flashlights again, but the lamp had to be covered with two thicknesses of white paper and the light had to be switched off during alerts. They couldn't have given off more light than the stone lamps of the Pleistocene.
The distinction between night and day was absolute, as it hadn't been since the shuttered, silent nights of the Middle Ages. Life continued in want and isolation as everyone waited within their husks for peace to favor them again.
By the time of the Blitz, in the late summer of 1940, the Luftwaffe had developed radio beams that helped navigators locate targets, so they could aim with some accuracy in bad weather or on dark nights. Still, the full moon was called the Bomber's Moon. Vera Brittain described the night of September 7, 1940:
From different angles, at different heights and with different speeds, came fifteen hundred aeroplanes of all types and sizes dropping bombs by the ton in eight hours of terror.... Furious fires, climbing the midnight sky from slums and docks, destroyed in a moment the simple precaution of the blackout;...civilians listening in the shelters and basements to the ceaseless roar of the planes and the intermittent thud of bombs, lost all sense of time, of order, even of consciousness. That night at least four hundred people perished; on the next, two hundred.
October 15 saw 410 raiders over London. They dropped 538 tons of explosives, which killed 400 civilians and injured 900 more. Hundreds of fires burned throughout the city. It would go on night after night for months, then intermittently for years. The two-minute rise and fall of the air raid warning, the sirens through the boroughs, the sound of the raiders coming. "Whatever part of London we live in," Brittain wrote, "they always seem, by day or by night, to be passing just overhead." Then the whistle and crackle