Imagined London - Anna Quindlen [31]
But the city’s trials are not simply ancient ones. Perhaps it is the most recent one of which we are most aware, and which we feel most deeply without having felt it personally at all, at least on our home ground. Sometimes you come upon it suddenly, in a way that shocks you into silence. On the Exhibition Row side of the Victoria and Albert Museum is a long wall that parallels the sidewalk. It is pocked with large holes, as though it had at one time been made of softer stuff and someone had thrown one hardball at it after another. Chiseled in among the pockmarks are these words: “The damage to these walls is the result of enemy bombing during the blitz of the second world war 1939–1945 and is left as a memorial to the enduring values of this great museum in a time of conflict.”
In some ways it’s the literature of the Blitz that makes London feel foreign as much as any Regency romance about carriage rides on Rotten Row and dances at Almack’s. Perhaps that’s because the stories are simultaneously of our times and yet quite foreign, at least for those who spent those years in America, its buildings pocked only with war bond posters and gold stars. Peter Ackroyd makes it quite vivid at the very end of his London book, very vivid and very humbling. Six hundred bombers dropped their payloads on East London one night in September 1940, then the next night, and the next, hitting St. Paul’s Cathedral and Piccadilly. They damaged Buckingham Palace, too, leading the Queen, later the Queen Mother, to famously say that she was glad she’d been bombed because now she could look the East End in the face.
By November, 1940, more than thirty thousand bombs had been dropped on London. Finally at the end of December came the raid that was the culmination of all that had gone before. The City, which was once the center of London and is now the center of finance and of publishing, was attacked. Whole blocks burned to the ground; many churches were severely damaged. Paternoster Row, that address familiar to anyone with old English books as the home of book publishing, was entirely destroyed, and, along with it, according to Ackroyd’s account, five million books. The offices of dozens of publishers vanished in one night, just as they had during the Great Fire of London.
Hospital destroyed in the Blitz, 1940
Some of the best known novels of the time capture this, but in small intimate bits, perhaps in part because this tells the story of ordinary Londoners better than panoramic scenes of destruction would, perhaps because many of the novels of the Blitz were written by women. Nancy Mitford’s The Pursuit of Love ends amid the strange juxtaposition of bombing raids and daily domestic life. Its narrator, Fanny, married and living in the country, goes up to London. “There had been a heavy raid the night before, and I passed through streets which glistened with broken glass,” she says. “Many fires still smoldered, and fire engines, ambulances and rescue men hurried to and fro.” But she also captures the almost gleeful pleasure some Londoners took in getting through the disasters, what Ackroyd describes as pride in their own suffering. A cab driver tells Fanny of helping the rescue workers with “a spongy mass of red,” adding, “it was still breathing, so I takes it to the hospital, but they says that’s no good to us, take it to the mortuary. So I sews it in a sack and takes it to the mortuary.”
“Oh, that’s nothing to what I have seen,” he adds.
“The people now, they don’t know what real trouble is,” said a talkative cab driver who’d been a child during that time, sent out to the country after the earliest bombs fell.
Elizabeth Bowen’s novel The Heat of the Day is set entirely during the period, and what it captures is a city deadened by waiting for the worst, going about its business in an atmosphere of banked fear and fire, the “lightless middle of the tunnel.” It is not so much the raids she describes as the life around and after them: