Inferno - Max Hastings [63]
In an age when much local transport was still horse-drawn, some city stables borrowed from country custom and acquired a goat, which horses would follow in an emergency. One night when the premises of a big City of London firm of carters were set ablaze by bombs, 200 of its horses were led to safety. Yet while Britain’s “blitz spirit” was real enough, so too were the misery and squalor that bombardment imposed. Bernard Kops, a small boy who later became a playwright and novelist, wrote: “Some people … recall a poetic dream about the Blitz. They talk about those days as if they were a time of a true communal spirit. Not to me. It was the beginning of an era of utter terror, of fear and horror. I stopped being a child and came face to face with the new reality of the world … Here we were back on the trot, wandering again, involved in a new exodus—the Jews of the East End, who had left their homes, and gone into the exile of the underground.”
A strand of traditional British silliness helped the afflicted: a London vicar once asked a fellow occupant of his basement shelter whether she prayed when she heard a bomb falling. “Yes,” she answered, “I pray, Oh God! Don’t let it fall here.” The vicar said, “But it’s a bit rough on other people, if your prayer is granted and the thing drops, not on you, but on them.” The woman replied, “I can’t help that. They must say their prayers and push it off further.” Air-raid shelters in old buildings swarmed with lice and bugs. In the big subterranean shelters of the inner cities, there was ugliness generated by drunken men and women, bitter quarrels and fights, filth inescapable where there were no lavatories.
Most people agreed that the struggle bore hardest upon the elderly and the very young, alike uncomprehending. Barbara Nixon again: “Neither had any idea what it was all about; they had never heard of Poland … and Fascism was, at most, a matter of that wicked beast Hitler who was trying to blow us up, or murder us all in our beds.” Ernie Pyle, the great American correspondent, wrote from London in January 1941: “It was the old people who seemed so tragic. Think of yourself at seventy or eighty, full of pain and of the dim memories of a lifetime that has probably all been bleak. And then think of yourself now, travelling at dusk every night to a subway station, wrapping your ragged overcoat about your old shoulders and sitting on a wooden bench with your back against a curved street wall. Sitting there all night, in nodding and fitful sleep. Think of that as your destiny—every night, every night from now on.”
A seventy-one-year-old Londoner, Herbert Brush, described how a woman friend had been to her doctor, “as evidently her nerves have gone wrong with the strain of driving a car under war conditions. On her way to Cambridge she came under machine-gun fire from the air and had to hide in a hedge. Then at Norwich there were several bombs dropped in the vicinity during the night. The doctor says she has shell-shock and has made her up a strong tonic and recommended complete rest for a fortnight.” In a narrow sense, this woman’s response to relatively slight peril was unimpressive; but human beings measure risk and privation within the compass of their personal knowledge. It was meaningless to assert to an English suburban housewife that Poles, Jews, French refugees and, later, soldiers on the Eastern Front suffered much worse things than she had. She knew only that what was happening to her was dreadful in comparison with all her previous experience of life. Only a few exulted