The Blitz: The British Under Attack. Juliet Gardiner

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СКАЧАТЬ came by and we tried hailing them but of course we had no luck … I suppose I’d been standing there about forty minutes when providentially my mother walked by right in front of me. She, poor soul, had been turned away from Euston at 8.30 and as the raid was still in progress had started to walk home. She’d already come all that way on foot when I met her but despite that suggested that we should walk on … I think if we’d both been feeling hale and hearty, we wouldn’t have gone but we seemed so numbed that nothing much mattered.

      … The whole of Thameside from London Bridge to Woolwich was a raging inferno. You could have seen to read by the light – if you’d felt inclined – and unfortunately for us we had to go by the East India Docks. Commercial Road was the only route open to the East because owing to the damage done to Bow Road, traffic was being diverted … And just before we got to Burdett Road, the bombs started falling. The shelters seemed to be absolutely non existent so we just went on … At one time we were made to go round back turnings because a delayed action bomb had fallen in the main road and nothing could pass. What was so maddening was the persistent drone of enemy planes which, I might mention, are easily distinguishable from our own. We couldn’t get away from it, and felt so completely helpless.

      Fires were breaking out everywhere … a chapel that lay back about thirty yards from us suddenly burst into flames. It was dreadful. The streets were littered with glass and the pavements pitted with shrapnel from the raid [that afternoon]. Far away down the Barking Road we could see the glare of an incendiary bomb that had landed in the roadway and we decided to take to the back streets. A pale flickering light over towards Barking turned out (so we found later) to be the power station which had been hit. I think something must have hit the gas works, too, because we still haven’t got any gas and at the moment [the next day, Sunday, 8 September] our Sunday joint is swinging on an improvised spit in front of the fire.

      … We were going down one turning when [an ARP] warden stopped us from going on and insisted that we stayed in his house. We were really very grateful and from 11pm to 5am we sat on the stairs in the dark gazing out through the open door to the street which was incessantly lit up with explosions. And how those bombs fell! Canning Town library was hit, Forest Gate got it too, and all around us seemed to be shaking. Dante had nothing on Hitler, believe me.

      … At last, at 5 o/c, the All Clear went and we finally reached home to find some windows out and the ceiling down in Mummy’s room …

      When I looked from my window I could see that one of the fires on Thames side was still burning and great clouds of black smoke were covering quite a large area.

      ‘Then quite suddenly it ceased,’ recalled Fireman Hurd, fighting a fire amidst the noise of screaming bombs and droning aircraft. ‘The silence was almost overpowering for a time. At about 5 o/c am the “All Clear” went. We had been subjected, without any real cover, to 8 hours of continual bombing! … Relief crews began to arrive (they came from Enfield) … we stayed there until 10 o/c on Sunday morning when our Sub Officer handed over to another officer. This officer and his ten pumps … had come from Brighton! Our crew proceeded home [then] and what a scene of desolation we passed through. Debris everywhere, confined to the East End though, but I was too tired to care much about what I saw then. We had been on our feet since 6.15 pm on Saturday until 10 am on Sunday, with only one snack in 21 hours.’

      The All Clear ‘sounded a beautiful symphony’ in Bernard Kops’ ears:

      everyone relaxed, the men arguing politics and the women talking about food, But the younger people wandered out to see the fires and I went with them along the Commercial Road. The closer I got the more black and red it became with flames shooting higher than the cranes along the dockside. Sparks were spitting everywhere and tongues of flames consumed the great warehouses along the black and orange waters of the Thames. Everything was chaos except the fire which was like a living monster with an insatiable appetite. And I was afraid of being devoured … so I left and wandered back towards Stepney Green where black smoke covered the sky.

      Yet, with all this, there was a feeling of unreality. I couldn’t believe it, it was like a film being shown before our eyes, Men were rushing around selling newspapers, screaming about the amount of German planes that were brought down, and there had been a family wiped out where I had been standing …

That first night of the blitz, 436 people were killed and 1,600 seriously injured.^* Among the dead were seven firemen. Thirteen men were killed when the corporation depot in Abbey Road, West Ham, which was being used as an ARP Cleansing and Ambulance station, received a direct hit. Cyril Demarne, who was nearby, hurried round to find a hand he recognised as that of his friend Wally Turley sticking out from under a huge slab of concrete. Turley, a fireman, had been attempting to put out a fire at the station when it collapsed, burying him, his fellow firefighters and other ARP workers stationed there. It was impossible to move the concrete to free the bodies until heavy lifting gear arrived, so Fireman Turley’s arm remained sticking out of the debris, a tragic signpost to one of the many instant burial grounds that night.

      Soon after the first raid of the blitz had begun the previous afternoon, the manager of Robert Baltrop’s Sainsbury’s had decided to close the shop and send all his staff home. Baltrop set out to keep his date with a girl.

      She turned up – it sounds daft but perhaps we all thought it was a bit romantic meeting in an air raid, all this was going on very close to us. We could smell the smoke and hear the bombs, but she had orders to take me home immediately if I turned up so we went to her home and they were all in the Anderson shelter in her back garden, her parents and the lady from upstairs, and we huddled in there, it was pretty awful all squashed in there together with the raid going on and her father talked in gloomy tones about H.G. Wells and how we should all have to live underground, and every time there was a thump her mother screamed … The man from upstairs came in straight from work, and he tumbled into the shelter breathless with these stories of roads blocked, streets in ruins, named places that I knew, and it was almost unbelievable to hear someone say, you know this place or that place, well, it’s been bombed.

      Baltrop finally became ‘fed up’ with this talk and the confined space, and walked home. His father had been out, ‘picking up what news he could about the East End, because we knew it so well, we knew people and places, and he’s heard this place had been bombed and that place … and we sat and had a cup of tea and he talked grievingly about the East End and the people and how they must be suffering, and then we went to bed and the raid was still going on and we wondered, would we wake up in the morning? What would tomorrow be like? And when I did wake up it was a lovely, sunny Sunday morning, lovely except that I think that four hundred and fifty or more people had been killed in East London, and a huge number injured, terrible, terrible destruction, and the Germans were coming back again that night …’

^* ‘Seriously injured’ described those who were admitted to and kept in hospital; a person receiving first aid treatment at the time, or subsequently presenting at an outpatients’ department or at their doctor’s surgery, was categorised as ‘slightly injured’. Of course many people sustained minor injuries for which they did not seek medical help, so they do not show up in the figures. Indeed, the Ministry of Home Security was concerned that reporting officers should be clear about what were ‘regarded as casualties, or to classify them in some way so that our published figures may represent the true gravity of the situation (i.e. not old ladies removed to hospital from near an incident “for their own comfort”)’.

       2 ‘The Most Grim Test in its History …’

      With our enormous metropolis here, the greatest target in СКАЧАТЬ