London: The Biography

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.