London: The Biography

In the summer of 1940, when the German forces began to conquer Europe, another attempt was made to remove the children, those of the East End in particular. One hundred thousand children were evacuated but, two months later, 2,500 children were coming back each week. It represents the strangest, and perhaps most melancholy, instinct-the need to get back to the city, even if it becomes a city of fire and death. The curious fact, even during the air-raids themselves, was that the children proved “more resilient” than the adults. Like their predecessors over many eras, like the children depicted by Hogarth in the eighteenth century, they seemed to revel among all the suffering and privation, and in part reclaimed that state of semi-savagery which had been the mark of the street-Arabs of the previous century. One visitor to Stepney after a raid noted that the children were “wild-looking and grimy outwardly, but full of vitality and enthusiasm. One child said, ‘Mister, let me take you to see the last bomb round the corner.’”

In Watson’s Wharf, off Wapping, a gang of children congregated under the name of the “Dead End kids.” Their story is told in East End Then and Now, edited by W.G. Ramsey. They were the unofficial fire-fighters of the East End. “Some of these children were very poor, and dressed in cheap clothes … They were split into sections of four. Each section was responsible for a district on Wapping Island.” They had iron bars and a hand-truck as well as sand buckets and spades to assist them in their work. They roped in time bombs, and tossed them into the Thames; they carried the wounded away from incendiary scenes. One intense night of bombing in Wapping brought them out and, in the words of one witness, “In a moment ten boys rushed up the stairs, ready, as it seemed, to eat fires.” They entered a burning building in order to lead out some horses trapped within, and emerged “with the clothes of some of those boys … smouldering.” Some of them were killed in the fires and explosions but, when casualties depleted their ranks, others willingly filled their places. It is a most extraordinary story which emphasises in vivid and poignant detail the hardiness and self-reliance bred within London children. A little girl from the Elephant and Castle, when asked if she wished to return to the country, said, “No fear.” No fear-that is the key to their self-containment or recklessness.

There was also a different kind of community. Elizabeth Bowen, in her novel of wartime London, The Heat of the Day, suggested that those who had died in the fire and destruction were not forgotten. “These unknown dead reproached those left living not by their own death, which might only be shared, but by their unknownness, which could not be mended now.” The war had revealed the essence of the city’s conditions of solitude and anonymity. “Who had the right to mourn them, not having cared that they had lived?” As a result there was an attempt by the citizens “to break down indifference,” and in some sense to ignore or mitigate the usual restrictions of life in London. “The wall between the living and the living became less solid as the wall between the living and the dead thinned.” So strangers would say, “Good night, good luck” as they passed each other in the evening.

There was also a marked and pervasive sense of unreality, as if the familiar outlines of the city had suddenly changed their aspect and become unknown or intangible. “Everybody and all familiar things and jobs seemed so unreal,” one recalled, “we even spoke differently to each other as if we should soon be parted.” This sense of fragility or transitoriness helped to form the atmosphere in what was called “a besieged city,” and one Londoner who made a brief visit to the countryside professed himself surprised “at buildings unthreatened, at mountains that could not be overthrown.” As a result of his experience “All permanence was astonishing. So unnatural had his own life been, that Nature seemed not to belong to him nor he to Nature.” The city had always been deemed “unnatural” by atavistic moralists, but now that sense was shared by its citizens. It was unnatural to be congregated in a place where bombs would fall; it was unnatural to be part of so vast and manifest a target. Yet this was the condition of their lives; perhaps it was the condition of being human.