London: The Biography

After the great fire-raid at the end of December 1940, the attacks were more sporadic but no less deadly. There were raids in January 1941, with a brief cessation in February, but they began again in earnest in March. On 16 April the city was visited by what the Germans described as “the greatest air-raid of all time”; the bombers returned again three nights later. More than a thousand people were killed on each night of the bombardment, which hit areas as diverse as Holborn and Chelsea. London became confused and misshapen, while anxiety and loss of sleep marked the faces of Londoners. It was the crushing sense of unreality, and meaninglessness, which now weighed heaviest; the weariness combined with the destruction to create a light-headedness among the population. “So low did the dive-bombers come,” one witness recalled, “that for the first time I mistook bombers for taxi-cabs.” The heaviest and most prolonged raid of all occurred on Saturday 10 May 1941, when bombs fell in Kingsway, Smithfield, Westminster and all over the City; almost 1,500 were killed. The Law Courts and the Tower of London were attacked, the House of Commons reduced to a shell. The church of St. Clement Danes was destroyed, so devastated that its rector died “from the shock and grief” in the following month. His wife died four months later. This perhaps represents a small amount of suffering, compared to the totality of misery endured during these years, but it marks one pertinent aspect of London’s destruction; certain individuals can become so attached to, or associated with, certain buildings that their destruction provokes death itself. The city and its inhabitants are intertwined, for better or for worse. On the following day “the smell of burning was never so pronounced as on that Sunday morning.” It seemed then that the city could not withstand the onslaught for much longer. An American journalist, Larry Rue, noticed that male workers in the City were travelling to their offices unshaven. “I began to realise,” he wrote, “to what deep depths of their being the 10 May raid had shocked and shaken the people of London. It was just one raid too much.” Yet it was to be the last significant attack upon London for three years.

The German invasion of Russia had indirectly saved the city from more destruction, and there succeeded a relative peace. Then “life” went on. The city seemed to resume its normal course, with its postmen and bus-drivers and milkmen and errand boys, but there was the strangest feeling of ennui or despondency after the spectacular damage of the Blitz. Philip Ziegler in London at War has described it as an “enervating lull.” With the conflict taking place in other cities and over other skies, “Londoners felt that they had been left on the sidelines, they were bored and dejected.” Those who still used the Underground shelters had established a network of friendship and camaraderie but this subterranean spirit was an odd token of London’s general condition, in what Elizabeth Bowen called “the lightless middle of the tunnel,” enduring the discomforts and disadvantages of a war over which it had no control. The citizens were frustrated at, and bored by, the privations of life. And this in turn affected the very atmosphere and character of London itself. The people were shabbily dressed and, in instinctive and intimate sympathy, their houses became shabby. The windows were cracked, the plaster was flaking away, the wallpaper manifested signs of damp. The public buildings of the city were also showing signs of fatigue and depression, as their façades became more grimy and decayed. The atmosphere was woebegone, with a strange symbiosis between the city and its inhabitants which suggests-as Defoe had discovered during the Great Plague-the presence of a living, suffering organism.

Then, at the beginning of 1944, the bombs returned. But the “little blitz,” as it was called, was the unhappy end of unfinished business; there were fourteen raids in all, the heaviest in February and March, directed against a city which had been wearied and to a certain extent demoralised by the prolonged and uncertain conflict. “London seems disturbed by the raids and less ebullient than in 1940-1,” Jock Colville noted.