London: The Biography полностью

Yet there was another aspect of the calmness and determination of Londoners in the autumn and winter of 1940, springing from some deep sense that the city had suffered before and had somehow survived. Of course nothing could equal the fury and destruction of the Blitz, but the sheer persistence and continuity of London through time lent an intimate yet perhaps at the time unidentifiable reassurance. There was always the intimation of eventual renewal and reconstruction. The poet Stephen Spender, in north London in the aftermath of one raid, related: “I had the comforting sense of the sure dark immensity of London.” Here is another source of consolation; the city was too large, too complex, too momentous, to be destroyed. Then he recognised that “The grittiness, stench and obscurity of Kilburn suddenly seemed a spiritual force-the immense force of poverty which had produced the narrow, yet intense, visions of Cockneys living in other times.” This has the “spiritual force” of revelation, since Spender seems to have concluded that poverty and suffering had somehow produced a kind of invulnerability to even the worst onslaughts which the world can unleash. “We can take it” was one of the often recorded comments by those who had been bombed out of their homes, with the unspoken addition that “we have taken everything else.”

The attitude of self-sufficiency was often accompanied by an element of pride. “Every one absolutely determined,” one observer, Humphrey Jennings, wrote, “secretly delighted with the privilege of holding up Hitler.” There was, according to Ziegler, “a strange lightness of heart … Londoners felt themselves an elite.” They were proud of their own sufferings, in the same way that earlier generations of Londoners claimed an almost proprietorial interest in their noxious fogs, in the violence of their streets, in the sheer anonymity and magnitude of their city. In a sense Londoners believed themselves to be especially chosen for calamity. This may in turn help to explain the evident fact that “macabre exaggeration became a hallmark of many Londoners’ conversation,” particularly on the numbers of the dead and the wounded. The innate theatricality of London life affords one explanation; it has been said that there “was never any conflict in the city’s history to match the drama of the Second World War.” London firemen claimed that half their time was spent in dispersing crowds of interested spectators rather than fighting the conflagrations. If it were not for the sheer blank monotony of tiredness and suffering, suffused with the horror of the bombs, one might almost sense a gaiety or delight in destruction itself.

There are other images of these early months. One was of the blackout which plunged one of the most brilliantly illuminated cities of the world into all but total darkness. It became once more the city of dreadful night, and aroused in some inhabitants sensations of almost primitive fear as once familiar thoroughfares became lost in blackness. One of Evelyn Waugh’s characters notes that “Time might have gone back two thousand years to the time when London was a stockaded cluster of huts”; urban civilisation had been established upon light for so long that, in its absence, all customary certainties fell away. Of course there were some who took advantage of the darkness for their own purposes, but for many others the predominant sensation was one of alarm and insufficiency. The lure of shelter under the ground has already been discussed, together with the fear of administrators that London would breed a race of “troglodytes” who would never wish to come to the surface. The reality, however, was both more stark and more prosaic. Only 4 per cent of the city’s population ever used the London Underground for night shelter, largely on account of the overcrowded and often insanitary conditions which they would have found there. In implicit compliance to the tradition of London as a city of separate family dwellings, most citizens elected to stay in their own houses.