Chapter II: Part 2

My particular policeman lives in a quiet suburb on a rise of ground, with a good view. And he said that the night before I arrived London was a sight to see, with searchlights and noise and fires all over town. He said a bomb hit his block not long ago and wiped out thirteen houses. But only five people were hurt and nobody was killed.

“Imagine bombing a quiet, homey suburb like ours!” he said. “What military advantage could that possibly have?”

“Well,” I said, “I suppose the point is to try to break the spirit of the people.”

And he said, not boastfully but in an ordinary tone, “I guess so; but actually it’s having just the opposite effect.”

I asked him if he had a backyard shelter. He said he did, but never went into it. He preferred to sleep in his own bed, get a good rest and take his chances.

On my second afternoon here I got a haircut. The barber talked all the time, and for once I enjoyed it. He knew instantly that I was an American. We don’t look very different to me, but these Londoners can tell an American a mile off. It didn’t take the barber long to find out that I had just arrived and that my first two nights in London had passed without a single bomb being dropped. He said we’d have some before many nights.

“And I’ll tell you,” he said, “if you don’t get a little windy your first night, then you’re not much of a man. A fellow who doesn’t get his wind up at the first experience isn’t a man at all. He’s just an animal with no nerves in his body.”

I told the barber I was all prepared to be London’s biggest coward. He said not to be ashamed if I was scared and did something silly. He was an air-raid warden at night in his home suburb, he said, and what did I suppose he did in their very first raid? He dived for the nearest underground shelter. When he got down there, he said, he realized that was no place for a warden to be, and he was so ashamed he took off his badge so people wouldn’t know he was a warden.

But that was soon changed. Now his whole district is organized. They know exactly what to expect and what to do, and they go about it like a business. He goes to his post every night after supper. Every third night he is on duty all night, regardless of whether anything happens. On other nights he stays on if things are happening. He’s not afraid any more at all.

I’m mighty glad I got a haircut. The barber was a great solace. Before that talk I had been afraid of bombs, and also afraid to have anyone know I was afraid. Now I’m only afraid of bombs.

I had heard stories of new arrivals over here sleeping right through their first air-raid warning, but I never thought anything so drab would happen to me. It did.

This morning at nine-thirty a friend came to my room. “Did you hear the warning?” he asked. “Don’t make fun of me,” I said. “There wasn’t any warning.” But he was right. The sirens went off at 6 A.M. There was just one plane over town, and it didn’t drop anything. The all clear sounded at 6:30, and I slept through that too.

I think the English bed manufacturers should have me write a testimonial.

* * * * *

In my first few days here I have met an enormous number of people. The first thing everyone says--and I’ll bet I’ve heard it two hundred times--is this:

“Is it better or worse than you thought it would be?”

Then I have to explain to them that in the United States we had felt that perhaps, because of the censorship, we might not be getting a complete picture of the devastation. We had been afraid that London was more grievously wounded than we were being allowed to know. And now, having been prepared for any shock and having looked at London, I can truthfully answer that it is better off than I had expected.

I think the newspapers have given a proper estimate of the damage. True, the destruction has been immense. But these ghastly blows actually have hurt London less than it is possible to imagine or believe without seeing for yourself.

London as a living, enduring institution is not gravely injured. Not in its architecture, or in its mode of existence, or its utilities, or its transportation, or its health. And above all, not in its spirit. So far, the blitz on London is a failure. London is no more knocked out than the man who smashes a finger is dead. Daytime life in London today comes very close to being normal.

My reply of “better” seemed to please the questioners, with one exception. A girl said, “Oh, I’m sorry to hear you say that.” I think she probably felt that I didn’t appreciate what they had been through. Also, she may have thought that if I wrote such stuff back to the States it might lead people to believe that Britain didn’t need help as badly as she really does.

* * * * *

There are no restrictions on newspapermen here. They can travel wherever they like.

The two sections of London hardest hit are the poor East End and the rich West End. The latter would correspond to the Times Square and Fifth Avenue districts in New York; or to all of downtown Washington between the Capitol and the “Million Dollar” Bridge; or to San Francisco from Market Street to Russian Hill.

I haven’t been to the East End yet, but I have walked at least ten miles through the West End. I covered and re-covered the Parliament Buildings, Regent and Oxford Streets (the great shopping centers), Pall Mall and Piccadilly, Park Lane and Leicester Square, the Strand and Holborn Circus. And the best way I can describe it is to say this:

You may walk a block or two without seeing a single wrecked building. Then occasionally you will see a block that is half wiped out. But the typical block in the West End would have perhaps two buildings completely wrecked by bomb or fire, and half a dozen damaged but not destroyed. That still leaves a lot of whole, sound buildings.

There is in the West End no single great sweep of destruction, with everything flat--just a building damaged here and another there.

You are impressed when you see how little effect a bomb has on a building unless it is a bomb of the very heaviest type. A big modern building next door to us took a heavy bomb right on top, yet it stands there today whole and beautiful, only slightly damaged. Steel and concrete and stone usually stand up. It is the age-weary buildings of brick and dry mortar that have gone down in heart-sickening heaps.

Much of the damage is not visible to a person walking on the street. I was in a plant, the rear part of which had been blown to the ground, yet from the front it looked untouched. A house next door to doom may get nothing more than broken windows. The Savoy Hotel stands up as big as life, but it has been hit more than once. The famous Savoy Grill is closed while bomb damage is repaired. And when I was taking a gander out my window I discovered that the room next to mine was unoccupied--because a bomb had blown off a corner of it.

Yet the service--food, light, drink, attention--goes on as usual, even to the floor porter complaining that I hadn’t put my shoes out for him to shine. The British won’t let anything interfere with their being British.

The damage is terrific, but what impresses me most about it--and the point I want to get over--is this: it doesn’t make any difference!

That sounds heartless. But honestly, it’s the way the British look at it. They don’t feel that they have been hurt at all.

An American who has been here through it all says the most impressive thing to him is the way people who have been secure have abandoned their property sense. They can see their buildings go up in smoke, their savings blasted to bits, and apparently they don’t care--so long as “we get that guy in the end.”

_III. MOST HATEFUL, MOST BEAUTIFUL_

_1. RINGED AND STABBED WITH FIRE_

_London,
December, 1940_

Some day when peace has returned to this odd world I want to come to London again and stand on a certain balcony on a moonlit night and look down upon the peaceful silver curve of the Thames with its dark bridges. And standing there, I want to tell somebody who has never seen it how London looked on a certain night in the holiday season of the year 1940.

For on that night this old, old city was--even though I must bite my tongue in shame for saying it--the most beautiful sight I have ever seen.

It was a night when London was ringed and stabbed with fire.

* * * * *

They came just after dark, and somehow you could sense from the quick, bitter firing of the guns that there was to be no monkey business this night.

Shortly after the sirens wailed you could hear the Germans grinding overhead. In my room, with its black curtains drawn across the windows, you could feel the shake from the guns. You could hear the boom, crump, crump, crump, of heavy bombs at their work of tearing buildings apart. They were not too far away.

Half an hour after the firing started I gathered a couple of friends and went to a high, darkened balcony that gave us a view of a third of the entire circle of London. As we stepped out onto the balcony a vast inner excitement came over all of us--an excitement that had neither fear nor horror in it, because it was too full of awe.

You have all seen big fires, but I doubt if you have ever seen the whole horizon of a city lined with great fires--scores of them, perhaps hundreds.

There was something inspiring just in the awful savagery of it.

The closest fires were near enough for us to hear the crackling flames and the yells of firemen. Little fires grew into big ones even as we watched. Big ones died down under the firemen’s valor, only to break out again later.

About every two minutes a new wave of planes would be over. The motors seemed to grind rather than roar, and to have an angry pulsation, like a bee buzzing in blind fury.

The guns did not make a constant overwhelming din as in those terrible days of September. They were intermittent--sometimes a few seconds apart, sometimes a minute or more. Their sound was sharp, near by; and soft and muffled, far away. They were everywhere over London.

Into the dark-shadowed spaces below us, while we watched, whole batches of incendiary bombs fell. We saw two dozen go off in two seconds. They flashed terrifically, then quickly simmered down to pin points of dazzling white, burning ferociously. These white pin points would go out one by one, as the unseen heroes of the moment smothered them with sand. But also, while we watched, other pin points would burn on, and soon a yellow flame would leap up from the white center. They had done their work--another building was on fire.

The greatest of all the fires was directly in front of us. Flames seemed to whip hundreds of feet into the air. Pinkish-white smoke ballooned upward in a great cloud, and out of this cloud there gradually took shape--so faintly at first that we weren’t sure we saw correctly--the gigantic dome of St. Paul’s Cathedral.

St. Paul’s was surrounded by fire, but it came through. It stood there in its enormous proportions--growing slowly clearer and clearer, the way objects take shape at dawn. It was like a picture of some miraculous figure that appears before peace-hungry soldiers on a battlefield.

The streets below us were semi-illuminated from the glow. Immediately above the fires the sky was red and angry, and overhead, making a ceiling in the vast heavens, there was a cloud of smoke all in pink. Up in that pink shrouding there were tiny, brilliant specks of flashing light--antiaircraft shells bursting. After the flash you could hear the sound.

Up there, too, the barrage balloons were standing out as clearly as if it were daytime, but now they were pink instead of silver. And now and then through a hole in that pink shroud there twinkled incongruously a permanent, genuine star--the old-fashioned kind that has always been there.

Below us the Thames grew lighter, and all around below were the shadows--the dark shadows of buildings and bridges that formed the base of this dreadful masterpiece.

Later on I borrowed a tin hat and went out among the fires. That was exciting too; but the thing I shall always remember above all the other things in my life is the monstrous loveliness of that one single view of London on a holiday night--London stabbed with great fires, shaken by explosions, its dark regions along the Thames sparkling with the pin points of white-hot bombs, all of it roofed over with a ceiling of pink that held bursting shells, balloons, flares and the grind of vicious engines. And in yourself the excitement and anticipation and wonder in your soul that this could be happening at all.

These things all went together to make the most hateful, most beautiful single scene I have ever known.

_2. NIGHT STROLL, ILLUMINATED_

_London,
December, 1940_

London learns a lesson from each new horror that the Germans bring over.

Through the school of experience it is gradually acquiring a superb efficiency at its new career of bomb-receiving. It learned a keen lesson from that Sunday night fire-bombing which was my own introduction to modern war. That lesson was that the rooftops of London must be manned through every hour of darkness.

They say there are a million buildings in London. Of course there is not a watcher on every single little roof; but hereafter whenever Hitler sends his fire-sprayers there will be at least a quarter of a million pairs of hands and eyes waiting on the darkened rooftops to smother his fire bombs or direct the firemen to them.

* * * * *

Let me tell you how an incendiary bomb works.

A fire bomb is about a foot long, and shaped like a miniature torpedo. On the upper end are three metal fins circled by a strip of metal on top. The bomb is made of a magnesium alloy, with a thermite core. Each one weighs a little better than two pounds. One plane can scatter a thousand of them. Ten planes could easily start 750 fires at once, over a large area.

Of course you don’t see the bombs falling. They go off when they strike. If they hit the street they bounce crazily like a football, sputter violently for the first minute, throwing white fire about thirty feet, and then simmer down in an intense molten mass and burn about ten minutes more. It is said they burn at a temperature of 2000 degrees. If one is left on a floor it will burn a hole and drop through. When they land in the open they are easily smothered with sand. Common ordinary citizens have smothered thousands of them.

Sunday night I saw one that fell within two feet of an emergency sandbox in the street. That was an easy one. But few of them land so conveniently.

That night I went to an office building which I visit frequently, and there two fire bombs had plunged through the roof and on down through three floors. One of them had gone through a heavy sheet of steel laid over an air-shaft. It left an opening in that steel plate exactly the shape of the bomb, and as neat as though it had been cut in cardboard with a knife.

Now there was a lesson about placing roof spotters. The men on the roof of that building knew that those bombs had gone through, and they were quickly smothered. But there were hundreds of unwatched buildings in London that night into which fire bombs plunged unnoticed, and ten minutes later the buildings were aflame.

That night as I wandered along Fleet Street I saw a five-story building suddenly leap into great flames. The firemen hadn’t even known there was a fire in it.

At home, when a big fire starts, the police rope off the whole section, but it wasn’t so in London Sunday night. What few pedestrians there were could go anywhere they liked, and they didn’t have to feel their way that night, for there was no darkness.

Probably foolishly, I walked down a street that was afire on both sides, past walls that would soon be ready to fall. Hundreds of small motor pumps, carried in two-wheeled trailers behind cars, stood in the streets. The engines made such a whir you couldn’t have heard a plane overhead. Firemen by the hundreds were working calmly, shouting orders to each other, smoking cigarettes, and paying no attention to pedestrians.

I walked ten blocks. Every step had to be picked carefully amid an intertwined mass of fire hose.

Somehow I didn’t have a feeling that this was war. I just felt as if I were seeing a terrific number of big “natural” fires. Even when I came upon two buildings that had been blown to dust by heavy bombs less than an hour before, there was still a feeling that it was all perfectly “natural.”

Although bombs are liable to fall anywhere, it happened that none came within six blocks of where we stood watching the early part of the fantastic show Sunday night. There were fires all around us, but we seemed to be on an island of immunity.

When we started out among the fires, the friends with whom I had been watching took another route and I did my fire-wandering alone. Oddly enough, I was never afraid. As I remember it, my only concern was lest I get in the firemen’s way.

When I returned to our oasis shortly before midnight, just as I stepped in the door the “raiders passed” signal sounded. Up in my room I discovered that my feet were soaked and my coat drenched with spray from leaky hoses.

When I turned out the light and pulled the blackout curtains from across the windows the room was bright from the glare of the fires, and it was hard to get to sleep. But I did sleep. And when I awakened, about six o’clock in the morning, the great light in the sky was gone. London again was almost as dark as it has been every night for a year and a half. So well do the firemen of London do their work.

The coming of daylight is always a blessing. Things have a way of looking overly grotesque at night. Today I can go out onto our balcony, where we stood watching London burn, and London will look just as it did the afternoon before the raiders came. True, property was destroyed--much property, valuable both materially and sentimentally. And lives were lost. But London is big, and its lives are many. You feel a little abashed to realize the next morning that London is still here. The skyline looks just the same. The streets are jammed with human beings.

Life is going on--where last night you felt that this must be the end of everything.

_3. THE LANDMARKS_

_London,
January, 1941_

Let us go for a walk on the tourist beat--or what was the tourist beat in the days when tourists could come to London.

We see that Westminster Abbey has been hit. Its beautiful windows have been knocked out. But ninety-eight per cent of the building is still there, and it is still open to visitors. Today I stood over the small new block of concrete in the floor that covers Mr. Chamberlain’s grave, the Abbey’s latest.

It is darkish in the Abbey now, for most of the windows are boarded up.

Parliament? Yes, these buildings have been hit. But again it is a case of a smashed finger, not a fatal injury. The entrance to the House of Commons is gone; there is some damage to the interior; and the same bomb damaged the rear end of Richard the Lionhearted’s bronze horse and bent Richard’s upheld sword, but he still rides on.

This one amuses me: Before the war started, the great tower above the House of Lords was shrouded by a maze of steel scaffolding, in connection with a wide plan for remodeling and repair. So what did they do? They went right ahead repairing.

And Big Ben? Well, he’s still striking the hours. He hasn’t been touched, despite half a dozen German claims that he has been knocked down.

Bombs have fallen around Trafalgar Square, yet Nelson still stands atop his great monument, and the immortal British lions, all four of them, still crouch at the base of the statue, untouched.

The statues of Lincoln and Washington have not been hit. You can still get roast beef at Simpson’s (and you still tip the chef sixpence when he wheels it to your table and cuts off a slice). If you had a favorite pub, ten to one it is still serving ale.

* * * * *

With two exceptions, all the well-known hotels are still operating, and are full. The exceptions are the Carlton and another that I can’t name. The Carlton was burned, but they say it is going to be repaired and re-opened.

The big hotels have music and dancing as usual. The lounges are utterly packed at teatime with tea and coffee drinkers. The only difference from peacetime is that you can’t see your hand in front of you when you walk out the front door at night.

St. Paul’s Cathedral has been hit in the rear but the damage is not nearly as bad as I had heard. The cathedral as a whole is still there, and it is open. The damaged wing is shut off by a gate, on which a sign says, not “No Admittance,” but “Out of Bounds.”

The people of London are both philosophical and proud about St. Paul’s. They go to look at it without sadness, and they say, “We would rather have it that way in a free London than have it whole like Notre Dame in an imprisoned Paris.”

The Tower of London has been hit, and a bomb struck near the Bank of England. But both places still stand. The Natural History Museum has been bombed, and what many people consider a wonderful joke was a direct hit on the million-year-old skeleton of a brontosaurus.

Londoners pray daily that a German bomb will do something about the Albert Memorial in Kensington Gardens. If you have ever seen it, you know why. As the British say, they could bear its removal with equanimity. But the contrary Germans have only taken a few little chips out of it.

Madame Tussaud’s Waxworks is open again, after being temporarily closed by a bombing next door. There are bomb craters in all the familiar parks. The American Express office in Haymarket has not been touched, although buildings have been wrecked near by.

* * * * *

Some months ago Vincent Sheean had a piece in the _Redbook_ magazine describing the chaotic wreckage in the West End. I remember specifically his picture of how Oxford Street was blocked off and deserted and ankle-deep in broken glass and rubble. Friends of mine were along when Sheean did his reporting for that piece, and they say he gave a true picture. But he would be surprised to see Oxford Street now.

It is as wide open as ever, jammed with buses and packed with pedestrians. In fact, it looks about like F Street in Washington the week before Christmas. Nearly all the stores are open. True, I could count on my hands the stores left with their original windows. But losing windows doesn’t cause a building to fall down. Business goes on as usual.

Selfridge’s famous department store is standing, and is open. The great Lewis store burned to the ground, as you may have seen in the newsreels--they say this was London’s second biggest fire--but Lewis’ rented all the ground-floor shops in the next block and is open again. Incidentally, Lewis’ gave London an awful shock the day after the fire, for they carried ads in the papers saying they knew their customers would be pleased to learn that a duplicate set of their books had been removed to the country beforehand, and consequently they had a complete record of the bills owed them.

All in all, it seems to me that London’s tourist beat has escaped remarkably well.

Just the same, a few minutes’ walk will show you that this is a city at war.

Every block is dotted with shelter signs. The official ones are black metal plates clamped to lamp posts, like street signs. They have a big white letter “S,” and underneath in small letters the word “Shelter” and a white arrow pointing to the building in front of which the sign is affixed. Each sign has a little V-shaped roof over it to keep the dim night-light from shining upward.

Every block has a dozen signs of white paper, pasted on building walls, saying “Shelter Here During Business Hours” or “Shelter for Fifty Persons after 5 P.M.” A shelter is anything that protects you. It may be an underground restaurant, a store basement, a bank vault.

I know buildings in London that go six stories underground. When the banshee wails in London’s West End you wouldn’t have to run fifty yards in any direction to find a shelter.

Other signs, in yellow and black, say “To the Trenches.” They point the way to shelters dug underneath small downtown parks such as Leicester Square. Every park and open space in London’s West End has a newly built catacomb underneath.

Then there are surface shelters. You see these everywhere. They are simply long, windowless, flat-topped sheds, about 8 feet high and 10 feet wide, stretching for a block or more. They are built of a light-tan brick and are divided into sections, each of which will hold about fifty persons. Some of them are built right down the middle of wide streets. Others are on sidewalks, up against the buildings, leaving only a couple of feet of sidewalk room.

There are also signs with arrows pointing to first-aid posts and fire substations.

All over London, in little parks and areaways and alleys there are tanks of water for fire-fighting. Barrels and buckets of sand, for throwing on incendiary bombs, small pumps and auxiliary fire apparatus are scattered everywhere. Even in the halls of my hotel.

A colossal amount of construction and repair work is going on all over London. Thirty-five thousand men are engaged in cleaning up the rubble of bombed buildings. Other scores of thousands work on the streets and under them on the maze of utility pipes and wires. Thousands more dig, build and hammer day and night, including Sundays, making more deep shelters, bricking up window openings, throwing up auxiliary walls.

Many a building has a brick wall standing in the middle of the sidewalk about three feet in front of its entrance, with a door in the middle. A few have built brick walls that entirely blanket their store fronts. And in some of London’s most important buildings workmen today are bricking up every window opening, leaving only one little gunhole in the center. This is for the invasion, if it ever comes and if it gets this far. Of course nobody believes that it will get this far, but they are taking no chances. They are making ready to fight in every street, behind every wall, out of every window, if it must come to that.

Around some Government buildings there are nasty-looking mazes of barbed wire. Some of the public statues are completely buried under mounds of sandbags, but most of them aren’t.

Piles of sandbags buttress the foundations of thousands of stores. Many of these sandbag piles look ragged and ratty now, for the bags have sprung leaks from long exposure to the weather, and sand trickles out of them. Many of them, for that matter, have been stabbed by fire fighters getting sand to put out incendiary bombs.

Army cars run about the streets. Huge, streamlined buses, camouflaged with a dull brown paint, come to town with soldiers on leave. You could hardly count the pedestrians in one block who are in uniform. At the cheaper restaurants the checkroom has more rifles than umbrellas.

Occasionally in some open space you see a flat sheet of brass-colored metal on top of a waist-high post. It looks something like a sun dial. This is a gas detector. If gas ever comes, this metal will change color.

Great parks are all dug up with trenches and mounds of dirt to keep enemy planes from landing. St. James’s Park has its honorable bomb craters, and its below-ground shelters, and even its barbed wire. Occasionally you see a big gun on a rooftop.

All this panorama is in addition to the wreckage you see on every side.

Yes, London is a martial city. You can hardly conceive of Denver or Indianapolis looking like it. And yet people are so accustomed to it now that they seem hardly to notice anything different from normal. Nobody, unless he is brand-new here, stops to look at bomb damage. Londoners seem barely aware of the barbed wire, the dugouts, the shelter signs. And I found that I, too, after a few days, could walk block after block without particularly noticing any of these things.

It is a new type of life; and that life has now become, through months of living with it, the normal life.

_4. ROUGHING IT_

_London,
January, 1941_

Some very wrong things were told me in America about the way I would have to live in London.

I was told that even in the best hotels you could get hot water only one day a week; that you couldn’t get laundry done, so you would have to throw away your soiled shirts and buy new ones; that you couldn’t buy any new ones; that there would be no decent hotel rooms; that you could get only one egg a week, and no tea; that food was so scarce it would be wise to bring concentrated food tablets and beef bouillon cubes.

Well, you ought to see where I’m staying. My room is the last word in good taste. It is completely modern and comfortable. There are deep chairs, and a bed that is a dream. I have two telephones, and a waiter, maid and valet who come when I ring. My bathroom is as big as an ordinary room, and the water is scalding hot twenty-four hours a day. Above all, the radiator gives off real heat. I’m as warm as I would be at home.

On my first morning here I asked if it would be possible to get an egg for breakfast. I not only got an egg--they brought me two eggs, ham, toast, jam and coffee, and they’ve been bringing the same thing every morning. Honestly, I feel ashamed to eat it. Of course only a tiny portion of London’s population is living like this. My circumstances do not give anything like a true picture of how England is living today. But my life now is at least a true picture of how it is possible to live in London if you pay the price. And the price I pay the hotel is $6 a day, which includes breakfast.

All this makes it hard to realize a war is actually going on. But then, there are things around the hotel that remind you.

Over the big windows of my room, looking out onto the Strand, hang thick, heavily padded curtains. On the street side these are black; on the room side, brown satin. Instead of being an unsightly makeshift, they are beautiful. Hanging on them is a card warning me not to open the curtains during the blackout under any circumstances. I was so apprehensive about doing something I shouldn’t that I slept all that first night without opening a window. I slept soundly, too, but naturally I was groggy in the morning. So I asked a clerk what to do about ventilation at night. He said, “Why, as soon as you turn out the lights, go and open the curtains and the window too. It’s all right just so you don’t show a light during the night.”

So you see I’m slow to catch on, but I’d rather be slow than dead.

The hotel’s big dining room has been moved to a lower floor, the better to keep away from the bombs. Here the waiters are all in formal clothes, an orchestra plays, and bellboys hurry about calling people to the telephone. You’d hardly know there was a war except that half the hats in the checkroom are tin hats, half the diners are in uniform, and hanging from the great center chandelier is an old-fashioned kerosene lantern, just in case.

On each table stands a handsomely printed card which says: “This room is provided with special protection from blast and splinters. The inner wall is 14 inches thick. The outer wall, five feet distant, is nine inches thick. The brick joints in each wall are strengthened with steel mesh, and the two walls support each other by 16 connecting steel rods. There are nine floors, of steel construction, above this room. The air-raid shelter is immediately below.”

But about those other warnings I had before leaving America. I have sent out my laundry and my coat to be cleaned, and they will be back tomorrow. They’d be back this evening if I wanted to pay extra.

As for shirts, I could buy any number of them, and heavy underwear, socks, suits, coats and everything else any human being could think of to wrap around his body or hang upon it. In fact, the store windows are so entrancing that I’m buying sweaters and coats and things I don’t need at all, just because they are so good-looking.

And about the concentrated food pills. Well, I haven’t wanted anything to eat yet that I couldn’t get, except enough sugar.

I have heard that paper is running short, but yesterday I bought 500 sheets of the same kind of writing paper I use at home, and at two-thirds the usual price.

Lastly, about those beef cubes I should have brought. Apparently the national drink in England is a beef extract called Bovril, which is advertised everywhere, like Coca Cola at home. Yesterday I went into a snack bar for some lunch. I asked the waitress just what this Bovril stuff was, and in a cockney accent that would lay you in the aisle she said:

“Why sir, it’s beef juice and it’s wonderful for you on cold days like this. It’s expensive, but it’s body-buildin’, sir, it’s very body-buildin’.”

So I had a cup. It cost five cents, and you just ought to see my body being built.

_5. WHOOO-ISSSHHH!_

_London,
January, 1941_

Although I’ve had my big night of fire and plenty of bombs too, I have not yet achieved any intimate acquaintance with a bomb. And I’m quite willing to have the introduction filed under “things pending.”

I’ve heard plenty of bombs explode at a distance, and I’ve even felt the building I was in shake, but I have yet to go through that horrible experience of hearing a bomb whistling right down toward me. Just the same, I’ve had this weak old heart stopped once. It didn’t happen on our big night of fires. It happened before that.

During your first few days in London you are all at sea. You are tense and jumpy and expectant, waiting and wondering how you will feel when you get your first bad scare. Well, one night I was awakened by the guns about 2 A.M. They kept firing off and on for about an hour, and then stopped. London was black and silent. There was no sound of any kind anywhere. I just lay in the bed staring at nothing.

And then there was a small, muffled thud in the distance. I ducked under the covers and waited for an explosion. But it never came.

Just that single ghostly “whooo-isshhh” and thud in the darkness, and then hours of silence. It took me a good while to get to sleep again.

The next morning I described it to a friend and asked what on earth it was, or whether I was just hearing things. And he said, “Why, no; that was a piece of falling shrapnel.”

* * * * *

I suppose there isn’t an American newspaperman in London who lived through the terrifying raids of August and September, 1940, who has not been under the bed at least twice when the bombs were whistling and dropping all around.

Everyone I have talked to, without exception, says it’s not so bad if you’re with somebody, but you have an absolute horror of being alone. Also, believe it or not, there is a general horror of being caught in the toilet or in the bathtub.

I was alone in my room the first night I actually heard German planes overhead. I was sitting at a desk writing when I heard the great drone of the motors. For several seconds it didn’t sink into my consciousness that they were not peaceful motors such as I might hear over Washington or Los Angeles, but were German motors over London. And then, I remember, I was furious because not a single antiaircraft gun was firing.

“Good Lord!” I thought. “They’re right over the hotel. I can hear them even with the windows shut. Why don’t those guys with the guns do something?”

A minute or so later the guns did start.

The planes were probably a great deal higher than I thought. But I could still almost swear they were no more than three or four thousand feet up. If they dropped any bombs, though, none of them fell near us.

The sound of the motors faded out, but intermittent firing went on for an hour. Then once again I heard planes overhead.

I couldn’t keep my mind on my writing. I sat on the edge of the chair, ready to jump down behind the bed if I heard a bomb whistling. But the funniest thing, when I look back on it, is to remember going around the room straightening up everything. I remember laying out on the desk coins and cigarettes and matches and my door key and knife, all in a meticulous row. I had just bought ten packs of cigarettes, and I stacked these neatly. All the letters on the desk I arranged in regimented stacks. I put a flashlight and a jar of Vick’s salve in a perfect line with the letters and cigarettes.

At the time I didn’t even know I was doing it. It was just a nervous outlet of some kind. When I finally went to bed I suddenly realized what I’d been doing, and laughed at myself.

* * * * *

This hotel has one of the finest basement shelters in London, but none of the American newspapermen who stop at the hotel ever sleeps in the shelter. I haven’t slept there yet either. In fact, I find lots of Londoners who prefer to stay in their own beds.

The other day we went out to look at some new bomb damage a couple of miles away. The destruction was ghastly. As we stood and looked, one newspaper veteran of the Battle of Britain said:

“You see, you never know where it’s going to hit, and neither does the guy six miles up there in the dark who lets it loose. Just think, if he pressed the trigger at the particular time that would get you, what would be the use of hiding? The chances of any certain bomb having your number on it are very slim, but if it has, running and ducking won’t help.”

As another newspaperman said, “Your best protection is the law of averages.”

_6. SOUNDS AND SIGHTS_

_London,
January, 1941_

Before leaving the United States I told friends that one of the things I wanted to do over here was to try to describe what the air-raid sirens sound like.

Well, I will try to do it. They don’t sound quite like a fire-engine siren, although they’re on the same principle. The tone has more of the old-fashioned automobile Klaxon in it, except that at the same time, instead of being harsh or squawky, it has an almost musical quality.

The siren sounds one minute for an alert, two minutes for the all clear. On an alert, the sound goes from a low to a high pitch, up and down every few seconds. The result is, if you aren’t close to it, it sounds much like a train whistling for a crossing--except that it just keeps on whistling for one crossing after another.

The sirens are scattered all over London. They are roughly fifteen blocks apart. An alert usually starts in the south part of London. You can hear the sirens to the south of you, then all around you, and then beyond to the north. It is like a series of great sound waves washing over the city. These waves overlap; and the time from the moment you hear the first one until the last one within range of your ears is silent may not be more than four minutes.

If you’re indoors, the sirens do not seem loud. In fact, during my first few days here I didn’t hear them half the time. But when your ear gets attuned to them, you know it the second they start. My hotel isn’t close enough to any sirens for them to be annoying, however, or to wake me up if I’m asleep.

I had wondered whether the sirens kept going throughout a raid. They don’t. They sound the warning and then are silent until the all clear--and the silent interval may be anywhere from ten minutes to all night. The all clear is announced by the same sirens, but instead of going up and down they go steadily for two minutes in the same tone.

To me, the sirens do not sound fiendish, or even weird. I think they’re sort of pretty.

The other night when the all clear sounded I lay on the bed listening. You could hear half a dozen sirens going at once, on exactly the same pitch. The combined whirring of these great horns out there in the still darkness gave off a sort of musical pulsation. In fact, it sounded exactly like the lonely singing of telephone wires on a bitter cold night in the prairies of the Middle West.

* * * * *

Now, what do the guns sound like?

Well, they sound like thunder in a violent electrical storm. When they are very close they sound as though lightning were striking within a quarter of a mile. They shake the floor and rattle the windows. Then as other guns start up, farther and farther away across the city, they sound like thunder traveling away from you.

In reading about the terrific noise of the sirens and guns in the great raids of September, 1940, I often wondered just how close you would be to the nearest antiaircraft gun. Well, they are all around you. The farthest one might be only a mile from you.

People living in the neighborhood of one of these guns come to have a possessive feeling about it. They call it “my gun,” and tell stories about it to their friends. And they get quite annoyed if it’s moved away.

In these last few weeks London has, with some outstanding exceptions, been fairly quiet, while the Germans have been giving one-night blitzes to other English cities. But a great many of the raiders pass right over London, terrifically high, on their way north.

Our sirens sound a warning, apparently when the Germans cross the coastline, usually about six o’clock in the evening. Then about fifteen minutes later, our guns start up. They shoot sporadically for an hour or so, and then all is quiet. Sometimes the all clear is sounded at this point, but more often not. For usually there is shooting again around 11 P.M. and 2 A.M., and the all clear ordinarily sounds about three o’clock.

The guns naturally waken you and keep you awake. But more often than not I am sound asleep when the all clear tells besieged London that it can relax once more.

You’ve read about the barrage balloons over London. Their purpose, as you know, is to keep German fliers high, from fear of running into them.

At night they are floated into the sky at the end of thin steel cables. The balloons are silver-colored and shaped like very fat sausages; and they have pudgy stabilizing fins at one end that make them look like Walt Disney elephants with sour but coy faces.

I had supposed that these balloon cables made a great wall around London, with the balloons themselves forming the top of this wall. But that isn’t the way at all. Instead of making a border they run up all over London, like candles on an eighty-year-old’s birthday cake.

When the weather is clear you can look up and see a couple of dozen of them from any spot. They are floating at various altitudes, seemingly about half a mile apart, and not in line. They’re just scattered up there, and they look more like a ceiling than a wall.

As proof of how little the average person looks toward the sky, I have thought to look at the balloons only two or three times since coming here, and friends of mine say they haven’t noticed them for weeks.

Suppose, I asked, a German plane should run into a balloon cable and cut it in two. Englishmen can’t do the old Hindu rope trick; so consequently all those miles of free cable up in the sky would have to come down. What happens then?

Well, it comes down all right, and plenty happens. The cable folds and wraps itself around buildings all over its particular section of town. This doesn’t happen often, but when it does I would just as soon be elsewhere.

* * * * *

On New Year’s Day I took a long walk through Hyde Park and Kensington Gardens. Believe it or not, there amid the trenches and the bomb craters and in the raw, cold weather was a whole garden of red and yellow roses in bloom.

* * * * *

A single bombing is referred to in London, with traditional British reserve, as an “incident.” If you ask a bobby where that big one went off last night he is apt to say, “Two blocks ahead, a block to the left, turn right, and you will be at the scene of the incident.”

When you get there, the “incident” will likely turn out to be half a block merely blown all to hell.

The other day we saw a fire engine dashing madly down the street. There had been no alert, and no enemy planes were over the city. The engine was simply going to an ordinary old-fashioned fire. It seemed absolutely incongruous. We had forgotten that fires had been starting without bombs for centuries, and that fire engines had been running to them in peacetime for generations.

* * * * *

Antiaircraft guns, they tell me, can propel a shell upward for better than four miles. The shells are set to explode at a given altitude; or rather, a given number of seconds after leaving the gun. When they explode they make a great flash, and fragments are thrown over a radius of several hundred yards. Thus they don’t have to get a direct hit on a plane, which would be more accidental than anything else. If they just get somewhere near him the explosion will sure make him jump.

But what goes up must come down. The falling pieces of these exploded shells are shrapnel. And if you get hit by a small piece of steel that has fallen four miles you are going to get hurt. Hence the tin hat or steel helmet.

Every man in uniform carries a steel helmet and a gas mask on a strap over his shoulder. Even when on leave, men in the services are obliged to carry them constantly. The rule is so strict that if a soldier gets hit by shrapnel when not wearing his tin hat, then the injury is considered a self-inflicted wound and he is disciplined accordingly.

But the people of London themselves have relaxed. Today on the streets you don’t see one civilian in five hundred carrying either a tin hat or a gas mask. In fact, real steel helmets are all gone. It is impossible to buy one. But the stores are selling helmets made of a heavy black fiber composition. They say these work just about as well as the tin ones. I bought one the other day for three dollars, and within four hours I had forgotten it and left it somewhere. So now I either have to shell out another three bucks, or run the chance of going around covered with self-inflicted wounds. I can’t decide what to do.

_7. BLINDFOLDED IN SAHARA_

_London,
January, 1941_

Now the days are getting longer, and the people of London count the few precious minutes of added daylight each day as though they were pearls.

For truly the blackout is a heavy and insidious thing. It gradually gets on your nerves until you feel as if you must throw it aside and let the light out into the night. Modern man is not attuned to natural darkness.

Every day the papers publish the exact minute for blacking out. When I first came to London the nights were at their very longest. The blackout went on as early as 5:19 P.M. and didn’t end until 8:35 in the morning. That’s more than fifteen hours of blackness.

It is a finable offense to show a light from a window during the blackout. You don’t even dare to light a cigarette in the street.

One morning a friend of mine, who is stopping in the same hotel, opened his curtains at 8:25. His watch was fast and he didn’t know it. In just one minute a plane spotter on a nearby roof had sent a man to knock on his door and suggest that he be more careful in the future.

Every afternoon about four a maid comes to my room and asks if she may “black out now.” But we have made an arrangement for me to take advantage of the outdoor light as long as possible, and then close the curtains myself about five o’clock.

* * * * *

Some friends of mine live in an apartment. Just before I came here London had a hot and heavy night, with incendiary and high-explosive bombs falling over the entire city. Apparently my friends were showing a little light, for a warden came and warned them. And not a minute after he had left, two or three bombs dropped within a block or so.

The warden came back and said: “Now you see? The Germans saw your light. That’s why we’re getting these bombs here now.”

Of course he really didn’t think that, but it made a good joke. The best “joke,” however, was that when the warden continued his rounds he discovered that those two bombs he was talking about had blown his own house to smithereens.

* * * * *

A few nights ago a warden knocked on my door and said a plane spotter across the street had seen a light in my window. The warden inspected the curtains and said they were perfectly all right. But about two hours later he was back, saying the spotter still reported a light from my window.

We finally figured out that a desk light on my writing table was shining up toward the top of the curtains, and that a little light was seeping through. So I moved the table to the back of the room, and the next day the hotel put a heavy auxiliary hood across the top of the window, around the regular blackout curtains. There have been no more complaints.

* * * * *

London decided to keep daylight-saving time all winter. That puts us six hours ahead of New York, and eight hours ahead of Denver. It seems a little odd to think, when getting up in the morning, that in Albuquerque it is the night before and my friends there are just going to bed (or at least should be if they’re leading a clean, righteous life like me).