London Blitz Quotes

Lucy began cutting her sausage into rounds. “I can’t believe Christmas is almost upon us,” she mentioned. “It’ll be a hard Christmas for many,” James said. “A dark Christmas for all.” “That’s why it’s good to remember that we have the Light,” Lucy said softly. James smiled at her. “Right you are, Lucy. Right you are.

And a ton came down on a coloured road, And a ton came down on a gaol, And a ton came down on a freckled girl, And a ton on the black canal, And a ton came down on a hospital, And a ton on a manuscript, And a ton shot up through the dome of a church, And a ton roared down to the crypt. And a ton danced over the Thames and filled A thousand panes with stars, And the splinters leapt on the Surrey shore To the tune of a thousand scars.

The author describes the attitude of some on the frontier at Rome's twilight as exhibiting "a kind of London-in-the-blitz determination to carry on being more Roman than usual.

When the Carlton Club, A Conservative Party bastion in London, was badly damaged by bombs and Churchill remarked that he was surprised that no one had been killed, a Labor Party official replied, "The devil looks after his own.

There was no clear-cut moment of victory for the British. They really won when Sea Lion was called off, but this Hitler backdown was a secret. The Luftwaffe kept up heavy night raids on the cities, and this with the U-boat sinkings made the outlook for England darker and darker until Hitler attacked the Soviet Union. But the Luftwaffe never recovered from the Battle of Britain. This was one reason why the Germans failed to take Moscow in 1941. The blitzkrieg ran out of blitz in Russia because it had dropped too much of it on the fields of Kent and Surrey, and in the streets of London.—V.H.

Londoners during the Blitz in World War II went about their day as normal, with the understanding that occasionally buildings get blown up. However desperate things were, someone still had to deliver milk. And if Mrs. McCreedy’s house got bombed in the night, well, you crossed it off the delivery list.

Always there have been six ravens at the Tower. If the ravens fly away, the kingdom will fall.

What do you recommend, James?" asked Jozef, perusing the scanty menu with a metropolitan air. "So many choices!" Dorota giggled. "Ah, it's recommending the fish I am," James answered gravely. "So good, you aren't needing even a drop of lemon to aid it." Both girls tittered. Truth to be told, none of them had seen so much as a lemon peel in the last two months.

In February, 1945, American bombers reduced this treasure to crushed stone and embers; disemboweled her with high-explosives and cremated her with incendiaries. The atom bomb may represent a fabulous advance, but it is interesting to note that primitive TNT and thermite managed to exterminate in one bloody night more people than died in the whole London blitz.

The situation was dire and deadly, but it was also the norm. Londoners during the Blitz in World War II went about their day as normal, with the understanding that occasionally buildings get blown up. However desperate things were, someone still had to deliver milk. And if Mrs. McCreedy’s house got bombed in the night, well, you crossed it off the delivery list.

The one universal balm for the trauma of war was tea. It was the thing that helped people cope. People made tea during air raids and after air raids, and on breaks between retrieving bodies from shattered buildings. Tea bolstered the network of thirty thousand observers who watched for German aircraft over England, operating from one thousand observation posts, all stocked with tea and kettles. Mobile canteens dispensed gallons of it, steaming, from spigots. In propaganda films, the making of tea became a visual metaphor for carrying on. “Tea acquired almost a magical importance in London life,” according to one study of London during the war. “And the reassuring cup of tea actually did seem to help cheer people up in a crisis.” Tea ran through Mass-Observation diaries like a river. “That’s one trouble about the raids,” a female diarist complained. “People do nothing but make tea and expect you to drink it.” Tea anchored the day—though at teatime, Churchill himself did not actually drink it, despite reputedly having said that tea was more important than ammunition. He preferred whiskey and water. Tea was comfort and history; above all, it was English. As long as there was tea, there was England. But now the war and the strict rationing that came with it threatened to shake even this most prosaic of pillars.

Pamela’s husband, Randolph, newly minted member of Parliament, missed the birth. He was in London, in bed with the wife of an Austrian tenor, whose monocled image appeared on cigarette trading cards.

Smoke curls among the ruins of East London. Many of the buildings have burned to the ground or split like exploded rocks. Small lights bloom like a sea of candles. Even this rain will never put them all out.

During World War II, a few years after Norma Jeane’s time in an orphanage, thousands of children were evacuated from the air raids and poor rations of London during the Blitz, and placed with volunteer families or group homes in the English countryside or even in other countries. It was only postwar studies comparing these children to others left behind that opened the eyes of many experts to the damage caused by emotional neglect. In spite of living in bombed-out ruins and constant fear of attack, the children who had been left with their mothers and families tended to fare better than those who had been evacuated to physical safety. Emotional security, continuity, a sense of being loved unconditionally for oneself—all those turn out to be as important to a child’s development as all but the most basic food and shelter.

No other British city experienced such losses, but throughout the United Kingdom the total of civilian deaths in 1940 and 1941, including those in London, reached 44,652, with another 52,370 injured. Of the dead, 5,626 were children.

Göring had promised Hitler he would bring England to its knees in four days, but even after four weeks of nightly attacks on London and raids against a host of other targets, there was still no sign that Churchill was beginning to waver.

Churchill insisted that the Government stayed in Whitehall throughout the Blitz. ‘Mr Churchill took the view’, recorded Thompson, ‘that it was essential that they took at least the same chances as the remainder of the population of London.

The London Blitz. Feller recounts that during the Blitz in World War II, Londoners noticed that a few sections of the city were hit by German V-2 rockets many times, while others were not hit at all. They were convinced that the rockets were targeting particular kinds of neighborhoods. But when statisticians divided a map of London into small squares and counted the bomb strikes, they found that the strikes followed the distribution of a Poisson process—the bombs, in other words, were falling at random.

After one raid set London’s Natural History Museum on fire, water from firemen’s hoses caused seeds in its collection to germinate, among them those from an ancient Persian silk tree, or mimosa—Albizia julibrissin. The seeds were said to be 147 years old.

CHEQUERS AND ITS FULL-MOON SURROGATE, Ditchley, were by now a regular weekend ritual for Churchill. These brief sojourns took him away from the increasingly dreary, bomb-worn vistas of London, and salved that need within his English soul for trees, hollows, ponds, and birdsong.

Kennedy, in turn, was not well liked in London. The wife of Churchill’s foreign secretary, Lord Halifax, detested the ambassador for his pessimism about Britain’s chances for survival and his prediction that the RAF would quickly be crushed. She wrote, “I could have killed him with pleasure.

Courage is not something that you already have that makes you brave when the tough times start. Courage is what you earn when you’ve been through the tough times and you discover they aren’t so tough after all. Do you see the catastrophic error that the Germans made? They bombed London because they thought that the trauma associated with the Blitz would destroy the courage of the British people. In fact, it did the opposite. It created a city of remote misses, who were more courageous than they had ever been before. The Germans would have been better off not bombing London at all.

Britain’s civil defense experts, fearing a “knock-out blow,” predicted that the first aerial attack on London would destroy much if not all of the city and kill two hundred thousand civilians. “It was widely believed that London would be reduced to rubble within minutes of war being declared,” wrote one junior official.

With the prospect of raids on London itself, U.S. ambassador Joseph Kennedy decamped. To the great disdain of many in London, he began conducting his ambassadorial affairs from his home in the country. Within the Foreign Office, a joke began to circulate: "I always thought my daffodils were yellow until I met Joe Kennedy.

Dinner proceeded as if no raid were occurring. After the meal, Biddle told Churchill that he would like to see for himself “the strides which London had made in air-raid precautions.” At which point Churchill invited him and Harriman to accompany him to the roof. The raid was still in progress. Along the way, they put on steel helmets and collected John Colville and Eric Seal, so that they, too, as Colville put it, could “watch the fun.” Getting to the roof took effort. “A fantastic climb it was,” Seal said in a letter to his wife, “up ladders, a long circular stairway, & a tiny manhole right at the top of a tower.” Nearby, anti-aircraft guns blasted away. The night sky filled with spears of light as searchlight crews hunted the bombers above. Now and then aircraft appeared silhouetted against the moon and the starlit sky. Engines roared high overhead in a continuous thrum. Churchill and his helmeted entourage stayed on the roof for two hours. “All the while,” Biddle wrote, in a letter to President Roosevelt, “he received reports at various intervals from the different sections of the city hit by the bombs. It was intensely interesting.” Biddle was impressed by Churchill’s evident courage and energy. In the midst of it all, as guns fired and bombs erupted in the distance, Churchill quoted Tennyson—part of an 1842 monologue called Locksley Hall, in which the poet wrote, with prescience: Heard the heavens fill with shouting, and there rain’d a ghastly dew From the nations’ airy navies grappling in the central blue.

fearing a “knock-out blow,” predicted that the first aerial attack on London would destroy much if not all of the city and kill two hundred thousand civilians. “It was widely believed that London would be reduced to rubble within minutes of war being declared,” wrote one junior official. Raids would cause such terror among the survivors that millions would go insane. “London for several days will be one vast raving bedlam,

According to Home Intelligence, “People living near guns are suffering from serious lack of sleep: a number of interviews made round one gun in West London showed that people were getting much less sleep than others a few hundred yards away.” But no one wanted the guns to stop. “There is little complaint about lack of sleep, mainly because of the new exhilaration created by the barrage. Nevertheless this serious loss of sleep needs watching.

The house fostered an easier and more candid exchange of ideas and opinions, encouraged by the simple fact that everyone had left their offices behind and by a wealth of novel opportunities for conversation—climbs up Beacon and Coombe Hills, walks in the rose garden, rounds of croquet, and hands of bezique, further leavened by free-flowing champagne, whiskey, and brandy. The talk typically ranged well past midnight. At Chequers, visitors knew they could speak more freely than in London, and with absolute confidentiality. After one weekend, Churchill’s new commander in chief of Home Forces, Alan Brooke, wrote to thank him for periodically inviting him to Chequers, and “giving me an opportunity of discussing the problems of the defense of this country with you, and of putting some of my difficulties before you. These informal talks are of the very greatest help to me, & I do hope you realize how grateful I am to you for your kindness.” Churchill, too, felt more at ease at Chequers, and understood that here he could behave as he wished, secure in the knowledge that whatever happened within would be kept secret (possibly a misplaced trust, given the memoirs and diaries that emerged after the war, like desert flowers after a first rain). This was, he said, a “cercle sacré.” A sacred circle. General Brooke recalled one night when Churchill, at two-fifteen A.M., suggested that everyone present retire to the great hall for sandwiches, which Brooke, exhausted, hoped was a signal that soon the night would end and he could get to bed. “But, no!” he wrote. What followed was one of those moments often to occur at Chequers that would remain lodged in visitors’ minds forever after. “He had the gramophone turned on,” wrote Brooke, “and, in the many-colored dressing-gown, with a sandwich in one hand and water-cress in the other, he trotted round and round the hall, giving occasional little skips to the tune of the gramophone.” At intervals as he rounded the room he would stop “to release some priceless quotation or thought.” During one such pause, Churchill likened a man’s life to a walk down a passage lined with closed windows. “As you reach each window, an unknown hand opens it and the light it lets in only increases by contrast the darkness of the end of the passage.” He danced on. —

People who try to tell you what the blitz was like in London start with fire and explosion and then almost invariably end up with some very tiny detail which crept in and set and became the symbol of the whole thing for them. . . . "It's the glass," says one man, "the sound in the morning of the broken glass being swept up, the vicious, flat tinkle." ... An old woman was selling little miserable sprays of sweet lavender. The city was rocking under the bombs and the light of burning buildings made it like day. . . . And in one little hole in the roar her voice got in—a squeaky voice. "Lavender!" she said. "Buy Lavender for luck." The bombing itself grows vague and dreamlike. The little pictures remain as sharp as they were when they were new.

There is an art to navigating London during the Blitz. Certain guides are obvious: Bethnal Green and Balham Undergrounds are no-goes, as is most of Wapping, Silvertown and the Isle of Dogs. The further west you go, the more you can move around late at night in reasonable confidence of not being hit, but should you pass an area which you feel sure was a council estate when you last checked in the 1970s, that is usually a sign that you should steer clear. There are also three practical ways in which the Blitz impacts on the general functioning of life in the city. The first is mundane: streets blocked, services suspended, hospitals overwhelmed, firefighters exhausted, policemen belligerent and bread difficult to find. Queuing becomes a tedious essential, and if you are a young nun not in uniform, sooner or later you will find yourself in the line for your weekly portion of meat, to be eaten very slowly one mouthful at a time, while non-judgemental ladies quietly judge you Secondly there is the slow erosion-a rather more subtle but perhaps more potent assault on the spirit It begins perhaps subtly, the half-seen glance down a shattered street where the survivors of a night which killed their kin sit dull and numb on the crooked remnants of their bed. Perhaps it need not even be a human stimulus: perhaps the sight of a child's nightdress hanging off a chimney pot, after it was thrown up only to float straight back down from the blast, is enough to stir something in your soul that has no rare. Perhaps the mother who cannot find her daughter, or the evacuees' faces pressed up against the window of a passing train. It is a death of the soul by a thousand cuts, and the falling skies are merely the laughter of the executioner going about his business. And then, inevitably, there is the moment of shock It is the day your neighbour died because he went to fix a bicycle in the wrong place, at the wrong time. It is the desk which is no longer filled, or the fire that ate your place of work entirely so now you stand on the street and wonder, what shall I do? There are a lot of lies told about the Blitz spirit: legends are made of singing in the tunnels, of those who kept going for friends, family and Britain. It is far simpler than that People kept going because that was all that they could really do. Which is no less an achievement, in its way.

HOPKINS’S VISIT TO ENGLAND was supposed to last two weeks; it expanded to over four, most of which he spent with Churchill against a backdrop of mounting suspense with regard to the Lend-Lease Bill, whose passage by Congress was anything but certain. In that time, Hopkins managed to endear himself to nearly everyone he met, including the valets at Claridge’s, who took an extra effort to make him look presentable. “Oh yes,” Hopkins told one valet. “I’ve got to remember I’m in London now—I’ve got to look dignified.” From time to time, the valets would find secret documents tucked into his clothing or discover that he had left his wallet in a pants pocket. A hotel waiter said Hopkins was “very genial—considerate—if I may say so, lovable—quite different from other Ambassadors we’ve had here.

1944 - Exploring London in wartime, a city with stiff upper lip, gritted teeth, clenched fists, makes you realize that Paris is a bit of whore. Every day and every night for weeks now, London has been bleeding and hiding its wounds with impressive dignity. A ‘don’t show off’ attitude prevails. From time to time a sputtering doodle-bug (a VI) shatters the torpor of the overcast sky. One second, sometimes two ... at most three ... of silence. Visualizing that fat cigar with shark fins as it stops dead, sways, idiotically tips over, then goes into a vertical dive. And explodes. Usually it’s an entire building that’s destroyed. Apparently the Civil Defense rescue teams observe a very strict rule of discretion and restraint. You never see any panic. In this impassive city detachment is the expression of panic.

Those who romanticize war often like to think of it, at least in areas of mortal peril, as nothing but “guts and glory.” Those who are inclined to pacifism, by contrast, often think of it as an unbroken sequence of horrors. Actually, however, people in wartime still fall in love, do the laundry, worry about pimples, drink beer, and do most of the same things that they do in times of peace. The patterns of daily life may be mundane, but they are remarkably tenacious. But, while people in wartime still go about their daily routines, the prospect of imminent death can give even quotidian chores a heightened intensity. When the first bombs were dropped on London in autumn of 1940, the population bore adversity better than almost anybody had expected. The danger was mixed with excitement, and the terror had a sort of apocalyptic magnificence.

The one universal balm for the trauma of war was tea. It was the thing that helped people cope. People made tea during air raids and after air raids, and on breaks between retrieving bodies from shattered buildings. Tea bolstered the network of thirty thousand observers who watched for German aircraft over England, operating from one thousand observation posts, all stocked with tea and kettles. Mobile canteens dispensed gallons of it, steaming, from spigots. In propaganda films, the making of tea became a visual metaphor for carrying on. “Tea acquired almost a magical importance in London life,” according to one study of London during the war. “And the reassuring cup of tea actually did seem to help cheer people up in a crisis.” Tea ran through Mass-Observation diaries like a river. “That’s one trouble about the raids,” a female diarist complained. “People do nothing but make tea and expect you to drink it.

IN BERLIN, JOSEPH GOEBBELS contemplated the motivation behind Churchill’s broadcast, and its potential effect. He kept careful watch on the evolving relationship between America and Britain, weighing how his propagandists might best influence the outcome. “The battle over intervention or non-intervention continues to rage in the USA,” he wrote in his diary on Monday, April 28, the day after the broadcast. The outcome was hard to predict. “We are active to the best of our ability, but we can scarcely make ourselves heard against the deafening Jew-chorus. In London they are placing all their last hopes in the USA. If something does not happen soon, then London is faced with annihilation.” Goebbels sensed mounting anxiety. “Their great fear is of a knock-out blow during the next weeks and months. We shall do our best to justify these fears.” He instructed his operatives on how best to use Churchill’s own broadcast to discredit him. They were to mock him for saying that after he visited bombed areas, he came back to London “not merely reassured but even refreshed.” In particular, they were to seize on how Churchill had described the forces he had transferred from Egypt to Greece to confront the German invasion. Churchill had said: “It happened that the divisions available and best suited to this task were from New Zealand and Australia, and that only about half the troops who took part in this dangerous expedition came from the Mother Country.” Goebbels leapt on this with glee. “Indeed, it so happened! It invariably ‘so happens’ that the British are in the rear; it always so happens that they are in retreat. It so happened that the British had no share in the casualties. It so happened that the greatest sacrifices during the offensive in the West were made by the French, the Belgians and the Dutch. It so happened that the Norwegians had to provide cover for the British flooding back from Norway.

This new surge in morale had nothing to do with Churchill’s speech and everything to do with his gift for understanding how simple gestures could generate huge effects. What had infuriated Londoners was that during these night raids the Luftwaffe seemed free to come and go as it wished, without interference from the night-blind RAF and the city’s strangely quiescent anti-aircraft guns. Gun crews were under orders to conserve ammunition and fire only when aircraft were sighted overhead and, as a consequence, did little firing at all. On Churchill’s orders, more guns were brought to the city, boosting the total to nearly two hundred, from ninety-two. More importantly, Churchill now directed their crews to fire with abandon, despite his knowing full well that guns only rarely brought down aircraft. The orders took effect that Wednesday night, September 11. The impact on civic morale was striking and immediate. Crews blasted away; one official described it as “largely wild and uncontrolled shooting.” Searchlights swept the sky. Shells burst over Trafalgar Square and Westminster like fireworks, sending a steady rain of shrapnel onto the streets below, much to the delight of London’s residents. The guns raised “a momentous sound that sent a chattering, smashing, blinding thrill through the London heart,” wrote novelist William Sansom. Churchill himself loved the sound of the guns; instead of seeking shelter, he would race to the nearest gun emplacement and watch. The new cacophony had “an immense effect on people’s morale,” wrote private secretary John Martin. “Tails are up and, after the fifth sleepless night, everyone looks quite different this morning—cheerful and confident. It was a curious bit of mass psychology—the relief of hitting back.” The next day’s Home Intelligence reports confirmed the effect. “The dominating topic of conversation today is the anti-aircraft barrage of last night. This greatly stimulated morale: in public shelters people cheered and conversation shows that the noise brought a shock of positive pleasure.

At the time of the Blitz a plan was presented in all seriousness for the building of an enormous Anti-aircraft Mountain, thousands of feet high, in Kent. From this, its sponsor explained, gunners would be able to shoot down the highest-flying bombers raiding London! And at various times plans came to D.M.W.D. for a space-ship; a gun for merchant vessels which squirted columns of water at approaching aircraft, presumably with the object of drowning the pilot in mid-air; and a weird and wonderful machine for manufacturing artificial tidal waves in the Pacific. Its inventor claimed that this would disorganize the Japanese defence system by washing all their outlying garrisons off the smaller coral atolls!

For example, children who are separated from their parents after a traumatic event are likely to suffer serious negative long-term effects. Studies conducted during World War II in England showed that children who lived in London during the Blitz and were sent away to the countryside for protection against German bombing raids fared much worse than children who remained with their parents and endured nights in bomb shelters and frightening images of destroyed buildings and dead people.21

1984 THE PLEASUREDOME ‘It was much more baroque. I think what happened is that as we became a successful touring band, we were no longer those kids in the street, we were no longer going to those clubs. Even though London is an exciting place, all of those poor Blitz Kids were becoming rich kids because they were becoming successful.’ GARY KEMP

After Dunkirk, the Luftwaffe had turned its sights onto England. We’d seen the destructive force of German military might playing to universal horror across cinema screens up and down the country, and with our army gone, Hitler and Göring’s eyes turned west to the white cliffs of Dover. Warsaw, Rotterdam… was London next? Leeds, Manchester, Liverpool, Edinburgh? They bombed us relentlessly for a fortnight, even before France signed her official surrender. Night-time bombing raids on London, now called “The Blitz”. Fires in the night sky, women and children screaming, the shriek of the bombers, the deathly silence that briefly, fatefully follows. And then dust, blood, sirens. Noise and smells and screeching yells, panic and terror. The rising panic of a people under fire, who knew they had no army left to defend them when the enemy came.

In the earliest days of World War II when London was undergoing the blitz but the United States had not yet been drawn into the hostilities, the US ambassador walked the streets during the hottest of the bombing and ask people at every level of British society what he could do to help. What a picture of our role as ambassadors of Christ's coming Kingdom!

ON A WARM, drowsy afternoon in early September, Ed Murrow, Vincent Sheean, and Ben Robertson, a correspondent for the New York newspaper PM, stopped at the edge of a field several miles south of London. The three had spent the day driving down the Thames estuary in Murrow’s Talbot Sunbeam roadster, enjoying the sun and looking for dogfights between Spitfires and Messerschmitts. Their search had been fruitless, and they stopped to buy apples from a farmer. Stretching out on the field to eat them, they drowsily listened to the chirp of crickets and buzzing of bees. The war seemed very far away. Within minutes, however, it returned with a vengeance. Hearing the harsh throb of aircraft engines, the Americans looked up at a sky filled with wave after wave of swastika-emblazoned bombers that clearly were not heading for their targets of previous days—the coastal defenses and RAF bases of southern England. Following the curve of the Thames, they were aimed straight at London. In minutes the sky over the capital was suffused with a fiery red glow; black smoke billowed up into a vast cloud that blanketed much of the horizon. When shrapnel from antiaircraft guns rained down around the American reporters, they dived into a nearby ditch, where, stunned, they watched the seemingly endless procession of enemy aircraft flying north. “London is burning. London is burning,” Robertson kept repeating. Returning to the city, they found flames sweeping through the East End, consuming dockyards, oil tanks, factories, overcrowded tenements, and everything else in their path. Hundreds of people had been killed, thousands injured or driven from their homes. Under a blood-red moon, women pushed prams piled high with their salvaged belongings. That horrific evening marked the beginning of the Blitz: from September 7 on, London would endure fifty-seven straight nights of relentless bombing. Until then, no other city in history had ever been subjected to such an onslaught. Warsaw and Rotterdam had been heavily bombed by the Germans early in the war, but not for the length of time of the assault on London. Although

AN ESTIMATED 1,100 Londoners were killed during the April 16 raids—the most devastating night of the Blitz thus far. But it held that distinction for only three days; on April 19, German bombers hit London again, killing more than 1,200 persons. Almost half a million London residents lost their homes in the two attacks. The

You should get one of those new-fangled, one-piece siren suits," she teased Jedrick, stepping over to fix his collar. "Think how fast it would be!" "With the zip?" he said, dubiously. "In ten thousand years!

The Upside of Disaster “What’s very fortunate, beautiful, wonderful, and also, in a weird way, tragic about modern society, is that crisis has been removed. When you reintroduce a crisis like in the Blitz in London or an earthquake that I wrote about in Avezzano, Italy, early in the 20th century, [things change]. In Avezzano, something like 95% of the population was killed. I’m going from memory, but unbelievable casualty, just like a nuclear strike. . . . People had to rely on each other, so everyone—upper-class people, lower-class people, peasants, and nobility—sort of crouched around the same campfires. One of the survivors said, ‘The earthquake gave us what the law promises but does not, in fact, deliver, which is the equality of all men.

They had become good enough friends to allow the other silence

people can feel nostalgia for some of the worst of times. After World War II, many Londoners claimed to miss the communal underground living they had experienced during the Blitz.

Arrow, a famous boat-train connecting London and Dover. A woman named Rebecca Steward, who appeared to be Mrs. Carmichael’s chatelaine/drill sergeant, coordinated moving the luggage. Also present was a Miss Pamela Verrall, Mrs. Carmichael’s private secretary.

When the Naval and Military Club reported sightings of a ghost in 1994, it was believed to be that of Major ‘Perky’ Braddell, a member who had been killed in the Blitz. The Club refused to contemplate an exorcism, however, on the grounds that Major Braddell had never formally resigned his membership.8 Presumably, they were waiting to present him with the bill for the outstanding five decades of subscriptions.

Burke was scathing about places he disliked – Ilford gets a real pasting in The Outer Circle. Moving round into the High Street it speaks volumes of how badly the area must have suffered in the Blitz that Burke wrote glowingly of the ‘Plastovians’ and their neighbourhood. Any notion of Plaistow as a quaint village in the marshes fades away with the grubby Costcutter hugging the corner.

One young woman sheltered with her boyfriend’s parents in northern London on the third night of the Blitz. In the long account she wrote the next day, she complained that her hostess made them all tea “just for something to do” and added that “that’s one trouble about the raids, people do nothing but make tea and expect you to drink it.

During the Blitz of 1940–1941, for example, as German bombs rained down on London, isolated populations of Culex mosquitoes were confined to the air-raid tunnel shelters of the Underground Tube along with the city’s resilient citizens. These trapped mosquitoes quickly adapted to feed on mice, rats, and humans instead of birds and are now a species of mosquito distinct from their aboveground parental counterparts.* What should have taken thousands of years of evolution was accomplished by these mining sapper mosquitoes in less than one hundred years. “In another 100 years time,” jokes Richard Jones, former president of the British Entomological and Natural History Society, “there may be separate Circle Line, Metropolitan Line and Jubilee Line mosquito species in the tunnels below London.

In London, more people died of the virus in one four-week stretch in April than in the worst four weeks of the Blitz.

my mother would probably buy my sister

Before the war, projections for psychiatric breakdown in England ran as high as four million people, but as the Blitz progressed, psychiatric hospitals around the country saw admissions go down. Emergency services in London reported an average of only two cases of “bomb neuroses” a week. Psychiatrists watched in puzzlement as long-standing patients saw their symptoms subside during the period of intense air raids. Voluntary admissions to psychiatric wards noticeably declined, and even epileptics reported having fewer seizures.

I do so dislike H. G. Wells being accompanied by Wagner, don't you Mr. Ford?” … he was forced to acknowledge the aptness of the phrase. Nazism combines a crassly mechanical futurism with the fuss and fume of a tawdry pseudo-Gothic misconception of the past.

On the surface, my novel The Vorbing is about vampires terrorising the village of Nocturne every night. The German Blitz on London in World War II. I was the real inspiration. I was fascinated by the idea of normality by day and then this evil, destructive power coming by night, and then the cycle repeating. I wanted to explore the kind of siege mentality that would create in a fantasy setting.

Her father had said that; it was the reason he had refused to run to Canada during the Second World War, the reason her mother had spent the blitz visiting civilians huddled in the tube stations beneath London, the same reason, to this day, we remain a United Kingdom. Their task, their mandate, is to personify all that is great in our national spirit. They must forever be an example to the rest of us, the strongest, and bravest, and absolute best of us. In a sense, it is they who are ruled by us, instead of the other way around, and they must sacrifice everything, everything, to shoulder the weight of this godlike burden

The launch was very often late, ten o’clock, eleven o’clock, and then you were over London or some other English city at about one or two in the morning, and of course then you’re tired. So you took one or two Pervitin tablets, and then you were all right again. . . . I had a lot of night operations, you know. And, of course, the commander always has to have his wits about him. So I took Pervitin as a precautionary measure. Imagine the commander being tired in battle! Uh, yes, please, that’s not going to work. . . . One wouldn’t abstain from Pervitin because of a little health scare. Who cares when you’re doomed to come down at any moment anyway!118 This certainly wasn’t a one-off remark. There are no statistical studies of Pervitin among the Luftwaffe, and by historiographical standards there is little supporting evidence of the comprehensive use of the “speedamin” among pilots, apart from Ranke’s original order of 35 million doses for the army and the Luftwaffe together.

What happened to Ken Johnson?” “He was killed in the Blitz,” said Dad. “Like Al Bowlly and Lorna Savage. Ted Heath told me that sometimes they thought Göring had it in for the jazzmen. Said he felt safer during the war doing tours in North Africa than he did playing gigs in London.” I doubted I was searching for the vengeful spirit of Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring, but it wouldn’t hurt to check just in case.

Back at the start of World War Two the authorities forbade the use of the Underground as an air raid shelter. Instead Londoners were supposed to rely on hastily built neighborhood shelters or on the famous Anderson shelters, which were basically rabbit hutches made from corrugated iron with some earth shoveled on top. Londoners being Londoners, the prohibition on using the Underground lasted right up until the first air raid warning, at which point the poorly educated but far from stupid populace of the capital did a quick back-of-the-envelope comparison between the stopping power of ten meters of earth and concrete and a few centimeters of compost, and moved underground en masse. The authorities were appalled. They tried exhortation, persuasion, and the outright use of force, but the Londoners wouldn’t budge. In fact, they started to organize their own bedding and refreshment services. And thus in a cloud of official disapproval the Blitz spirit was born.