When I see the wreckage of Gaza, and now of Southern Lebanon, I wonder just how any of the destruction will ever be rebuilt. Even with good will and money (neither of which are likely to eventuate unless Trump turns them into another of his Trump Trophies), where would you even start? But then I remembered our trip to London way back in 2011, and our surprise on finding St Luke’s Bombed Out Church in Liverpool. At that stage, they hadn’t quite decided what to do with it, and I’m pleased to find that they’re now using it for cultural events. Here is how it looked in 2011:
It was a salutary reminder that, especially in London, many of the historic buildings that we had walked around, marvelling at their antiquity, had actually been bombed during May 1941- and especially on the night 10-11 May 1941, which is the particular focus of this book.
Gavin Mortimer is a freelance journalist, although he has written several war-related books. To gather the material for this book, he appealed in magazines and local papers for the reminiscences of Blitz survivors of 1941 and received over two hundred responses. He followed up by phone with several correspondents, and interviewed others who don’t feature in the book. He also drew on memoirs from several historical societies, museums and archives.
His journalist impulses are on show in how he structures this book. He starts off early on the Saturday morning on 10th May and introduces us to a wide range of characters: probably too wide. It was only half-way through the book that I found a list of the ‘Main Players’ with a helpful one-sentence summary of who they were which I wish had been at the front of the book rather than at the back. Until I found it, I kept thinking “Do I know this person? Were they earlier in the book?” As it turns out, there were many, many more characters mentioned than the featured ‘Main Players’.
As his various characters woke up, and got themselves off to their various commitments, they were unaware of what they were to face that day. After an eight-month Hitler was getting bored of the Blitz, and was turning his attention to Russia, but when the RAF attacked Bremen and Hamburg in retaliation for an eight-month ransacking of London, Liverpool, Glasgow and Sheffield, Hitler was incensed (p. 20)
It was a Saturday: the football was on at Wembley stadium. Daylight saving had started in May, and the night of 10-11 was bitterly cold even though the days were fine. Vera Lynn was performing, and the cinemas were doing a roaring trade. Little did they realize that at 10.30 that night, German planes were readying to take off. Mortimer traces through the preparations of both the RAF and the Luftwaffe pilots as they ready themselves for a raid. This seemed to take an inordinate number of pages so that it wasn’t until p. 116 of a 353 p. book that the bombing actually began. The author is obviously fond of the technical details of military hardware, because at times his descriptions of the planes and dogfights became rather tedious. I much more enjoyed the human stories.
And there are many human stories here. Some of his characters appear just once, as an example of the point that he is making. Sometimes the stories are grouped around a particular location, or a specific role (firewatcher, fireman, churchman etc.) and while some characters appear in several places, others do not. Some of the stories use his informants’ own words, in other stories he has paraphrased them. The bombing came mainly in two waves, with sporadic bombings as Sunday morning dawned. There is a good representation of both men and women, of different ages, located across London.
There is much that I hadn’t realized. It had never occurred to me that it would be bitterly cold- it was May, after all. After more than a year of bombing (imagine that, night after night), arrangements had been made for temporary reservoirs from which the firetrucks could draw their water. Some of them were constructed on the spot as needed on the streets; others were built into the basements of buildings that had been sealed and converted into reservoirs. Buildings had their own firewatchers, patrolling the building looking for outbreaks of fire, especially from incendiary bombs. And how would you even start to reinstall the services afterwards? When the bombs formed craters, the sewage culverts were repaired first because they were the deepest, then electricity cables and hydraulic power mains, followed by the gas mains which were actually lower than the hydraulics but they needed to wait until everything was secure because they were made of heavy iron. The water mains were last, fixed and sterilized. (p. 318)
He challenges some myths as well. There was looting, and the East End bitterly resented the Royal Family coming down and pretending that they were in the same boat as everyone else then travelling up to the wilds of Scotland, while Londoners were left with ruins and craters.
The book has beautiful vintage maps as the endpieces of the book, but as someone not familiar with London at all, I found them next to useless. I would have really appreciated some clearly drawn maps of various locations and landmarks, inserted in the text where he was describing the bombing.
He closes the book with an epilogue, where he follows up on the main informants and what they were doing at the time of publication (2005). Many of them were elderly then, so I suppose that there are even fewer now. This underlines the importance of capturing these ‘Voices from the London Blitz’ before they fall silent. But unfortunately there are other survivors in Ukraine, Gaza and Lebanon, who continue to endure their own blitzes as well. Their stories are yet to be written.
My rating: 7/10
Sourced from: Brotherhood Books
Read because: I loved Sarah Water’s The Night Watch and Kate Atkinson’s Life after Life.
The Resident Judge of Port Phillip 