“I was passing Hyde Park,” says a man, “when a
big raid came over. I went down into the gutter. Always did that when you
couldn’t get a shelter. I saw a great tree, one like those, jump into the air
and fall on its side not so far from me—right there where that scoop is in the
ground. And then a sparrow fell in the gutter right beside me. It was dead all
right. Concussion kills birds easily. For some reason I picked it up and held
it for a long time. There was no blood on it or anything like that. I took it
home with me. Funny thing, I had to throw it right away.”
One night, when the bombs screamed and blatted,
a refugee who had been driven from place to place and tortured in all of them
until he finally reached London, couldn’t stand it any more. He cut his throat
and jumped out of a high window. A girl, who was driving an ambulance that
night, says, “I remember how angry I was with him. I understand it a little
now, but that night I was furious with him. There were so many who got it that
night and they couldn’t help it. I shouted at him I hoped he would die, and he
did.
“People save such strange things. One elderly
man lost his whole house by fire. He saved an old rocking chair. He took it
everywhere with him; wouldn’t leave it for a moment. His whole family was
killed, but he hung on to that rocking chair. He wouldn’t sit in it. He sat on the
ground beside it, but you couldn’t get it away from him.”
Two reporters sat out the blitz in the Savoy
Hotel, playing chess and fortifying themselves. When the bombs came near they
went under the table. “One or the other of us always reached up and cheated a
little,” the reporter says.
Hundreds of stories, and all of them end with a
little incident, a little simple thing that stays in your mind.
“I remember the eyes of people going to work in
the morning,” a man says. “There was a quality of tiredness in those eyes I
haven’t forgotten. It was beyond a tiredness you can imagine—a desperate kind
of weariness that never expected to be rested. The eyes of the people seemed to
be deep, deep in their heads, and their voices seemed to come from a long
distance. And I remember during a raid seeing a blind man standing on the curb,
tapping with his stick and waiting for someone to take him across through the
traffic. There wasn’t any traffic, and the air was full of fire, but he stood
there and tapped until someone came along and took him to a shelter.”
