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| REVIEWS | BY GERALD ISAAMAN |
 Making aircraft parts in unused Tube tunnels  British women dance with US servicemen at the Red Cross club, off Piccadilly Circus  The bombs landed within yards of Big Ben  Oxford Street shoppers outside the bomb-damaged John Lewis store  Vegetables grow in the Tower of London’s moat  Devastation viewed from the roof of St Paul’s |
London 1945 by Maureen Waller John Murray, £20 The doodlebug stopped dead above me in the afternoon sky. The droning engine cut out as I walked home from school – and I dived under a hedge in the garden of a house in Hackney, waiting and wondering whether I was to be blasted to smithereens. As a child of the war, I didn’t know then that the German V1 rocket bombs that plagued London in the summer of 1944 drifted at least half a mile before creating their special havoc. But that chilling moment remains with me. Indeed, some 60 years later, I can take you back to the exact spot where I was that afternoon. And the memory of that event came flooding back as I read Maureen Waller’s brilliantly evocative reminder of the last days of the war we fought against Hitler. “Life in the debris of war” is her secondary title for a book filled with fascinating and audacious facts and the fictions of war days that come together as a kaleidoscopic social history that had to be recorded in such vivid and dramatic detail. You don’t need to have lived through those war years, to have been an evacuee, to have spent nights in the shelters and scrambled for shrapnel souvenirs on the rooftop of the LCC flats where we lived, to appreciate the horrendous history. But it undoubtedly helps to bring home all these years later how London stood battered, defiant and undefeated. Perhaps, like Malta, this great city should have earned its own George Cross, and to some extent this book provides the justification in abundance as it records with insight and sensitivity some amazing days. This ground-breaking study focuses on so much. It captures the arrival of the Yanks with their chewing gum and silk stockings and the blackmarketeering and looting that went on amid the hard days of rationing and queues for horse meat and possibly one fresh egg a month. It records the new social order that arrived when peace broke out and we looked to Clement Attlee and radical Labour to create a welcome new world out of the broken old. A few local vignettes help to paint the picture. Amid the freezing days of January 1944, in West Hampstead, Gladys Cox took a look at the effects of the first V2 bombs, the sinister, silent rockets that took just four minutes to arrive. “After lunch, it stopped snowing, and as the air was invigorating we walked, or slithered in the slush, down to Iverson Road,” she recorded. “Here, rows and rows of small houses had been blasted from back to front; doors, windows, ceilings all one. “Whole families were out in the street standing beside the remains of their possessions, piled on the pavements waiting for the removal vans; heaps of rubble everywhere, pathetically showing bits of holly and Christmas decorations.” A 90-year-old woman, who spent five years in Hampstead Tube station, one of some 3,000 who sheltered there during the Blitz, said her “greatest delight” was to watch “the people getting in and out of trains”. Many were in fact sorry to leave the safety of their underground homes. Mrs Johnson, of Mansfield Road, Gospel Oak, was a regular at Belsize Park station, where the artist Henry Moore captured their wartime plight. She said: “I am very happy here and I shall certainly miss all the friends I have made when we leave. “It is ridiculous to say that the tubes are unhealthy. Why, I have had only one cold in the five years I have been here.” Emergency coal dumps were set up in each borough, but some in urgent need rushed the dumps and the police had to be called. Living near King’s Cross, Anthony Heap recorded in his diary: “The fuel situation continues to go from bad to worse. “Still unable to get deliveries, distracted housewives daily besiege the newly opened coal dump in their thousands to buy 14lbs for sixpence. Gas and electricity supplies are liable to be suddenly cut off without notice.” Islington was seriously hit by V1 and V2 bombs. A Boxing Day rocket fell on the packed Prince of Wales pub, in Mackenzie Road, resulting in 71 deaths, 56 seriously injured and 202 slightly wounded. Yet, ironically, the arrival of Hollywood films brought out a spate of gangster hold-ups. Six boys hid at night in the churchyard of St James’s, Pentonville Road, mugging American soldiers with dummy revolvers and taking their money and valuables. When they appeared in court, they explained: “After seeing the gangster films we thought we might try the same.” In Hackney, on VE night, Harold Pinter, 15, pinched the bottom of a girl in the crowd and was knocked unconscious by her soldier boyfriend. That was before the ultimate A-bomb weapons wiped out Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Noel Coward insisting that the atomic revolution would “blow us all to buggery – not a bad idea!” Coward, like others, couldn’t cope with the end of hostilities. “I wish I had more feeling about it,” he wrote. “My mind seems unable to take it in. We shall see how sweet the face of peace looks. I cannot help visualising an inane, vacuous grin.” Amid all the mayhem of temporary mortuaries, housing shortages and damaged lives, bombed Keats House and other museums kept open. Bloomsbury and Fitzrovia pubs provided the literary haunts of writers and publishers. Michael Foot kept the Evening Standard alive with debate. George Orwell declared: “We cannot win the war without introducing socialism, nor establish socialism without winning the war.” R A Butler produced his education act which raised the school leaving age to 15 and promised secondary education for all. The Beveridge Report of 1942 remained a best-seller with its demands for the elimination of the five giant evils of want, squalor, greed, poverty and disease, yet the government declined to promote it. Herbert Morrison at the LCC was already tentatively planning a brave new London, long before Ken Livingstone. He wrote in The Times: “London has been in the front line in the final victorious phase of the greatest war that history has ever known. “She was in the first battle and she is in the last one – so far.” |
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