The Love-Charm of Bombs by Lara Feigel Read Free Book Online

John Lehmann compared this to the noise of a dog in the extremities of agony. The warning was then taken up by the wardens, who sounded sharp blasts on their whistles, urging local residents to retreat into shelters. Once they had blown their whistles, Bowen and Greene had to visit the shelters in their district, making sure that people were settling for the night and that the paraffin lamps were still working. Now, with the sky lit up by searchlights, pedestrians watched as the battle played itself out high up in the sky, with the planes too far away to hear. The raiding bombers, arriving from the coast, were met by defending fighters, diving and curling, with both leaving white trails across the sky. Gradually the enemy aeroplanes approached the city, as they do in The Heat of the Day , ‘dragging, drumming, slowly round in the pool of night, drawing up bursts of gunfire – nosing, pausing, turning’.
    From now on the hum of aircraft overhead was punctuated by the noise of bombs dropping, mingled with the persistent sound of the pelting shells of the ack-ack guns, which were stationed near Bowen in Regent’s Park. In his wartime diary Harold Nicolson, who was currently heading the Ministry of Information, tried to distinguish between the different layers of sound:
     
    There is the distant drumfire of the outer batteries. There is the nearer crum-crum of the Regent’s Park guns. Then there is the drone of aeroplanes and the sharp impertinent notes of some nearer batteries. FF-oopb! they shout. And then in the middle distance there is the rocket sound of the heavy guns in Hyde Park. One gets to love them, these angry London guns. And when they drop into silence, one hears above them, irritating and undeterred, the dentist’s drill of the German aeroplanes, seeming always overhead, appearing always to circle round and round, ready always to drop three bombs, flaming, and then . . . Crump, crump, crump, somewhere.
     
    The first bombs of the night were usually incendiaries: small cylindrical weapons about eighteen inches long with a magnesium alloy exterior and a core of thermite priming composition. These were dropped in clusters and were designed to start fires that would light the way for subsequent planes dropping more powerful high explosive bombs. The incendiaries sounded less threatening than the HEs, clattering down casually like trays of tin cans. But an official civil defence booklet warned the public that it was possible for one aeroplane to carry up to a thousand of these bombs, and that they were particularly potent because the whole of the device was combustible, with the exception of the striker mechanism and the sheet-iron tail fin. The Home Office had calculated that a single German bomber could start up to 150 fires spread over three miles. According to John Strachey incendiaries could be regarded either as harmless toys or as deadly menaces, depending on whether civilians were prepared to put them out with sand buckets and stirrup pumps. Three weeks into the Blitz, ARP wardens had become adept at using their tin hats to extinguish them as soon as they landed in the street and were becoming less dependent on the help of the fire brigade.
    Now, the incendiaries punctured the darkness of the blackout, lighting up the ruins which already lined Marylebone and Bloomsbury. Both Bowen and Greene found the ruins eerily beautiful when illuminated at night. Greene frequently passed by the first bombed house he had seen, neatly sliced in half, in Woburn Square. Initially, exposed in cross-section, it had looked like a Swiss chalet: ‘there were a pair of skiing sticks hanging in the attic, and in another room a grand piano cocked one leg over the abyss.’ The kitchen seemed impossibly crowded with furniture until he realised that he had been given a kind of mouse-eye view from behind the stove and the dresser. These were the surreal scenes that would characterise much wartime visual art and that in turn would