Up West by Pip Granger Read Free Book Online

found an opening in the ground. Somebody said, “Anyone got a torch, we’ve found this ladder going down.” Of course we immediately assumed there was treasure down there, and that it belonged to the King of Corsica, who’d got this gravestone in the church. Much later, I discovered that he was someone who’d done something for the Corsicans, and they couldn’t pay him sothey gave him the title and an illuminated manuscript. He had died destitute, and people clubbed together to bury him.
    â€˜Anyway, my house was closest, about fifty metres away, so I ran back, got a torch, and we went down the ladder. It was all cold, pitch black and cave-like. So we switch on the torch and there are coffins on shelves, just a foot or so away. You’ve never seen people move so quickly. In the blink of an eyelid everybody was standing up top again. How we all got up the ladder at the same time, I don’t know. We’d found the crypt, obviously.’
    Leo and his mother generally took shelter during air raids in the Empire snooker hall across the road. The slate-bed billiard tables in the basement snooker hall – with no windows to be blown in – provided more protection than could be found in conventional Morrison shelters.
    One of the abiding images of wartime London is of people sleeping on Underground tube stations, and although the stations in the West End did a roaring trade as shelters – Piccadilly slept up to four thousand people, for instance – few locals, it seemed, used them. Some used the newly built Lex Garage, others backyard Anderson shelters, or Morrison shelters set in the living room or under the stairs, while others used imaginative alternatives, like the Zanellis, or simply toughed it out. Because space was so scarce, safe shelters could not always be dug. Many schools had to improvise. ‘I remember,’ wrote Ray Constantine, ‘when I was at school, sitting in the sandbagged areas by the coat hangers and sinks during the air raids.’
    Although the East End, the City and the docks took the brunt of the Luftwaffe’s attacks on London, the West End did not escape unscathed. Far from it. Sticks of bombs fell across Covent Garden and Soho, demolishing not only St Anne’s Church, which copped it again in May 1941, but also part of Newport Dwellings and chunks of Old Compton Street.
    A Civil Defence bomb incident photograph * shows the aftermath of the raid that brought down part of Newport Dwellings in the early hours of 17 April 1941, killing forty-eight people, including Sonia Boulter’s grandmother. Sonia pointed to the AFS man seen from the back in the foreground of this photo. ‘I often wonder if that was my dad. He wasn’t in the forces because he had TB, but he went in to the Auxiliary Fire Service and I wonder if that can be my dad.’
    Many men who were for one reason or another excluded from active service joined the AFS, fire-watching through the long nights of the air raids, often from high, exposed places. Volunteer labour like this was at a premium in the Blitz. As Sonia Boulter’s schoolfriend, Maria Mechele, recalls, ‘I was born during the war and remember going to the air raid shelter in Berwick Street. My dad was in the heavy rescue, and used to go out and help dig the people out of bombed buildings.’
    It must have been a desperate and harrowing job, digging through the rubble listening and looking for signs of life, butmost of those who lived in London through the Blitz and the later doodlebug raids had nightmares to forget. The bombs left scars in people’s minds, as well as on the landscape. On Saturday, 8 March 1941, one of the biggest raids of the Blitz scored a direct hit on the Café de Paris nightclub, killing bandleader Ken ‘Snakehips’ Johnson and more than thirty others. All told, that night’s raids killed 159 people.
    Newspaper reports concentrated on evoking the ‘spirit