Up West by Pip Granger Read Free Book Online Page A

of the Blitz’.
The Times
of 10 March reported that ‘people living nearby made tea, and passers-by contributed handkerchiefs’, while soldiers, who gravitated to the West End on a Saturday night, helped the wounded by applying field dressings. ‘All agree,’
The Times
account went on, ‘that there was the utmost coolness and much gallantry. “Don’t bother about me,” people with less serious wounds said over and over again. Rescue work began almost immediately. There were many wonderful escapes, and a fair number of people were able to walk out of the damaged building with no worse hurt than a bruised back or some cuts.’
    One can hardly blame the newspapers for putting the best gloss on things, for emphasizing the positive, but things often looked different from ground level. An image from that day still haunts Leo Zanelli, who was ten years old at the time: ‘My mother’s brother, Uncle Peter, was an ambulance driver in the war. He was always coming to see us in Romilly Street after air raids to make sure we were all right. I remember once he came in, and he was in shock for ages. He’d gone in to the Café de Paris. The bomb had fallen straight throughthe skylight on to the dance floor. My uncle had picked up his best friend’s head. He used to stay awake at nights after that. Of course, he had to tell his friend’s father that his son had just died, but the bomb had taken his head off cleanly. Head in one corner, body in another.
    â€˜He always remembered how, by the edge of the dance floor, there were a couple, still in their seats, and the man was offering the woman his cigarette case. You’d expect, a blast like that, people would be all over the place, and some were, but these two, although the concussion had killed them, they were just sitting there, natural.’
    Leo carries other vivid nightmarish images from the war. ‘I was in the snooker hall,’ he remembers, ‘so I didn’t actually see it, but after a bomb, a soldier came down the street away from the scene covered in blood. When they took off his jacket to see what the damage was, there was a terrible scream, because his arm came off with it. The jacket was OK, not torn at all. Blast is a funny thing.’
    The bombing was not all there was to fear. The blackout also claimed its victims. ‘Where the La Capannina restaurant is now,’ Leo remembers, ‘on the corner of Romilly Street, there used to be an oil shop, a general hardware shop, and in the morning they found a soldier impaled on the railings outside. It must have been a burglary: he just stepped off the roof in the blackout. I didn’t see it, but I heard people describe it to my mother; by the time I went out to have a look, they had covered it with a shelter. Apparently it was quite common for burglars to be killed by falling in the dark.’
    Ray Constantine was another who experienced the horrors of war at first hand, even though he was a schoolboy at the time. His family had been bombed out. They were living in a rest centre: ‘I was walking down Lisson Grove to school one day, when a lorry about four hundred yards away erupted. For an instant I couldn’t breathe, then a deafening explosion knocked me over. Some time later, I got up and continued. There was a full arm in battledress on the pavement. I picked it up and placed it in the gutter. I was late getting to school, and said to the teacher, “Please, Miss, a bomb fell on me.” There had been no air raid, but nothing more was said.
    â€˜I later worked out that the lorry must have been transporting a defused bomb that had somehow gone off. Then, recently, I watched a programme on UXBs. An old man was saying how bomb disposal used to disable the fuse with a large magnet, but that the Germans realized this and added a second, trembler device. He related how they had placed the magnet on a bomb in Marylebone, then loaded it in