This was written on September 9th 1940 by my
mother (then 26, a lecturer at Bedford College, London). I’ve left out family
news.
Dear Ma and Pa,
I thought I’d better drop you a line and managed to put 2
and 2 together about last night’s bombing and realised that the station, cinema
and museum bombed all together were Baker St, Tussauds and the wax works. All
is well except that EET (Professor Turner) and I have all our Lab
windows gone! As I heard one cockney voice say yesterday, “What a shame I
didn’t go into the glass business!”
Last night I went to see James off at Liverpool St. Just as
his train went, off went a siren. I popped straight down to a Shelter, it
turned out to be the disused Bishopsgate Tube shaft. A good thing it was big
enough, for about 2,000 people were there before the fun was over! I went in at
8 p.m. and staggered out at 6 a.m. today! It was a good thing too that it was
deep, for three bombs fell above it with great crashes like thunder, so that it
rocked. But the jolly little cockneys inside just sang a little louder. The
morale in London is wonderful. I was thrilled with my fellow men last night,
and very, very glad of my Elementary School days, as I found I was able to join
in the fun and appreciate it all. A jovial man brought down a harmonium and
played it for 4 hours! There were some very coarse songs (G Formby ones,
I think) but lots of others I knew, like “Comrades”, “The Man that Broke the
Bank at Monte Carlo”, “Where did you get that Hat?”, “The Rose of Tralee” etc.
etc. When the nearest bomb fell (blowing up a train and setting the station on
fire) there was a momentary lull followed by a louder song. Some kind people
brought round water to drink in a watering can, after about five hours and we
all drank out of the same glass.
We came out at 6 looking as if we had been in an earthquake:
the tube tunnel had been full of dust – no seats – and we had all lain in it,
hair and faces and all. Some little middle-aged cockney soldiers were good to
me and gave me their gas masks to sit on, a small pear, a little bit of
chocolate and some Rowntree gums. The whole atmosphere was grand.
Out of Liverpool St this morning I walked down to the Bank
and lo! There a great bomb had dropped, just taking the front colonnade, and the
crater stretched all across the open space. I walked round Barts [where her
brother was a junior doctor] but did not dare go in as I looked so awful,
with filthy face and hands and hair.
Round behind Barts a great fire raged and I tracked it down
to behind Barbican. It was just like pictures of Hell. All the London fire brigade
pumps were there, pumping away like mad to try and drench the surrounding
buildings. All honour and credit is due to the Auxiliary Fire Service.
Well, thinks I, after staring at this for a while amid a
little group of poor women in shawls, I’ll go back to a peaceful breakfast at
Bedford. So left the city where there was a constant tinkle of glass being
swept up – can you imagine all those imposing windows near the Bank with their
windows broken? – and got a train to Baker St. What horror met my eyes! I began
to think it was a nightmare! All Upper Baker St littered with glass: not a shop
window left: stockings and vests and things draping over the pavement (it was still
just 7.15 a.m.). And then the wreckage! Just behind Tussaud’s Cinema a huge
crater: houses quite gone: a pathetic site was one wall standing with a picture
still hanging on it. That great block of flats in Chiltern Court reduced to a
skeleton: similarly the workhouse. DON’T imagine for a moment that all London is
like this. Not a bit of it. I dashed into Bedford and found no damage but
windows gone, particularly our Labs, dash it. Old Adolph would catch it if Dr.
Turner could get him.
At breakfast we had a sad little bunch of people whose
houses were quite destroyed. All shy in queer clothes like night dresses and
mackintoshes. Mostly caretakers and keepers of little shops. It always seems to
get the poor.
With much love….
