There are other images of these early months. One was of the blackout which plunged one of the most brilliantly illuminated cities of the world into all but total darkness. It became once more the city of dreadful night, and aroused in some inhabitants sensations of almost primitive fear as once familiar thoroughfares became lost in blackness. One of Evelyn Waugh’s characters notes that “Time might have gone back two thousand years to the time when London was a stockaded cluster of huts”; urban civilisation had been established upon light for so long that, in its absence, all customary certainties fell away. Of course there were some who took advantage of the darkness for their own purposes, but for many others the predominant sensation was one of alarm and insufficiency. The lure of shelter under the ground has already been discussed, together with the fear of administrators that London would breed a race of “troglodytes” who would never wish to come to the surface. The reality, however, was both more stark and more prosaic. Only 4 per cent of the city’s population ever used the London Underground for night shelter, largely on account of the overcrowded and often insanitary conditions which they would have found there. In implicit compliance to the tradition of London as a city of separate family dwellings, most citizens elected to stay in their own houses.
And what might they have seen when they emerged at daybreak? “The house about 30 yards from ours struck at one this morning by a bomb. Completely ruined. Another bomb in the square still unexploded … The house was still smouldering. There is a great pile of bricks … Scraps of cloth hanging to the bare walls at the side still standing. A looking glass I think swinging. Like a tooth knocked out-a clean cut.” Virginia Woolf’s description registers the sensation of almost physical shock, as if the city were indeed a living being which could suffer hurt. “A vast gap at the top of Chancery Lane. Smoking still. Some great shop entirely destroyed: the hotel opposite like a shell … And then miles amp; miles of orderly ordinary streets … Streets empty. Faces set amp; eyes bleared.” It might seem that nothing could obliterate these “miles amp; miles” of streets, that London could as it were “soak up” any punishment, yet its citizens were not so sturdy; fatigue, and weariness, and anxiety passed over them in waves. In the following month, October 1940, Woolf visited Tavistock and Mecklenburg Squares where she had lived. She passed a long line of people, with bags and blankets, queuing at eleven thirty that morning for a night’s shelter in Warren Street Underground Station. In Tavistock Square she found the remnants of her old house-“Basement all rubble. Only relics an old basket chair … Otherwise bricks amp; wood splinters … I cd just see a piece of my studio wall standing: otherwise rubble where I wrote so many books.” And then there was the dust, like the soft residue of obliterated experience. “All again litter, glass, black soft dust, plaster powder.”
It was remarked at the time that upon everything lay a fine coat of grey ash and cinders, prompting further comparison between London and Pompeii. The loss of personal history was another aspect of the city bombings; the wallpaper, and mirrors, and carpets were sometimes stripped bare and left hanging in the air of a ruin as if the private lives of Londoners had suddenly become public property. This encouraged a communal feeling and became one of the principal sources of the evident bravado and determination.
The Second World War also created a climate of care. It became a question of saving the children, for example, by a process of mass evacuation from the city to the country. In the months preceding the outbreak of hostilities on 3 September 1939, a policy of voluntary evacuation was drawn up to deal with the movement of approximately four million women and children, yet the curious magnetism of London then began to exert itself. Less than half the families wished, or decided, to leave. Those children about to be sent to reception areas in the country departed reluctantly. The children of Dagenham were despatched on boats and John O’Leary, author of Danger over Dagenham, has recorded “awful silence. The children did not sing.” One of a childhood contingent from Stepney, the writer Bernard Kops, recalled that “this was the place where we were born, where we grew up, where we played and sang, laughed and cried. And now all the grey faces as we passed were weeping. It was strangely quiet.” When they arrived in the country they seemed, and were, quite out of place. A minority were unwashed, lice-ridden and disruptive. Here the old image of the savage rises forcefully. Others “would not eat wholesome food but clamoured for fish and chips, sweets and biscuits” and “would not go to bed at reasonable hours.” They were the unnatural progeny of an unnatural city. And there “were children who refused new clothes and who fought and clung desperately to old and dirty things.” The image of the London child as somehow “dirty” and woeful is here reinforced. Then, within a few weeks, they began to return home. By the winter of 1939 approximately 150,000 mothers and children had come back; by the early months of the following year, half of the evacuees had made their way back to the city. “London was, for me, like a return from exile,” one is reported as saying in Ziegler’s history. “My pet cat met me at the gate, the neighbours welcomed me and the sun shone.” Here is a palpable sense of belonging, of being part of the city, which is the strongest sentiment among Londoners.
In the summer of 1940, when the German forces began to conquer Europe, another attempt was made to remove the children, those of the East End in particular. One hundred thousand children were evacuated but, two months later, 2,500 children were coming back each week. It represents the strangest, and perhaps most melancholy, instinct-the need to get back to the city, even if it becomes a city of fire and death. The curious fact, even during the air-raids themselves, was that the children proved “more resilient” than the adults. Like their predecessors over many eras, like the children depicted by Hogarth in the eighteenth century, they seemed to revel among all the suffering and privation, and in part reclaimed that state of semi-savagery which had been the mark of the street-Arabs of the previous century. One visitor to Stepney after a raid noted that the children were “wild-looking and grimy outwardly, but full of vitality and enthusiasm. One child said, ‘Mister, let me take you to see the last bomb round the corner.’”
In Watson’s Wharf, off Wapping, a gang of children congregated under the name of the “Dead End kids.” Their story is told in East End Then and Now, edited by W.G. Ramsey. They were the unofficial fire-fighters of the East End. “Some of these children were very poor, and dressed in cheap clothes … They were split into sections of four. Each section was responsible for a district on Wapping Island.” They had iron bars and a hand-truck as well as sand buckets and spades to assist them in their work. They roped in time bombs, and tossed them into the Thames; they carried the wounded away from incendiary scenes. One intense night of bombing in Wapping brought them out and, in the words of one witness, “In a moment ten boys rushed up the stairs, ready, as it seemed, to eat fires.” They entered a burning building in order to lead out some horses trapped within, and emerged “with the clothes of some of those boys … smouldering.” Some of them were killed in the fires and explosions but, when casualties depleted their ranks, others willingly filled their places. It is a most extraordinary story which emphasises in vivid and poignant detail the hardiness and self-reliance bred within London children. A little girl from the Elephant and Castle, when asked if she wished to return to the country, said, “No fear.” No fear-that is the key to their self-containment or recklessness.