There was also a different kind of community. Elizabeth Bowen, in her novel of wartime London, The Heat of the Day, suggested that those who had died in the fire and destruction were not forgotten. “These unknown dead reproached those left living not by their own death, which might only be shared, but by their unknownness, which could not be mended now.” The war had revealed the essence of the city’s conditions of solitude and anonymity. “Who had the right to mourn them, not having cared that they had lived?” As a result there was an attempt by the citizens “to break down indifference,” and in some sense to ignore or mitigate the usual restrictions of life in London. “The wall between the living and the living became less solid as the wall between the living and the dead thinned.” So strangers would say, “Good night, good luck” as they passed each other in the evening.
There was also a marked and pervasive sense of unreality, as if the familiar outlines of the city had suddenly changed their aspect and become unknown or intangible. “Everybody and all familiar things and jobs seemed so unreal,” one recalled, “we even spoke differently to each other as if we should soon be parted.” This sense of fragility or transitoriness helped to form the atmosphere in what was called “a besieged city,” and one Londoner who made a brief visit to the countryside professed himself surprised “at buildings unthreatened, at mountains that could not be overthrown.” As a result of his experience “All permanence was astonishing. So unnatural had his own life been, that Nature seemed not to belong to him nor he to Nature.” The city had always been deemed “unnatural” by atavistic moralists, but now that sense was shared by its citizens. It was unnatural to be congregated in a place where bombs would fall; it was unnatural to be part of so vast and manifest a target. Yet this was the condition of their lives; perhaps it was the condition of being human.
The bombings of 1940 culminated in the most celebrated and notorious of all raids, that of Sunday 29 December 1940. The warning was sounded a little after six in the evening, and then the incendiaries came down like “heavy rain.” The attack was concentrated upon the City of London. The Great Fire had come again. The area from Aldersgate to Cannon Street, all of Cheapside and Moorgate, was in flames. One observer on the roof of the Bank of England recalled that “the whole of London seemed alight! We were hemmed in by a wall of flame in every direction.” Nineteen churches, sixteen of them built by Christopher Wren after the first Great Fire, were destroyed; of the thirty-four guild halls, only three escaped; the whole of Paternoster Row went up in flames, destroying some five million books; the Guildhall was badly damaged; St. Paul’s was ringed with fire, but escaped. “No one who saw will ever forget,” William Kent wrote in The Lost Treasures of London, “their emotions on the night when London was burning and the dome seemed to ride the sea of fire.” Almost a third of the city was reduced to ash and rubble. By curious coincidence, however, the destruction was largely visited upon the historical and religious aspects of the old City; the thoroughfares of business, such as Cornhill and Lombard Street, remained relatively unscathed while none of the great financial centres was touched. The deities of the city protected the Bank of England and the Stock Market, like the City griffins which jealously guard its treasure.
One who walked through the ruins the day after the raid recalled that “The air felt singed. I was breathing ashes … The air itself, as we walked, smelt of burning.” There are many accounts of the craters, the cellars opened to the outer air, the shattered walls, the fallen masonry, the gas-mains on fire, the pavements covered with dust and broken glass, the odd stumps of brick, the broken and suspended stairs. “For some days the church walls steamed and smoked,” according to James Pope-Hennessy in an account entitled History Under Fire. Yet the workers, the temporary inhabitants, of the City came back. After the raids, “the whole City seemed to be on the tramp” as the clerks and secretaries and office boys all took circuitous ways through the ruins to their destinations. Many had arrived to find their places of employment “gutted” or absolutely destroyed, and then returned on the following morning “simply because they had nothing better to do.” The power of the City then became manifest in their behaviour; they resembled the prisoners of Newgate who, after it had been fired by the Gordon rioters, returned to wander among the ruins of their cells.
The City had become unfamiliar territory. The area between St. Mary le Bow in Cheapside and St. Paul’s Cathedral reverted to wasteland, where the long grass was crossed by beaten paths bearing the names of Old Change, Friday Street, Bread Street and Watling Street. Signs were nailed up, with the names of these streets and others, to prevent people from losing their way. Even the colours of the city had changed; concrete and granite had “been scorched umber” while church ruins were “chrome yellow.” There are some remarkable photographs, taken by Cecil Beaton in the aftermath of the December raid. Paternoster Row is a mound of broken rubble with odd pieces of ironwork sticking out among the brick and stone; the premises of thirty publishers were destroyed. In the last Great Fire the Row was similarly struck and, according to Pepys, “all the great booksellers almost undone.” Outside the church of St. Giles, Cripplegate, the statue of Milton had been blown off its plinth by the blast of a bomb but the tower and walls of the church survived as they had done almost four hundred years before. It was recorded on 12 September 1545 that “Sant Gylles was burned, alle hole, save the walles, stepall, and alle, and how it came God knoweth”; now, almost by a miracle, they were saved again. There are photographs of many ruined church interiors, with monuments tumbled down, screens fallen into fragments, and cherubs’ heads scattered across the floor; there are photographs of the ruined Guildhall, of the bombed Middle Temple, of craters and falling roofs. It seemed to many that the tangible and textural history of London was without meaning, if its glory could disappear in a night; it was too fragile, and frail, to be relied upon. It was the invisible and intangible spirit or presence of London that survived, and somehow flourished, in the period of devastation.
There were, however, unexpected discoveries. A section of the Roman Wall, hidden for many hundreds of years, was uncovered by the bombing of Cripplegate. An underground chamber paved with tiles emerged below the altar of St. Mary le Bow, and a “Gothic blocked-up doorway” was recovered in St. Vedast’s, Foster Lane, after its bombardment. Roman relics were found by Austin Friars, one of them a tile with the paw-marks of a dog in pursuit of a cat. Behind the organ of All Hallows Church, hitherto concealed by panelling which the bombs destroyed, was found a seventh-century arch formed out of Roman tiles. The parish priest described how “out of the wall adjacent to the arch great fragments fell which had for at least eight hundred years been embedded as the capstones in the strong Norman pillars of that date. Some of these stones were most remarkable … They represent a school of craftsmanship whereof we have no other evidence. They form a portion of a noble Cross which once upreared its head on Tower Hill, before the Norman William conquered London.” The emblematic significance of the discovery was not in doubt; the German bombs had fortuitously uncovered a Saxon cross representing defiance before an invader. So those who believed that the city’s history could be easily destroyed were mistaken; it emerged at a deeper level with the implicit assurance that, like the ancient cross, London itself would rise again. There was even a natural analogy. Air damage to the herbarium in the Natural History Museum meant that certain seeds became damp, including mimosa brought from China in 1793. After their trance of 147 years, they began to grow again.