Max writes to a friend in New York on 1 November 1940
My dear Leonard, 10 30 p.m
One or two letters we have been getting from the USA lately suggest that some of the people who have been out of England longer than you are suffering from a lot of wrong ideas about the bombing of London, and as you left soon after the Blitz began it may interest you to have some sort of a picture of what it feels like after the first couple of months or so.
(FEW WORDS CENSORED) I had just finished supper (rather late for nowadays) and was coming down the (CENSORED) when one of the enemy bombers overhead began to make a loud and at the same time deliberate broody noise which made me suspect that it was about to lay eggs. Sure enough, almost as soon as I had got between two strongish looking buildings, a loud roaring swish began and there was a considerable explosion accompanied by a good deal of small debris falling on and around me as I lay, by this time flat on the pavement, with my warden's hat on and my felt hat in my hand. I at once got up and started running in the direction from which the stuff seemed to come. People all the way along were putting their heads out or coming into the road in the semi-darkness, but none knew where the bomb had struck and all the buildings round looked curiously normal and intact, after the impression of everything being blotted out. At last after going round most of the block I found a man running towards me who had come from the scene - I soon came to a narrow alley leading between some partly shattered houses, behind which were great heaps of rubble stretching for as far again. It was outside the area of my post and very close to a neighbouring one, so there were several wardens already on the job. I was sent to look for another alleged bomb which turned out not to exist. When I reported, a number of CENSORED were being got out, and I went home to put on my uniform and get my hooded torch so as to make myself useful. When I got back a few minutes later a man was calling from a basement in the back street opposite the demolished houses. He was quite well, and although the masonry we got him out quite safely by smashing up the window and making a human chain to pull him up. He gave his name as Weaver and added after we had taken his address "I'd give you my telephone number too but its probably out of order now"! He wanted to start off to Staines, but as he had obviously had a shock we persuaded him to go to the nearest rest centre.
Then I went through the six cottages on which the bomb had fallen. There was a family trapped in the end one, and the rescue parties were getting down to the job. At first the impression had been one of chaos - buildings and their contents just strewn and heaped about, and a handful of tin-hatted men and women with a few vehicles moving about and standing in clusters dealing with the easier effects, but apparently helpless in front of this mountain of rubble. But now someone had heard a woman calling for help from underneath; men, spades and tackle were mobilised and soon we had located a man woman and girl all alive not far below the surface. Rescue parties slowly dug away the earth, lifted the bricks into baskets, moved the timber and made a crater at the end of which were the buried people. The woman kept shouting that she could not bear it and that we could easily pull her out if we tried; at last a nurse wriggled under and gave her morphia, apparently at the expense of crushing one of her own ribs.
Every time the raiders came right overhead again, as they did every few minutes, someone could call for our already heavily dimmed torches to be put out, and the barrage, which had just started before you left, would get loud and close.
It was a strange sight if anyone could have painted it; these couple dozen men and women, some white-hatted and others with luminous W's and R's and S's on black tin hats, all grouped in a circle round the crater, the diggers inside, then the people like myself moving lighter debris and putting torches on the scene of operations, and then a doctor, the nurse, a parson and others on the fringe waiting to deal with the victims, all among these brand-new ruins. At last we unearthed a man's foot with a sock on it which gave a healthy twitch - the foot not the sock - and by degrees in two and a half hours the three were got out (not before their cat had availed itself of our opening to rush out between us) and given hot drinks on their stretchers and carried very carefully by a special path from which we had removed all the stumbling-blocks, out to the waiting ambulances.
It was now raining hard and I went back to the Post of that area and signed off, being given a cup of hot soup by the senior warden, with whom I used to patrol when she was on my own Post. On the site there was a certain amount of cursing, especially when some insisted on the lights being put out, and others called back that they were not bloody cats etc, but on the whole tempers were good, and people like the nurse who insisted on seeing the job through with her cracked rib were remarkably calm and casual in their manner.
At intervals other bombs fell, but no more near us; sometimes several dropped flares made the sky half like daylight. Then I came home, washed, put antiseptic on my scratches, and here I am writing this, down in the basement at home, with intermittent bomber noise and barrage.
I forgot to say that when the mother who had been screaming was got out her first words were to thank us all very nicely, in the same tone as if we had given her a very good Xmas present, and her second to make sure her daughter and husband were out. They talked to one another quite calmly on their stretchers before being taken away.
Now these are experiences which have come to several thousand Londoners since you went over, and yet the attitude to them is getting steadily more balanced and confident, partly I think because of recognition of the limits of the destruction and the chances of escape, partly through fatalism, partly because so many of those who could not take it are now evacuated, and partly because of the relative efficiency and high morale of the ARP services, and above all pride in the RAF and confidence that they will win.
The particular street where this happened ** has already had several bad bomb hits, but the road has been mended, services are functioning again and people carry on - the wardens' Post-cum-Shelter had an atmosphere remarkably like a village hall the day before the local beanfeast, with a lot of plump, managing, bright, middle-aged ladies and men making themselves useful, and plenty of hangers-on.
The curious thing is the way it is all given a status of normality, not by some sort of neurotic adaptation, but by embracing it into the English social pattern, just as if the Bishop's wife had to have Gandhi and Harry Pollitt and the local pawnbroker to tea and treated it as the most natural thing in the world. The idea that bombs are terrifying and intolerable is therefore submerged in the very strong insistence on treating them as a rather special but quite normal
and accepted institution, of a sort no one expects to enjoy much like a flower show where it always rains and everyone knows it always will. So instead of the bomb destroying the civilisation the civilisation practically destroys the bomb - well, all but!
Well I have written too much and you will never be able to read it, but at any rate it has been interesting to put it down like this while it is fresh, and if it helps to convey a bit of background so much the better.
God bless you Leonard and goodnight. Max.
** NOTE IN EXPLANATION (1985) The bomb was in Shawfield Street, near the Memorial Hall, SW3. ARP = Air Raid Precautions services. Harry Pollitt was the then leader of the British Communist Party.
