Chapter III: Part 3

* * * * *

Everybody has read thousands of words about the blackout, but you cannot know what it’s like unless you’ve been in it.

There is a slight reflected glow on the streets from the lights of automobiles and buses, when any of these happen to be passing. But if no such vehicle is near, you simply have to feel your way with your feet.

When I pull my curtains and open the window before going to bed, and look out upon London, I can see no more than if I were standing in the middle of the Sahara Desert on the darkest night of the year, blindfolded and with my eyes shut. Looking down from my sixth-story window, I can’t see a single pin point of light anywhere.

The curbs in London are painted white, which makes walking a little easier. All light poles and safety-zone posts are painted black with white rings. The fenders of cars used at night are tipped with white. All moving vehicles carry lights, but they are mere pin points.

Pedestrians are permitted to use flashlights--called “torches” here--provided these are small, or shaded, and aren’t pointed upward. I had been told back home that torches and batteries could no longer be bought in London, but they can. The price of batteries has been fixed by the government at a maximum of twelve cents.

Traffic lights are hooded from above, and the glass itself is painted a solid black except for a little cross in the middle. This is the tiniest of slits, yet from two or three blocks away it looks like a full green or red light.

People no longer motion for a taxi at night--it would be no use. They just stand on the curb and yell. At midnight, if I lean out of my window I can see no more than if I were blind, but I can hear people all up and down the street yelling for taxis at the top of their lungs.

It’s miraculous the way taxis get about at night. When you get into one the driver clips off at twenty-five miles an hour and just keeps on going, ramming forward into nothingness.

I have achieved a new high in something or other for myself. The other night I found the correct bus in the dark, rode three miles into the night, felt my way across a street into a strange apartment house and got clear up to the apartment of a friend of mine. It made me feel so wonderful I took a taxi home.

_IV. THE HEROES ARE ALL THE PEOPLE_

_1. IT’S ALL TRUE_

_London,
January, 1941_

You have all read about London’s amazing ability to take it, and about the almost annoying calm of Englishmen in the face of Hitler’s bombs. Well, I am not going to dwell on this, since it has been much written about already. But I just want to confirm that what you have read in this connection is all true. I got it the very minute I stepped off the plane from Lisbon, and I’ve been getting it ever since.

You get it in the attitude of people, you get it in the casual way common folks talk, you get it just by looking around and seeing people going about their business.

The day before Christmas a hotel maid said, “I’ll never forgive that old Hitler if he gives us a blitz on Christmas Day.” That’s typical British conversation. The attitude of the people is not one of bravado. It is no self-injection of “Do or die for dear old Siwash.” It isn’t flag-waving, or our own sometimes silly brand of patriotism. In fact, I’ve never seen or heard the word patriotism since coming here.

No, it is none of these. It is simply a quaint old British idea that nobody is going to push them around with any lasting success.

There are millions of people in this world who fear that England may eventually lose this war. Such an ending is inconceivable to the British.

* * * * *

The whole spirit of this war is different from that of the first World War. Over here there doesn’t seem to be the pumped-up, hysterical hatred that we had for Germany in the World War. I’ve heard Germans referred to as “the Boche” only once in London.

You don’t hear atrocity stories told around here about the Germans. You don’t hear people making outlandish remarks. You no longer hear stories about Hitler being insane and a pervert. In fact, I’ve heard him referred to several times as a mighty smart man who has made very few mistakes. This isn’t spoken sympathetically, or by pro-Nazis, but by common Englishmen willing to give the devil his due.

They say Hitler has made only one big mistake so far, and that was by starting the war in the first place.

* * * * *

And the spirit of bravery in the face of death is different in this war too. You all remember, or at least have read about, the eat-drink-and-be-merry-for-tomorrow-we-die spirit of soldiers on leave in the first World War. It was fatalistic, and dramatic, and what-the-hell. It was champagne and girls and on with the dance while there’s still time.

That’s not true in this war. There is night life in London, but not that daredevil kind of night life. People dance quietly. Late parties are rare. Drunkenness is not common. Soldiers on leave act much like civilians in peacetime. For in this war it isn’t the soldiers who may die tomorrow--it’s the people.

When the King goes out to inspect his heroes, they aren’t long lines of straight-standing men in khaki with polished buttons. They are grimy firemen and wardens in blue overalls, so tired they can’t even stand up straight for the King.

When just ordinary people at home may die tomorrow, heroics go out the window.

People aren’t filled with a madly sweet compulsion to crowd a lifetime of fun into their few remaining hours. No, they are too busy, too poor, too tired, and too placidly determined to win by sticking it out.

It’s a funny war. As someone remarked, the front-line trenches are four miles straight up above London, and the heroes are all the people.

* * * * *

It is true that all eyes in England look toward America.

My American accent alone is a key to unlock almost any door in London--except the doors of the extreme upper classes, of course.

And just as American public opinion about the war changes gradually, so I believe the British feeling about the possibility of our entering the war is changing. A few months ago, they say, all England was rabid for America to come in. But now many people are looking beyond the mere emotional effect of our entrance. Many feel that if we came in, all our production would be kept at home and England would get less than she is getting now. About a third of the people I’ve discussed the matter with feel that way. But almost without exception they do feel that we should furnish cargo ships and convoy them with our warships.

* * * * *

Today every London conversation eventually switches around to “He’s up to something. What do you think it is?” Nine times out of ten Hitler is referred to as “he” rather than by name. Even the newspapers do it sometimes.

Something is being cooked up--everybody is sure of that. Most people think he will attempt an invasion before spring. Many think he will unwind an aerial blitz over London this month that will make the September bombings seem tame.

Any night he may start it. Any night people expect it. And they are ready. They feel that Hitler has not got anything that they, the ordinary people, can’t take.

And after being here with them for a few weeks I believe they are right.

_2. THE CUPBOARD’S NOT BARE_

_London,
January, 1941_

Food isn’t a very romantic subject. You’ve never heard of a medal being presented to a war hero because he lived on one meal a day. The girls don’t flock around the English farmer who makes two potatoes grow where only one grew before. But believe me, food in this war is only a jump or two behind planes and big guns in importance.

And as each month passes, the food problem will become increasingly vital to both sides. Ultimately, perhaps years from now, it may be that food will decide who is to win this war.

It is too early yet for any food shortage to begin making deep marks on the warring populations. They say food is still plentiful in Germany, and I know that England is in good shape. That is obvious to anybody who just eats around.

There is rationing, of course. Prices are high, and some things are so scarce they have almost ceased to exist. But as to the basic things that are needed to keep body and soul together, the situation in London hasn’t reached even dead seriousness.

* * * * *

“Dispersal” is becoming more and more the theme of England in wartime--dispersal of troops, of factories, of children, of food. The bombings have brought that about. Scatter every vital thing all over England in tiny units and small groups--that’s the keynote. Today only 80,000 of London’s one million children are left in the city. They are all over England.

They tell me that the soldiers, with some exceptions, eat and sleep in groups no larger than thirty. Army trucks are always parked a good fifty yards apart so a single bomb won’t get more than one of them. Factories have branches everywhere. And as for food, it is stored in thousands of nooks and crannies all over Great Britain.

There are stocks of food in empty garages, in old meeting halls, in unused theaters, police stations, barns, cellars. No one-night blitz, no matter how terrific, is going to wipe out any notable portion of Britain’s stored food.

And speaking of dispersal, the Ministry of Food keeps only a skeleton staff of 250 in London. The bulk of the ministry’s staff of about 2500 are in the country.

England began working out a wartime food-control plan four years before the war started. It even had all the ration books printed and waiting months before the war.

The first rationing was not put into effect until four months after the war started--that is, in January, 1940. Bacon, butter and sugar were the first items dealt with.

When a certain food is rationed, that does not necessarily mean the country is running short of it. It means that the government considers this particular food to be essential, and so it begins rationing to conserve a surplus for the far future. Also, many things are rationed to insure an equal distribution--so the rich people won’t eat up all the things the poor couldn’t afford if there were no such controls.

Today in England it is almost impossible to get onions, raisins, eggs, lemons or cheeses. Yet none of these things is rationed, because the government considers them nonessential to sturdy, healthy living. It is ready to let them go out of existence for the duration.

Today rationing applies to the following items in the following ways:

BACON AND HAM--Four ounces a week per person. (Peacetime consumption averaged 5.6 ounces.)

BUTTER--Two ounces of butter and four ounces of margarine a week. (Before the war, people averaged 7 ounces of butter.)

SUGAR--Eight ounces a week. (Consumption has been cut more than half; it used to be 17 ounces on the average.)

TEA--Two ounces. (Prewar consumption was 2.9 ounces.) But tea is not really short in England, as you can get it in any restaurant and nearly every grocery. Consumption is down only about one-fourth.

MEAT--The rationing of meat is based on price rather than on weight, because of the many qualities available. People today are allowed to buy one shilling tenpence--about 37 cents--worth of meat per person per week. This means about two pounds of fair beef. Fowl is not rationed, and there is a good supply.

As an example of how rapidly things change, since I wrote the above, two days ago, the weekly meat allowance has dropped to 30 cents’ worth; and pork liver, kidney, heart and sweetbreads have been added to the rationed list.

The government makes mistakes that cause some confusion, as all governments do. For example, in dealing with rabbits the government set a maximum price for the retailers but none for wholesalers. As a result, the grocerymen must pay 17 cents a pound for rabbits but they dare not charge their customers more than 15 cents. The upshot is that plenty of rabbits are wasting away in warehouses.

The cut in sugar is probably what pains the average Englishman most. The English people have been used to tremendous quantities of sugar, probably a great deal more than was good for them. Doctors think this cutting of sugar consumption in half will be a fine thing for the national blood pressure.

The stores are nearly sold out of candy. I went to one today which had just one box of candy left. Chocolates run from 50 cents to $1 a pound, and they’re not very good either. Many of the pieces are filled with dry cake.

When you eat in restaurants, the finest places give you two small cubes of sugar with each cup of coffee; the medium-priced and cheap places only one. And I don’t like coffee with one cube of sugar.

Back in Lisbon I kept slipping cubes of sugar into my pocket from the hotel table, and I arrived here with about twenty. So for a while I had an extra one to drop in each cup of coffee, but they’re all gone now. If I were making this trip over again I would throw away my shirts and bring three pounds of sugar.

* * * * *

There are approximately forty-six million people in the United Kingdom, so England prints fifty million of her food-ration books. For everybody must have one.

In the past, new books have been mailed out every six months. Starting in July, 1941, the books will be good for one year. Also, instead of tearing out coupons, the grocer will merely cancel them with a stamp.

People the world over love to figure out stupendous statistics, and the Food Ministry is no exception. It has estimated that these changes will save a thousand tons of paper and will dispense with the handling of 14,500,000,000 coupons a year.

Each member of a family, including each child, gets a ration book. Then the housewife goes to her favorite grocer and registers. She isn’t allowed to change grocers except at six-month intervals, unless she moves. And she can trade only where she is registered.

Although I carry a ration book I couldn’t buy anything on it unless I first registered at a store. Even then, if I wanted something scarce, such as oranges, eggs or onions, they wouldn’t sell me any because of my not being an old customer.

Rationing is a complex affair. If you eat at home you can buy only so much a week. Yet you can go to a restaurant and get all you want, without even showing your ration book.

The hotels do their buying in big lots and can get choice things, but they, too, are rationed. Today they are allowed only 50 per cent of the bacon and ham they used last May. In January, 1941, they are getting less than half the meat they used in January, 1940; and now that is being cut still further.

They are allowed to give each diner only one-fourth of an ounce of butter and margarine (only one-twelfth of an ounce of this can be real butter), and they will serve you only one meat course.

If you live in a hotel you can stay for five days without a ration book. After that, they take the coupons from the book at the end of each week.

You can eat in public places for practically any price you care to pay. At our hotel it runs around two dollars for dinner, so I eat elsewhere. Dinner at Simpson’s, with soup and dessert, will cost better than a dollar and a half, yet the other night at one of Lyons’ numerous “Corner Houses” we had a good enough dinner, with music and everything, for 50 cents. The place was packed with soldiers and their girls, and I don’t mean officers.

Only the more expensive places give you napkins now. At night, eating places are rather infrequent, so you almost have to eat at whatever place is handy.

You hardly ever see real butter in the restaurants. They serve margarine instead. At the Food Ministry it’s pronounced with a hard “g,” as in Margaret. It’s all right, too. The government now requires that all margarine be injected with vitamins “A” and “D,” and they say it has all the food qualities of real butter.

Also, you never see real cream. What you get is a ghostly white mixture of vegetable oils. It’s thicker than cream and it has the oily texture of mayonnaise, but I can swear that it isn’t bad at all.

As cargo space in English ships grows more and more precious, the importation of foods is increasingly restricted. Anything bulky is cut out. They have now stopped importing any fruit whatever, except oranges. Even canned fruits have been stopped. To take the place of fruit in diets, the government is encouraging Englishmen to eat more vegetables and grow more vegetables.

* * * * *

Most food prices in England are controlled by the government, but even so the average cost of food has gone up 22 per cent since the war started. As in all inflations, either in wartime or peacetime, wages have not risen accordingly. Hence many people have a tough time making both ends meet.

I will give you a list of representative food prices. Some of them do not seem so extraordinarily high, but you must remember that the average white-collar employee in England doesn’t make as much as we do at home. Also, he pays out more in taxes.

Bacon is 35 cents a pound, in our money. The best butter is 35 cents, with the average quality 32 cents, but you don’t get a pound a week unless there are eight in your family. Margarine comes in two grades, at 9 cents and 15 cents. Sugar runs around 7½ cents a pound, tea 50 cents, and joint steak costs about 42 cents a pound (when you can get it). Stewing beef is around 30 cents, and joint roast about 36 cents a pound.

In meats you take whatever the dealers happen to have. Often you have to accept mutton instead of beef. There is no pork at all. The price of turkeys for Christmas was controlled at 50 cents a pound; whereupon chickens, which were not controlled, shot up to 60 cents a pound.

Eggs are 80 cents a dozen, but you can get only about four eggs a week at the stores. Oranges are 3 cents apiece and are still obtainable, although they are growing scarcer. You can get lemons and onions only when a new shipment arrives, and they won’t be arriving much longer. Lemons are 11 cents a pound. Apples have been up to 35 cents a pound, which is three or four apples; but the price is now controlled at 20 cents a pound for the very best, running down to 11 cents. Soon there will be no more apples, until England’s own crop comes in next fall. Some grapefruit have been coming from the Bahamas and Palestine; they run from 10 to 20 cents apiece.

Bread stands at about 14 cents for a four-pound loaf, and there is plenty of flour. The government subsidizes the bread makers, for it wants everybody to be able to buy bread cheaply. Bread will be one of the last items ever to run short.

First-grade potatoes average 18 cents for seven pounds. Milk is 7½ cents a pint, but for children under five and nursing mothers it is 3½ cents. And all families with incomes of less than $8 a week can get milk free. Some three million people are eligible for this free milk, and two and one-half million of them are taking it.

The English feel deeply the present shortage of “biscuits” or, as we would call them, sweet crackers. These biscuits are of many forms, candied and filled, and the English people practically lived on them, along with their tea. But they have almost gone out of existence.

Whenever a shipment of precious things comes in they are ladled out by the grocer as great favors to his best customers.

An American friend of mine read in the papers about a new shipment of onions, so she asked her grocer if he had any. He said he didn’t have a one. But then he disappeared into a back room for a moment, and when he returned he slyly handed her a sack and said, “Here are your oranges, Madam.” When she got home she found two wonderful onions in the sack.

Most of my eating has been done in hotel dining rooms. They are packed at night with wealthy-looking Englishmen and women. Almost daily I hear some Englishman express a little shame at sitting there eating such a fine meal, and a little revulsion at the sight of hundreds of well-fed diners like himself around him, when so much of England’s population can’t eat that way.

As for myself, I have ham and eggs every morning for breakfast, where I had expected none at all. I couldn’t have this if I weren’t “eating out”; and I, like the Englishmen who eat at hotels, feel a little guilt at each mouthful I take.

With Germany bearing down harder in her U-boat strangulation campaign, there is more talk in the newspapers and among groups about stricter regulation of food. The striking thing about this talk--and I think it is an example of British character--is that the people want the Food Ministry to cut down on food faster than it is doing.

You can hardly conceive of the determination of the people of England to win this war. They are ready for anything. They are ready to take further rationing cuts. They are ready to eat in groups at communal kitchens. Even the rich would quit their swanky dining rooms without much grumbling.

If England loses this war it won’t be because people aren’t willing--and even ahead of the government in their eagerness--to assume a life of all-out sacrifice.

_3. STREET SCENE_

_London,
January, 1941_

Along the nearly two miles of Regent and Oxford Streets where the big stores and fashionable shops are situated, I believe the windows have been blown out of two-thirds of the buildings. But the store owners have been ingenious about fixing up the damage.

They cover the great gaping front of a shop with wallboard, leaving a rectangular opening about the size of a table top right in the center. They put a pane of glass across this opening, and then they install a window display just as before, except on a smaller scale. Often the wallboard front is painted blue or brown or gray. Some of the stores even have hunting scenes or marching soldiers painted like a frieze across the top of the new wallboard front.

The result of all this is that instead of looking like patchwork, it makes what seems to me a neater and more attractive line of store fronts than before the bombings.

When a building is only slightly damaged by a bomb it is immediately repaired. Workmen are busy day and night cleaning out rubble and putting buildings together again. It is amazing how quickly they can turn a scene of destruction back into something normal.

But if a building has been too badly damaged for repair it simply stays that way until the war is over. No rebuilding from the ground up is permitted. The government needs all materials too badly--cement, bricks, steel. As a result, when the war is over England will probably have the greatest building boom in the history of the world. And maybe this very boom will be the thing to hold down unemployment and to ease the terrible shock of nonproduction and depression that follows all wars in all countries.

Maybe that will be one of England’s silver linings.

The most puzzling thing to me about all the work of repairing and shoring up buildings and erecting shelters is where all the brick comes from. There are so many hundreds of surface shelters, so many thousands of bricked-up windows and protective walls, so much buttressing and fortifying and repairing, that you’d think there couldn’t have been that many bricks in the world. Yet you see more bricks stacked up everywhere, in alleys, along sidewalks, even in lobbies of buildings, ready for use. And these are all new, whole bricks.

Don’t tell me the British don’t have a sense of humor.

I never get tired of walking around reading the signs put up by stores that have had their windows blown out. My favorite one is at a bookstore, the front of which has been blasted clear out. The store is still doing business, and its sign says, “More Open than Usual.”

A sign on a barber shops says, “Blown Over Here from Across the Street.” A sign on a bomb-scarred pub says, “Even Hitler Can’t Stop Us from Selling Watney’s Ale.” And in front of a beauty shop along the Strand there is a sign saying, “Non-Stop Perming During Raids.”

* * * * *

The other day I noticed a piece of stone about the size of a walnut lying under the radiator in my room. I picked it up and examined it. It was rounded at one end, and you could tell from the other end that it had been freshly broken off something. I studied it a long time, and finally came to the conclusion that it was a toe off some statue, or possibly from the sculptured frieze that adorns the roofline of our hotel. But how did it get into my room?

It suddenly dawned on me. And when the maid came in to straighten up I said, “Maid, have the windows ever been blown out of this room?”

“Why, yes,” she said; “just a few days before you came. But they put them back in, you know.”

They did a nice job of clearing up my room, but they forgot to look under the radiator. So I have a souvenir.

* * * * *

And now at last I am all equipped with a steel helmet and a gas mask. A friend who has just left for America gave me his. As soon as he was gone I brought the mask up to my room and tried it on. It is a big one, issued by the American Embassy, and it is so complicated that I can’t make head nor tail of it. If the gas ever comes I might as well throw this contraption out the window and take a deep breath.

* * * * *

The famous fore-and-aft hat of the London bobby is gone for the duration. Today all policemen wear steel helmets. These are painted dark blue, with “Police” in white letters on the front.

London is fairly crawling with policemen. You meet half a dozen in every block. I understand there are now 40,000 bobbies--just double what there used to be. They are mostly young and soldierly looking, and I have found that instead of being austere they are very friendly. In fact, they will talk your head off if you stop to inquire your way.

* * * * *

London is plastered with posters and signs of warning, instruction and advice. Many of them are illustrated. For instance, one of them pictures a man and a woman gawking skyward, and the inscription says: “Don’t stand and stare at the sky when you hear a plane.” Then it explains that planes drop their bombs long before they are over the objective, and warns that if you stop to look up when you hear motors you may get one smack in the face.

A few blocks from my hotel is a huge store called His Majesty’s Stationery Office. There you can buy for a few cents any one of thousands of detailed booklets on wartime food, arms, shipping, air raids, bombs, and so on, which the government has issued.

There is always a crowd in front of the counters, buying wartime education.

* * * * *

Many automobiles have little printed signs on the windshields saying, “Free lifts at your own risk.” These are driven by suburbanites who get extra rations of gasoline for bringing other people to work. There are 20,000 of these now, but the arrangement is likely to be discontinued, for public transportation is practically back to normal.

Newspaper cartoonists are having a lot of fun with these small details of wartime life. For example, just after the British captured Bardia in Libya, a _Daily Express_ cartoon showed Mussolini standing alone in the desert thumbing for a ride, and Hitler flying over in a German plane with a sign on it saying, “Free lifts at your own risk.”

Nearly all the stores and offices close at four o’clock so people can get home before the blackout. At four-thirty the sidewalks and streets resemble Broadway. At five-thirty they look like Main Street on a dull Monday night.

Since gasoline is rationed, I was astonished by the heavy daytime traffic. There is constantly a solid wall of those big red doubledecker buses, and there are so many private cars that I don’t see how the streets could hold any more. I hate to think what traffic was like in peacetime.

A friend of mine says he thinks the autos here must run on air. People get only a couple of quarts of gas at a time. When you get into a car the gas needle always seems to register zero, but somehow they keep on running.

* * * * *

I’ve just had my first air-mail letter from the United States. It was eighteen days on the way, which I’m told is faster than usual. Many air-mail letters take a month. American magazines and newspapers do not arrive until six weeks after their appearance back home.

I remember reading that in September it took five days for a letter to be delivered right here in London, but now I get mail in the morning that was posted the evening before. The local postal service seems to be completely normal.

London’s weather is not so bad as I had always heard, at least not yet. Incidentally, the censors won’t let you cable anything about the current weather--what it is like this morning, for instance. That might give the Germans an idea.

* * * * *

Newsboys in the streets of London never open their mouths. I wish our newsboys would develop that habit. Over here they just write the biggest news of the day on small blackboards with chalk, or print it on white paper, and prop these bulletins on the building walls beside them. Most of the “newsboys,” incidentally, are old men.

Taxi meters here start at the equivalent of fifteen cents. A trip costs about the same as, or perhaps less than, in New York. In the daytime there are plenty of taxis everywhere, and the taxis are a sight to behold. All of them look as though they had been designed in Queen Victoria’s time and ought to be pulled by horses. But they run fine, and I swear they can turn around in their own length.

One of the few things I have found that are cheaper here than at home is a haircut. I paid only thirty cents the other day in the hotel barbershop, and since then I’ve seen haircuts advertised at fifteen cents. I’m going to get a haircut every day from now on--enough to last me for a year or two.

_4. THIS IS THE WAY OF WAPPING_

_London,
January, 1941_

This is the way the people of London are.

Last night I was standing in the dimly lighted office of the marshal of a big air-raid shelter in the East End. A bareheaded man with a mustache, a muffler and a heavy overcoat was sitting in a chair tilted against the wall. I hadn’t noticed him until he spoke.

“Have you been around Wapping?” he asked.

Wapping is a poor, crime-heavy, conglomerate, notorious section of London. Also it has been terrifically bombed, as has all of London’s waterfront.

“No, I haven’t,” I said, “but it’s one place I’d like to see.”

“Well,” said the man, “I’m a policeman and tomorrow’s my day off. I’d like nothing better than to show you around Wapping if you would care for me to.”

Would I care for it! To get around Wapping with a policeman as a private guide--you can’t beat that if you’re out to see London. I jumped at the chance.

So Mr. Ian Rubin, London bobby, and I walked six miles around Wapping. We did back alleys and dark places, burned warehouses and wrecked churches, block after block of empty flats. We did Wapping with a fine-tooth comb. And so I’m in a position to say that as far as Wapping is concerned there almost isn’t any Wapping any more.

Wapping is one part of the big borough of Stepney. Today its population is a mere few hundred. The entire ward was compulsorily evacuated in that first awful week of the blitz. They put people on boats and took them down the Thames. Those who have come back are mostly men.

In normal times Wapping would be a swarming, noisy mass of humanity, a population as dense as in our Lower East Side in New York. Today I walked block after block and met only half a dozen people. There was no sound in the streets. The place was dead. It was like a graveyard.

We walked into the big inner courtyard of a square of tenement flats. Rear balconies on each floor formed the walls of a square. The windows were all out; the walls were cracked; abandoned household belongings lay where they had been thrown. In the balconies above, no faces peeped over the railings. There was no sound, no movement, no life in the whole block. It was the terrible silence of that Wapping courtyard that got me.

Policeman Rubin and I walked on. We went into the station of a demolition squad--the men who pull down dangerous walls before turning over the general job of demolition to others. These are brave men. Five of them, in workmen’s clothes, were sitting before a crackling fireplace. There was nothing for them to do today--but there might be any time.

They were very friendly, but I could barely understand their Cockney speech. One of them asked me if it was possible to write a letter to San Francisco. One of his fellow workers answered for me. “Sure, you dummy,” he said. “You can write anywhere you want.”

Everyone of these men had been bombed out of his flat, one of them three times. Their wives have been evacuated, but they stayed on to work--a part of London’s great civilian army.

We stood now in a vacant lot where until last September there had been a five-story block of flats. It was fully occupied when a bomb hit. On the wall of a building across the alley you can still see the handprints of a man who was blown from his flat and smashed to death against the wall.

We stood amid the wreckage of a church, in which Policeman Rubin himself had toiled all night helping to reach a mother superior who had been buried in the debris. She was dead when they found her.

We went to see the Church of St. John of Wapping, well known to American tourists. Only the steeple was left, and it was being torn down for safety’s sake.

We passed a pub where in the old days pirates and smugglers used to gather from the ends of the world to sell their illicit goods. It has been boarded up since September.

We passed an undamaged warehouse, where big sacks of East Indian spice were being loaded onto drays, and the smell was sweet and wonderful.

We came to a street sign that said, “Danger. Unexploded Bomb.” So we walked around it.

Policeman Rubin showed me where a time bomb fell at the edge of a school. They couldn’t get it out, so it lay there nine days before blowing the school to smithereens. The wreckage of the school still lay there in a heap.

I saw firemen damping down the inside of a warehouse in which a small new blaze had sprung up after months of smoldering.

I saw great mounds of burned newsprint paper, and other mounds of scorched hemp. I saw half walls with great steel girders hanging, twisted by explosion and fire.

But I saw whole warehouses, too; for Hitler didn’t get them all.

We wandered back and forth through dead, empty streets, and looked at hundreds of ground-floor apartments where rubble-covered furniture stood just as it had been left. The owners probably will never come back for it.

We walked for another hour, Policeman Rubin and I, and then suddenly we came upon a small store with the wallboard front and little show-window center which are today the badge of a bombed establishment that’s still doing business. And when I saw that window it dawned on me that in a solid hour of walking this was the first open store window I had seen.

Every other doorway and window in an entire hour of walking through the heart of a city district was a doorway or a window into a room that no longer held human beings or goods.

That is the way in Wapping today.

There will have to be a new Wapping when this is all over.

_5. THE PYNTED AWL_

_London,
January, 1941_

We got on a bus, a friend and myself, to see more of London’s devastated East End, where the poor people live. London buses are double-deckers, and you can smoke on the top deck, so we sat up there.

You don’t just pay a flat fare in London. The conductor comes around and sells you a ticket to wherever you want to go. But we weren’t sure just where we wanted to go, not knowing London well.

“I think we’d like to go around the Isle of Dogs,” I told the conductor. So he told us where to change buses.

While waiting for the second bus we bought four apples (thirty cents) and ate them. This second bus took us only a short way, and we had to get off and walk two blocks, for the street had been blown up. A big group of men in workmen’s clothes stood waiting for the next bus.

“Is this where we get a bus to the Isle of Dogs?” we asked.

One little stoop-shouldered fellow with yellow teeth and a frazzled coat said, “Just where do you want to go?”

We said we didn’t know. He laughed and said, “Well, this bus will take us there.”

So we all got on, and after a while a big man who was with the little fellow moved back and said he and the little fellow were going to walk through a tunnel under the Thames and would we like to get off and go with them. We said, “Sure.”

It was a foot tunnel, not big enough for cars. These two men work on barges carrying freight up and down the Thames. They leave home one morning and don’t return until the next afternoon. They were carrying tin lunch boxes now.

The big fellow had been to New York six times, before the first World War, working on ships. He told us about it as we walked through the tunnel.

At the other end we came out into what is known as Greenwich. The two men walked us past Greenwich College, which is very old. We stopped before some iron gates and peered through them at some far domes.

“Now that there,” said the little fellow, “that’s the fymous pynted awl.”

“The what?” I said.

“The pynted awl,” he said. “You know, doncha, the fymous pynted awl--the pynted ceilin’, you know.”

And then I realized he was saying “painted hall.” So we looked appreciatively.

“All American tourists knows it,” he said. “The artist he lyed on his back in a ’ammock for twenty years pyntin’ that ceilin’, and when he got through he found a mistyke in it and he went cracked worryin’ about it. Nobody else to this d’y has ever been ayble to find the mistyke. You tell the Americans the bombs heynt touched the pynted awl.”

We came to the little fellow’s corner, so we shook hands and said good-bye. The big fellow got on a double-decked trolley with us, and do you know that this cockney, a complete stranger, insisted on paying our fare--and him as poor as a church mouse! He said people had been nice to him in New York. But that was twenty-five years ago.

After a while we said good-bye to him and got on another bus. It took us down into Blackwall Tunnel, back under the Thames. Then we got out and walked down into the neighborhood of the great West India docks. They won’t let you onto the docks, but we could peep through.

It was raining now and very cold, and it was getting dark. We walked amid wreckage and rubble and great buildings that stood, wounded and empty. It was ghost-like and fearsome in the wet dusk. Poor, pitiful East End! True, Londoners say the slums should have been knocked down long ago, but this is a grievous way to go about it.

We got lost, and a policeman showed us the way again. At last we took another bus back toward the city. At Aldgate East Station I got off to change to the underground, while my friend continued on the bus.

It was pitch black now. I decided to get a bite to eat. I made out, faintly, the form of a policeman, and asked him where I could find a place to eat. He said there was a pub around the corner, three doors away. I felt my way around, but couldn’t find the door of the pub.

In a minute a figure stood beside me. It was the policeman. He pushed the door in the darkness but it didn’t give.

“It’s closed,” he said. “But you can get something across the street, there where you see that little light behind the curtain.”

So I felt my way across and into a tiny place. It wasn’t very clean. There were bare tables, sawdust on the floor, and three candles burning on a counter.

“What kind of sandwiches have you got?” I asked.

“Hot or cold?” said the man behind the counter.

“Hot,” I said. Whereupon he dished up a great big fried fish, filled the plate with crisp fried potatoes, and handed it over. I recognized the dish as the famous “fish and chips.”

I wasn’t too eager to eat it in such a place, but one bite was all I needed. I never tasted better fish or potatoes in my life. And my whole supper cost a shilling--twenty cents.

I got back to the underground and bought a ticket to Charing Cross, the station nearest my hotel. When I got to the station and came upstairs, ready to venture out into the complete blackness, I asked the station starter which direction I should take to walk toward the Strand.

All you have to do over here is open your mouth. In one word they know you’re a stranger. And knowing that, they help you. The station man took my elbow, led me outside and across a couple of drives and sidewalks, and got me out into the middle of the street.

“Now go straight ahead,” he said, “right up this street, and you’ll come to the Strand.”

He must have guided me for half a block. I made it to the Strand, and made it clear back to the hotel, which was about eight blocks. I didn’t get lost, or run into anybody, or fall down. I walked into the Savoy feeling like King George himself.

_V. GUNS AND BOMBERS_

_1. TEA, WITH SOUND EFFECTS_

_London,
January, 1941_

If I was going to get by with calling myself a war correspondent, I figured it was time to get out and see some shooting. So the War Office fixed me up with a solemn, complicated pass to spend a night with an antiaircraft gun crew. It took quite a while to arrange, but finally the day arrived.

I waited until late afternoon, then put on my galoshes and my tin hat, bought ten packs of cigarettes for the gun crew, got into a taxi and went off to the war. When I got there I found that instead of ten men there were hundreds.

A sentry took me to a little cabin where two officers were having tea. They wrote down the number of my pass, and said some boob had told them over the phone that my name was MacInernie. Then they asked me to have tea with them.

The day had been dark and gloomy, and the clouds were hanging low. I was disgusted, for my pass was only good for one night and it didn’t look like flying weather to me.

“You can’t tell a thing about it,” one of the officers said. “Sometimes they come over on the most illogical nights.”

Another officer, who was just going on twenty-four hours’ leave, said: “They’ll be over. They always come when I go on leave. It’s never failed yet.”

He left, and another officer came in and joined us at tea.

This hut was a sort of battlefront apartment. The officers don’t live there, but they eat, sleep and work there, near the guns, while on duty.

A soldier in uniform poured our tea. As dusk came, he pulled down the blackout blinds. It was nearing six o’clock. The officers don’t eat dinner until about nine-thirty, so they were having very late tea.

Now it was all dark outside. And suddenly the sirens went off.

We all looked at each other.

“I told you they might come,” said an officer. But I could tell he was really surprised.

A telephone rang. The officer on duty listened for a minute and then pointed to a wall map, indicating a spot halfway between the Channel coast and London.

“They’re right there now,” he said. “They’ll be here in ten minutes.”

He leisurely finished his tea, and had started to put on his overcoat when the phone rang again.

“Righto,” he said over the phone. And to us he said, “The men are running to the guns now. Come along, let’s see what’s up.”

Each of the guns was set down in a sort of concrete cistern. These gun bases were built before the war started. One of the gunnery officers used to play on this very ground as a child.

There were several small rooms, entirely underground and heavily concreted. The instrument men sat down there, with headphones on, making red marks on a map of London. Each red mark indicated a plane. They’d erase the marks almost as fast as they put them down, and indicate new positions.

Up above, right at the center of this antiaircraft settlement, was a complicated instrument through which the artillerymen sight. In daytime they can get the exact bearings of a plane with this instrument, but at night it’s no good. So they have to use a sound detector. This is a big revolving machine with phonograph horns, at which half a dozen soldiers sit in the dark and read illuminated instruments. It is extremely sensitive. The other night they got a Salvation Army band on it. Honestly.

One man calls out the readings by telephone to the control room below, where these are noted on charts.

I had got it into my head that these sound detectors were hooked directly to the guns and that the guns just automatically pointed and fired whenever the sound mechanism thought the time was propitious. But it isn’t done that way. All the dope from the sound machine, and that which comes over the phone from other instruments all over London, is rapidly tabulated, and calculations are made, and the guns are then aimed and fired manually at wherever they figure the plane should be by that time.

The Germans were mighty busy this night. They were overhead constantly for four hours, starting fires and dropping heavy explosives, many of which we could hear blowing things to destruction around us.

“See!” said my friend the officer, standing there in the dark. “By all rights it should have been a quiet night, and now look at this! You were lucky.”

* * * * *

Now we are standing down below, on the floor of a huge concrete “cistern” somewhere near London. It is a wet, chilly January night. A huge gun sticks its snout up out of the cistern against the faint light of a moon-tinted sky.

The base of the gun is half enclosed in a steel cabin, like the cab of a locomotive. On each side of the gun barrel sits a man on a stool, just like an engineer and fireman. The man on the right, by cranking a wheel, keeps the gun moving around on a swivel, following the hand on a dial which points toward the sound of motors in the sky. The man on the left similarly raises and lowers the gun barrel.

Down in the pit are other men. They are all in uniform, but here in the dark they are mere shapes. They might as well be woodcutters or farmers for all you can tell.

Nobody says anything.

Three men stand just behind and to one side of the gun. Before them, lying in a rack that moves with the gun, is a row of big shells. The shells taper down to a pencil-point end. That end is a steel cap, shiny bright, with figures and marks on it, and right in the end, like the eye of a needle, there is a small hole. One man stands there with a narrow steel punch stuck through this hole. He holds the punch in his right hand. In his left is a shielded flashlight pointing down onto the end of the shell so he can read those little figures which a few seconds later will be bursting through thousands of feet of sky. He stands there waiting--everybody is waiting--everybody is ready for the order.

Off in the darkness, some yards away, technical information is being relayed from one instrument man to another. The sound-detector boys phone, “One three five one four zero one four five,” giving the course of the enemy plane. Over the phone from somewhere else in London comes the plane’s altitude. Mathematicians figure the angle, the range, the bearing. They call out as they figure. It is all quiet, but it is tense and rapid. The officer in charge stands alone there in the darkness. He takes no part in the details. The enlisted men do all that.

Finally there is a shout: “Stand by to fire.” The voice carries to all the gun crews, and each acknowledges with a yell.

We are about ready to shoot at a German. Let’s go back to one of the gun pits.

The boys are waiting. Not a word is said. Then comes a yell: “One five.” That’s the order for setting the time fuse. When that yell comes it means that within a few seconds a shell will be on its way up into the sky.

It is a dramatic thing, like the opening gong of a prize fight, ending months of training.

At the yell, the man with the punch gives the tiny end of the shell a little twist. He has set it at “one five”--in other words, he has set it to explode fifteen seconds after leaving the gun.

It takes him less than a second. He steps back. The man next to him already has this huge shell in his arms. He half throws it into the arms of the man next to him. This one swings it onto a set of rollers and shoves it upward to the man on the left side of the gun cab. He jerks it off the rollers, switches it into a steel cradle alongside the gun barrel. A lever rolls the cradle over and the shell is in the gun. An automatic ram pushes it tight, the breech snaps shut and locks. It is all done in the dark.

The gun is ready. We all step back.

There is utter silence, absolute suspension of all motion. A newcomer puts his fingers to his ears and gets tense all over.