The Bravest Voices

by Ida Cook

  But who can avoid the danger it is signalling? There is not a thing you can do about it. You can only sit there, pretending it isn’t happening, with an idiotically hopeful smile pinned on your frozen face—going on with your conversation by main force, even if you suspect that your sentences are tailing off into futile banalities. You must go on doing what is normal—must go on with it—because only that way can you hold off the fantastic and terrible just an instant longer.

  Then there is a moment when you know that the sound of the descending bomber has merged into the sound of the descending bomb. In the few seconds remaining before the impact, you have time to think an astonishing number of thoughts. All the assurances you have ever heard about “not hearing the bomb that hits you,” “if you can hear it, you know you’re safe,” and so on pass through your mind without leaving any impression. The reports about shelters that “didn’t stand up to it” and “bombs that came right through and then exploded” also pass through your mind, and they do leave their impression.

  With fatal certainty, you know that this time it is your bomb, your shelter, your death....

  And then the fearful thud is not on top of your head after all, but some blessed distance away.

  For a moment, you can’t even recollect that it has probably meant death to someone else. You are literally sweating with the relief of finding you are alive. There is saliva again in your dry mouth, the salt taste of terror is going, your tensed muscles relax, and you hope you haven’t looked more frightened than anyone else.

  The danger is past; it never really existed, it was really quite far away, you only imagined...

  And then it comes again. Whooooooooeeeeeeee!

  No wonder we used to organize sing-songs to drown the hideous sound as much as possible. There is something rather exhilarating in defiantly bawling, “Daisy, Daisy, give me your answer, do,” in competition with German bombers. And “Roll Out the Barrel” has never seemed quite the same to me without a gunfire obbligato in the background.

  Sometimes, as we sang the old favourites of 25 years earlier, it was hard to remember if we were in this war or the last one. “Pack Up Your Troubles,” “There’s a Long, Long Trail,” “Keep the Home Fires Burning,” “Tipperary”—they had all been sung thousands of times by the khaki columns marching across Belgium and France to stem that other German tide. Now, the children of those men, sometimes the men themselves, middle-aged but tough still, were singing them all over again. But this time, the Germans had reached London; they were right overhead.

  And still we sang, “While there’s a Lucifer to light your fag, smile boys, that’s the style.”

  I had chanted those songs as a schoolgirl once. Now, with thousands of other women, I was wondering if we should live to sing those old songs many times more.

  But we were not by any means always reduced to our own resources for a concert. Every night, in every part of East and South-East London, singers and pianists and stage artists of every description were going from shelter to shelter, bringing pleasure and cheer to the people marooned there.

  Someone with a car, or a taxi driver, could nearly always be found to take them through the bombs and shrapnel. And if they had to walk part of the way—well, that was all part of the business of “serving the public,” in the most selfless and exacting sense of the phrase.

  There was no compulsion upon these people. Each one did it for no other reason than a desire to brighten the lot of those in the heavily bombed areas who were sticking to their jobs and winning the war by the grim process of “hanging on.” Most of those artists could, no doubt, have spent their nights in comparative safety in very different areas. They deliberately chose to share the perils of the Blitz, because they knew that what they had to offer would help distract thoughts and toughen still further the iron morale that was pretty nearly our only weapon at that time.

  More than one artist gave up a good contract in the States when the Blitz began, coming home to play or sing in the London shelters. For my part, I was never afterwards able to judge those artists on the cool impartial basis of artistic merit. Good, bad or indifferent, I always applauded them, for the sake of those shelter concerts.

  The shelter concert I remember best was when a well-known contralto and her accompanist came down to entertain us. She had never been a favourite of mine, but I had heard her quite often before, in what now seemed the dim past.

  Her personality, as such, had never appeared impressive to me. But, as she stood there now in our crowded shelter, singing popular songs, telling funny stories, leading the community singing, she was deliberately measuring sheer personality against the terror of the raid outside.

  And she won. There was no question about that. She had us all singing and laughing in no time. We hardly thought about the raid outside. She sang and we sang and her accompanist played, indefatigably.

  Then presently, she asked us to choose what we ourselves would like to sing, and someone suggested, “Drink To Me Only...”

  “Why, yes, of course,” she said. “Do you all know it?”

  Incredibly, we all knew it. And suddenly, by one of those concerted impulses that do sometimes move a whole multitude in close sympathy with one another, we were all on our mettle.

  The accompanist played the air over to us and then, from the packed benches of our bare, stone-walled shelter, rose in admirable harmony and with quite exquisite restraint, the simple, beautiful strains of Ben Johnson’s song.

  Drink to me only with thine eyes,

  And I will pledge with mine;

  Or leave a kiss within the cup

  And I’ll not ask for wine.

  How often had these very words sounded through the Mermaid Tavern, not so far away from where we were singing them now? Most of the generation who first sang that song must have been able to remember the defeat of the Spanish Armada. It was a different Armada now—and that last bomb was nearer than one liked—but we were the generation sharing its defeat.

  The thirst that from the soul doth rise

  Doth ask a drink divine;

  But might I of Jove’s nectar sup,

  I would not change for thine.

  At the end of the verse, the accompanist leaped to his feet, fairly blazing with enthusiasm and exclaimed, “I’ve seldom heard that better sung! You’ve simply got to sing the second verse now. It’s not so often sung, but it contains some of the most beautiful words in the English language. Let’s be sure and get them right.”

  He recited them to us. We repeated them after him. And then the battered old piano started again.

  I sent thee late a rosy wreath,

  Not so much honouring thee

  As giving it a hope that there

  It could not wither’d be;

  What did it matter if Spaniard or German were trying to tear life from us? This was one of the great songs of great England, and we would sing it to the end, whether it were the sixteenth or the twentieth century.

  But thou thereon didst only breathe,

  And sent’st it back to me;

  Since when it grows and smells, I swear,

  Not of itself but thee!

  Immortal words, immortal tune, immortal people. They were making history, and they sang as they did it.

  To all of us who love music, and have been fortunate enough to indulge that love, there are half a dozen performances that stand out in the memories. An opera performance, with singers, orchestra, conductor and composer in the exact combination one has always hoped to hear it and seldom does. A Mozart serenade on a warm, starry night in Salzburg, when even the surrounding mountains seem to listen.

  But, among my own list of great performances—every other one of which owed much to professional artistry and the exercise of trained and perfected art—I must place that strange and moving occasion when two hundred Cockneys sang “Drink To Me With Th
ine Eyes” in the cellar of a London factory and forgot that from overhead the bombs were falling.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Finally the event we had all been dreading occurred: the night when we really were hit. The factory overhead was not directly hit but a public house and block of flats next door to the factory and almost directly over one half of our shelter were.

  We heard the sound of the descending bomber, the sound of the descending bomb—to which we were all quite accustomed—but the final thud seemed to hit us personally; it was succeeded by the new and terrifying sound of masonry crashing down over our heads for endless, horrible moments. We rose instinctively to our feet in a body, wondering, wondering if the roof above us would hold.

  It held. But through the shelter came drifting clouds of dust from the rubble overhead, and there was an immediate call for volunteers to go out and help. Volunteers were particularly needed to enter the gradually collapsing public house and bring out those who were still alive.

  A boy of nineteen, whom I had never before associated with anything but the rather tiresome playing of a piano-accordion, was the first one in. Afterwards, he described what had happened. After crawling in, he had switched his lamp around and the first thing he had seen was a woman, quite dead. “And me stomach came up and hit the roof of me mouth,” was the expressive way he had described his feelings.

  But he described the rescue work very matter-of-factly, while he drank hot Oxo and relaxed. And he finished by saying thoughtfully, “I don’t think I’ll tell my Mum and Dad I was in it.”

  “Won’t you?” I exclaimed. For, unashamed sensationalist that I am, I was dying to get home and tell my Dad about it all. “But why not?”

  “Oh, they’ll only worry,” he explained tolerantly. “But, coo!” he added reflectively, “I’ll never be nearer to heaven than I was tonight. I heard them harps playing.”

  Curious though it may sound, there was a sort of relief about having been hit at last. It was the quite illogical feeling that we had had our turn and survived. I remember feeling indescribably cheerful as I went home the next morning.

  During the day, I had occasion to go up West. As my bus went up Park Lane, I suddenly saw the wonderful, fantastic riot of purple, white and golden crocuses that, every year, burst forth at that side of Hyde Park in a glory of insolent colour. It was a perfect day, and I was alive. I should have been dead, but I was alive. The sky had never been more blue, the grass more green nor the crocuses more incredibly beautiful.

  The memory of that tidal wave of thankfulness has never left me. Every year, when I first see the crocuses in Hyde Park, I feel the tears come into my eyes, and I remember again that wonderful, glorious sensation.

  It was, I think, only two weeks later that we experienced our worst night of all. Most people in London at that time will recall the two fearful raids of April 16 and April 19. I was down in the shelter on that memorable Wednesday, and from the very beginning, we knew it was going to be what was euphemistically called “a lively night.”

  The lights were not turned out that night. Or, rather, I think we turned them out for half an hour and then, by common consent, turned them on again. The great tarpaulin over the doorway—for it was unsafe to have anything rigid like a door—was lifted almost to the ceiling again and again by the force of the bomb blasts, and a few of the women could not help crying a little.

  I remember doggedly reading an evening newspaper over and over. By driving my elbows hard into my ribs and holding the paper in both hands, I could manage not to let its leaves tremble too obviously.

  Once, dear Mrs. Gee came over and remarked, “It’s a nasty night, isn’t it?”

  And, with false cheeriness, I managed to say, “Really, an awful lot of the noise is gunfire, you know.”

  Mrs. Gee laughed with real humour and replied, “But an awful lot isn’t, Miss Cook.” And we both smiled feebly.

  I had been frightened before, of course. There had often been odd moments when I had thought, This is it. But that night, for the first and only time, the growing conviction came over me that we could not live until the morning.

  I remember thinking, I shall never see Mother again. I shall never hear Rosa sing again. And those two acceptances seemed to make it absolutely final.

  Every half hour or so our fire guards came through the shelter to see that we were all right and report on events above. They were wonderfully cheerful and chaffed us a good deal for having the lights on.

  “What’s the matter with some of you girls?” they wanted to know. “If you can’t get to sleep on a nice quiet night like this, what’ll you do when it’s really noisy?”

  We laughed rather sheepishly, trying to look as though we didn’t really mind what was happening.

  But, as the night wore on, they took a different tone during their rounds of the shelter. They stressed how foolish people were who had stayed up above when they could have gone to shelter underground.

  “You mean it’s been a bad night for casualties?” someone asked.

  Yes, it had been a bad night for casualties. Made you feel how glad you were just to be alive. Better to lose everything you possessed than risk your lives and the lives of your families by staying near your worldly possessions.

  Yes, we all agreed fervently, the really important thing was just to be alive.

  “You can buy fresh homes,” one of the men said. “But you can’t put back people who’ve been killed.”

  How true, we agreed again. None of us minded what was lost so long as we and our dear ones were safe.

  At this point, one of them remarked casually that it was a good thing we felt that way, the only sensible way.

  Then one of the women realized where the conversation was drifting. She said, rather hesitantly, “Is there a lot of damage up above?”

  Yes, there was a lot of damage.

  We looked at each other. “Some of our places gone?”

  Yes, several people’s places had gone.

  Then one woman looked directly at her husband. “Is our place gone?”

  “I’m afraid so, girl,” he said. “There isn’t much left up there. But we’re alive. We’re all lucky to be alive. We’d have been dead if we’d stayed up above.”

  “Oh, what a mercy we didn’t!” she exclaimed. “How lucky we are!”

  Incredible though it sounds, within a few moments, a whole lot of people were congratulating each other on their extraordinary good fortune in only having lost all their worldly possessions.

  About four o’clock in the morning, things had grown a little quieter, so I asked one of the fire guards if I might go up to the top of the stairs and look out. He said I might; the worst was over. And up the long flight of stairs I went.

  It is still difficult to visualize that scene. As I stepped out into the open air, I saw everything by a warm, almost cosy glow. It was not daylight. It was not moonlight. It was firelight on a colossal scale. I was looking at the outside world by firelight. It is impossible to describe how monstrously incongruous that can seem.

  As I looked around, it appeared to me that ours was the only building that had not been hit. All around were burning ruins. Since I had gone down to the shelter the night before, the whole skyline had changed. It was like finding myself in a totally unfamiliar part of the town.

  * * *

  When that incredible night passed into an incredible dawn, we all started picking our way homeward. The smell of burning was everywhere and the air was thick with bits of charred paper: the last of the big book centres in the City had been hit that night, and in the tremendous draught created by the fires, the remains of millions of books had been drawn up and now were drifting down, sometimes miles away in the outer suburbs.

  One charred sheet, which fell in our garden at home, came from a Bible. On it was something about the wicked being confounded. I found that oddly comforti
ng, before the sheet fell to pieces in my hand.

  On Saturday of that week, there followed an almost equally terrible raid, and then there was a pause until the famous May 10 raid, the last great raid of the Big Blitz. After these events, extreme terror retreated until the days of the flying bombs, or doodlebugs.

  For the purposes of continuity, I have intentionally kept only to the history of the shelter throughout that winter of 1940-41, but I must go back now and deal with the one great personal tragedy that had hit us during that period.

  One weekend in November, 1940, I had been up in Wales, staying with Louise. On my return, I telephoned Nesta’s office, as usual, to arrange to meet her and Jane and give them all the news about our exile.

  A rather subdued voice replied, “Oh, haven’t you heard about Nesta? Then I think I’d better put you on to the man for whom she works.”

  After a short but agonizing delay, another voice spoke to me and, without any preamble said, “I’m terribly sorry to have to tell you. Their house was bombed on Friday night. Nesta and her mother are both very badly injured, but I understand Jane and her father are not so seriously hurt. Jane has been moved to a hospital outside London, but Nesta and her mother are too ill to be moved.”

  I stopped only to ask the name of their local hospital, put down the telephone, and set out, running. I remember running along the top of our road, unable to bear waiting for a bus. All the time I kept on thinking, if only I’m in time. I don’t think I even allowed myself to realize what I hoped to be in time for.

  Such a scene of devastation surrounded the hospital that I wondered how anyone had survived at all. And yet, somehow, I had never really accepted the idea of any of us being hurt. One doesn’t. One hears about others, one is terribly sorry, one is often frightened. But one doesn’t, I realized then, ever accept the complete idea that one of one’s own may be a victim.

  I was admitted at once to see Nesta, who was in a room by herself. She didn’t know me. Poor child, I hardly knew her.

  “Speak to her,” the nurse said. “See if you can hold her attention for a moment and persuade her to rest. We can’t.”