Safe Passage

by Mary Burchell

  There were young people and old people; men, women and children. Some wrapped in blankets, some were ambitiously tucked away in something approaching a bed, made up on an old mattress. Some were covered by the most exquisite patchwork quilts.

  I had asked about those quilts earlier in the evening, for the sight of them had jerked my mind back to happy days spent long ago on that holiday in the Catskill Mountains. Strange days of changing values! We should have called the Catskills part of the New World in that faraway time. Now they seemed, in distant, happy retrospect, to be part of the Old World—that Old World of comfort and safety and brightness. The New World, the world to which we were fast becoming accustomed, was this strange, bomb-shattered, noise-torn existence, where we crept underground and pretended to each other that this was the normal state of living.

  I admit my throat grew tight when I first looked on those quilts. I exclaimed, “Those must have come from America! They couldn’t come from anywhere else in the world.”

  I was assured that, indeed, they had come from America.

  “You wouldn’t believe, miss, how good the Americans have been to us,” I was told. “Bales and bales of stuff, and all of it good. Not a rubbishy thing among it. Good enough for anyone. I don’t know what we’d have done without the Americans.”

  I hope some of the good ladies of those sewing parties in Maine and Connecticut, in Boston and Philadelphia, somehow sensed the gratitude with which their gifts were received. Night after night, under their patchwork quilts, slept people they were never to see or know, but to whom the word “American” now took on a personal and special meaning.

  As the night wore on, I made some interesting discoveries. I discovered that more people than not talk in their sleep; that quite a number laugh, some of them chuckling away with a lively, private enjoyment that makes one long to share the joke; and that the snore of which the human throat and nose are capable ranges from basso profundo to coloratura soprano.

  I could write quite a learned dissertation on snoring, after my shelter experiences. There is the staccato snore of the nervous person who has not quite cast off all cares in sleep.

  There is the gradual crescendo snore of the placid sleeper, who goes on with unhurried persistence up the scale, only to start at the bottom again when he has achieved the limit of his range. There is the dolce fa niente snore of the person who dreams pleasantly and with variety; the explosive snore, which makes others groan protestingly in their sleep; the slumbering volcano snore, with its steady, threatening rhythm that never quite achieves eruption; and there is the simple snore for snoring’s sake.

  By five o’clock, all sounds outside had died away, and presently, far away and then coming nearer, the unlovely but welcome sound of the “All Clear.” The tide of war had receded for another 12 or 13 hours. It was time to start waking the early risers.

  I had been given the times and had had my victims pointed out, and I went round shaking one sleeping figure after another, whispering the time and seeing that they did not drop off again. A cheerful, elderly baker. A big, quiet, kindly fellow who worked at the docks. An energetic little grandmother who cleaned offices in the City. I woke each in turn.

  The little cleaner had her grandson with her, and he wept somewhat in protestation at being awakened so early. He was very cheerful in the evenings, specializing in an imitation of Hitler that was very popular; but at half-past five in the morning, his cheerfulness was at a low ebb. In subsequent weeks, I used to have a sweet ready for him as he went past me on his way out of the shelter, carrying his bundle of blankets. He would remove his fist from his eye as he passed me and accept the offer of consolation.

  At six o’clock, up went the lights in the shelter. Everyone dragged themselves to the surface of another day, and then there was a general stir, an exchange of sleepy good-mornings, the folding of blankets and stowing away of bundles. One more night was over, and still we were alive. I rejoined Alice in the sick bay, and drank very hot, sweet tea from an enamel mug; and never did tea taste better.

  It was hardly light when I stumbled out of the shelter and along Tower Bridge Road half-asleep, to wait for my early bus to “The Elephant.” But the world of Bermondsey was awake and humming with activity. There was a lot to be crammed into the few short hours before the bombers came to us again.

  We could count on the siren in the early hours of the evening, and it was not very healthy to go through the streets of East and South-East London after it sounded. So, as the hour of blackout grew earlier and earlier throughout the interminable weeks, so shelter life began at half-past seven, at seven, at half-past six. And, of necessity, it began to take on a much more settled and permanent character.

  No longer was shelter life a temporary state of affairs in which one improvised as one went along. It became a natural state of being, and the evening had to be planned accordingly.

  In our shelter, with a minimum of fuss, there grew up—I might almost say sprang up—a discussion group, a dressmaking class, a weekly class in Bible study, lectures, concerts, film shows, darts matches. And for those who knitted and sewed and crocheted, there were the endless talks and discussions from which emerged the true character of the nation to which I have the honour of belonging.

  Profound truths were presented as natural conclusions; noble sentiments, clothed in very everyday speech, accepted as the ordinary standards; wise vision suddenly shown in simple conversation. I can hear them now!

  Mrs. Gee—best and most valued of friends—saying, as the place shuddered under the infernal assault from above, “Whenever I feel I can’t go on, I think of Mr. Churchill and the weight he carries. And then I feel much better. It’s bad enough for us, but we know we’ve only got to hold on. He’s got to make all the decisions.”

  Mrs. Coffee-shop—we always called her that, and I don’t think I ever knew her real name—shaking her head and saying with a sigh, “I wish my husband would come down here.”

  “Why won’t he?” I asked. “Does he dislike shelter life so much?”

  “Oh, it’s not that,” she explained. “Only he won’t leave the dog. He gets frightened, you know, but of course we can’t bring him down here, so my husband stays with him.”

  The old hop-picker, telling us of the Battle of Britain, as seen from the Kentish hop-fields: “Anyone that’s seen what I’ve seen wouldn’t ever refuse to put their hand in their pocket for an air force all their lives. Falling out of the sky, they was—just falling out of the sky. And often enough, our boys coming down by parachute as their own planes caught on fire. They’d pick themselves up almost before you could ask ’em if they was all right, and off they’d go crying, ‘Give me another machine, and let me get at ’em again.’ Ah, what boys!”

  And then, the same old woman telling how her own two sons were killed at Dunkirk within three minutes of each other. One was shot through the mouth and his brother, hearing him cry out, went back for him and was killed beside him.

  “They was such good boys,” she told me. “Such good boys. Always brought their money home every Friday night, they did. Killed within three minutes of each other. Both of them gone. But, there, perhaps it was best that way. They were that fond of each other. My Bill wouldn’t have wanted to come home without my Harry.”

  She sank into thought for a moment. And then she added, rather proudly, “The sergeant himself came and told me about it when he got back. Very nice, he was. ‘Don’t cry, Ma,’ he said. ‘We know what you’re feeling. We’d been a long time together and we wasn’t pals, we was brothers. We couldn’t stay to bury them—there wasn’t time. But we did the best we could,’ he said. ‘We left them side by side, with their hands touching.’”

  In the welter of horror and haste that was Dunkirk, someone paused to put the hands of the two dead boys together, so that even in their death, they were not divided.

  “Such good boys they was,” the old woman repeated sorrowfully. “But, there, miss,” she added more cheerfully, “we must all
make sacrifices in these days, mustn’t we?”

  I said, I hope with some humility, that we must. And I have often wondered since if the brotherhood of man has ever been more movingly described than in those words, “We did the best we could. We left them side by side, with their hands touching.”

  One of the most striking things about this shelter life of ours was the way in which each thought for all, and a simple and general humanity created a natural community of interests and sympathy. Good humour, good sense and a kindly reasonableness triumphed over nearly all the limitations and shortcomings of a cramped, indeed a primitive, existence. Nerves must have been stretched to the snapping point, and yet I very seldom heard so much as a sharp personal argument in all the nights I spent down there. I think that constituted as big a victory over circumstances as the more obvious courage with which the bombardment was endured.

  Perhaps, of course, the realization that minor differences meant nothing in the face of the terrible major emergency had something to do with it. After all, when death is prowling about overhead, life does seem rather too precious to fritter away on petty disputes. And certainly the reminder of what was waiting for every one of us was pretty constant.

  It was not only the continuous sound of gunfire, nor even the dreadful increasing frequency of the bomb hits, which seemed to make the very earth beneath us shift strangely. It was the stories everyone knew and no one could resist telling.

  Stories concerning the friends, neighbours, relatives of the people down there. Families wiped out, shelters—not so very unlike ours, when you came to think of it—that, in the telling phrase, “had not stood up to a direct hit.” Disasters embracing whole streets, mass funerals where the victims were personally known to half the people in our shelter. It began to seem illogical that, when so many people were dying, we were left alive. Measured by nothing more than the simple law of averages, we felt we must be hit soon. Would our shelter “stand up to it”?

  And then there was the evidence of our eyes when we left the shelter in the morning—or sometimes, when it was still too dark to see, just the testimony of tinkling broken glass underfoot or the unnatural crunch of slates that should have been on roofs far above our heads, but were now lying on the pavement along which we groped our way.

  In spite of the dismal frequency of the experience, I never quite got used to the extraordinary sensation of passing a familiar building that had been solid last night and suddenly realizing that through ragged holes in its fabric, one could see the pale light of the morning sky.

  No wonder we began to think increasingly often, “Next time it will surely be us.”

  Of course, we spent a lot of time telling each other that our shelter was especially safe. And the directors of the factory overhead most gallantly contributed their efforts to making us feel this was so. Instead of going home to the less bombed areas where they lived, they frequently took turns sleeping down in the shelter, because, as they casually mentioned, “they felt safe there as anywhere.”

  That made the word go around that there could hardly be any danger. “Shows they have confidence in the place, and they should know. It must be pretty safe. As safe as it can be, that is.”

  As safe as it can be. There was the rub. How safe could any shelter be if a bomb fell in just the right place?

  We knew, and we knew everyone else knew, that nowhere was really safe in the increasing rain of fire and terror that was being poured on London. And when the bombers were overhead—right overhead, I mean—who really thought about how safe their shelter was, I should like to know? I suppose no one who has not actually experienced it can quite imagine the horrific sound of a bomber diving to attack. It combines in its screaming note all the melancholy of a banshee wail with the nerve-rasping warning of a danger-signal.

  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.