Post D : Some Experiences of an Air Raid Warden

Excerpts:

I. Introduction to the Blitz

The line was interrupted beyond Wimbledon. Just before they got there the sirens went, and immediately out of the train windows they saw the raiders, the size of small moths, flying south. These moths flew on undisturbed for perhaps thirty seconds: then they were beset by tiny gnats, diving down on them and curling up at them from beneath. The air battle was too high for there to be any sound of machine-gun fire. Both the raiding bombers and the defending fighters left graceful white trails of condensation across the sky, so that for several minutes after they had passed out of sight you could see the pattern of the engagement. There were long, straight paths made by the bombers, parallel at first, then tending to diverge and grow irregular as they were intersected and interlaced by the short, steeply curved arcs of the dives and zooms of the fighters.

It was a sky-bound, geometrical and austere sight, with little to do, one might have thought, with the human beings going about their business four or five miles below in South-West London.

Ford was on his way back from Surrey. The serious night attacks upon London had started a week before, on September 7th. But there was still a certain amount of day raiding going on. At Wimbledon he took a bus. As soon as they had gone over Putney Bridge the bus left its normal route and diverged into side turnings. Presently the streets began to have an unusual look. A good many people were about without hats; they had evidently just come out of their houses; they were looking up and down the street. The disturbed ant-hill comparison inevitably occurred to him. Not that the streets were crowded. But the people were evidently neither doing anything nor going anywhere in particular. They were just disturbed. Down a side street Ford saw a knot of people, some of them in one or other of the Civil Defence uniforms, round a wrecked house. A little farther on the bus scrunched over broken glass. Shattered shop windows gave some streets an eyeless look.

Ford asked the conductor if the bus would get back on to its normal route. The conductor said, "I've no idea." As they seemed to be diverging farther and farther Ford got out and began walking home. He passed two more newly wrecked houses, upon which rescue or other work was going on. He turned down James Street, a nondescript sort of street that he never remembered having walked down before. It took him into Gage Street, which he walked along into Marlow Square.

Two or three Air Raid Wardens were walking about rather busily at the far end of the Square. Where his own street, St. Hilda's Terrace, began he found a rope barrier. As he came up to it two wardens stopped him. "You can't go past," they said in chorus. "Unexploded bombs in Bedford Court." Ford immediately felt determined to go to his house. He said, "But my house is only two doors down. It's really in Marlow Square. Surely I can go there."

"Quite impossible," said one of the wardens.

"But I must get a toothbrush."

"Do you want to risk your life for a toothbrush?" said a lady warden.

Ford said, "Who wouldn't?"

His facetiousness was not encouraged. Another warden came up. Ford recognised a Miss Sterling. Miss Sterling,
he vaguely knew, was "his" warden, in the sense that she lived only a dozen doors away, and had come round once or twice to enquire whether they had a stirrup pump, if their gas masks were in order, and so on. He appealed to her. "Oh, Miss Sterling, I only want to go home just for a minute to get some things."

The other wardens repeated, "Quite impossible."

Ford thought of the two old ladies who lived in the basement and "did for him".

"But what about Miss Team and Miss Aird?" he said. "Have they been evacuated yet?"

Miss Sterling said, "They haven't gone yet."

"Then it's perfectly absurd," he replied. "Of course I must go back and help them to pack, and to get my own things." Without waiting for a refusal he stepped over the rope barrier. As he went he heard the other two wardens blaming Miss Sterling for letting him go.

At home the two old ladies were packing in a fluster. "Oh, Mr. John, we've got to be out in three minutes. Wherever shall we go—whatever shall we do?"

Ford said, "We'll find somewhere for you."

Just then the sirens went again. Miss Aird dropped the string bag into which she was stuffing a half-eaten joint. Her hands fluttered. They began to hear gunfire.

Ford went upstairs and began throwing clothes into two big suitcases. He hadn't finished when the front-door bell rang. He opened it and found Miss Sterling standing on the doorstep. She was not facing him, but was looking, with a detached expression, down the street towards Bedford Court. She said, "Mr. Ford"—she spoke very slowly—"Mr. Ford—I don't think—I don't think—there are any D.A. bombs at all."

Ford was considerably puzzled. He said, "Don't we have to go, then?"

"I don't think so."

 

 

 

 

III. Digging for Mrs. Miller

The little Marlow Square incident began a period of considerable strain. No further bombs came down in their sector, but each night there were heavy raids, in which many bombs fell within the borough.

At two o'clock one morning the telephone bell rang. Ford had just come down from the landing, and was about to wake Levy. He answered the telephone and heard Mrs. Raymond's correctly official voice.

"Post D speaking. Control has informed us that an exceptionally large number of incidents are reported as taking place in Slaney. All Chelsea wardens are instructed to be in readiness to report there for duty."

Ford went upstairs and duly informed Miss Sterling and Miss Dalrymple, who were on watch, of this message. There did not seem much to do or say about it. So he went to bed and to sleep. He woke to find Miss Sterling shining a torch on him. She said: "Post D has rung through to say that you are to go to Slaney F at 8 a.m. They have more incidents than they can cope with."

He disentangled his slept-in clothes from the blankets and mattress on the basement floor of the sub-post. He swilled water over his face, finding it cold out of the hot tap. Apparently the gas had gone again in the night. He took a bus down the Queen's Road to the next A.R.P. district, Slaney. When he got to the Slaney F Post the Senior Warden was out; fetched, he hesitated between various tasks. Then Rumbold, another Post D warden, came. Finally they were both told to go down to Beaton Street.

A bomb, or bombs, had hit the last five houses in Beaton Street, where it joins the river, and a small tenement that forms the last block on the embankment. (Ford supposed that these were some of the incidents which Post D had reported during the night. Curiously enough no one at 46 had heard the detonations.) These buildings had been destroyed Where they had stood there was a crater, with two mounds of debris on each side of it, one some twenty-five feet, and the other some fifteen feet, high. The debris of the five houses and the tenement was completely mixed in the mounds; there was no trace of separate structures.

Ford and Rumbold found rescue squads working on each mound. After wandering about a little they found the warden in charge. He seemed unable to think of anything he wanted done. "Just keep them from coming down the streets," he said. He evidently felt vaguely that it must be right to stop people doing something. But nobody was coming down the streets. Between ten and twenty oldish men and women, and one or two untidy girls were standing about in the doors and on the area steps of the more or less shattered, but still standing, houses round the incident.

Ford and Rumbold saw no one to stop doing anything; so they just waited about. It was a squally October morning. As usual on the embankment, you suddenly became conscious of the weather, almost as if you had been in the country. The tide was low: gulls stood on the mud-flats. The wind flickered the surface of the channel. A biggish collier, looking inappropriate so far up the river, was moored fifty yards farther on beside the power station. The power station's chimneys stood over them. People glanced at them, and then at the mounds.

Ford began watchjng what the rescue squad on the nearest mound was doing. They had evidently been at work for some hours already. They had fixed a plank walk up the side of the mound, and a knot of them was concentrated near the top, apparently moving the debris about with their hands, and putting bits of it into wicker baskets. When the baskets were filled they took them to other parts of the mound and emptied them. It looked aimless. Ford climbed on to the debris to try to see what they were at. As soon as he got on to the mound he found that it was made up of an extraordinary texture of brick and plaster rubble, more or less shattered lengths of floor joists and beams, pieces of broken furniture, rugs, carpets, linoleum, curtains, pieces of crockery, often unbroken, all made into a homogeneous, tight-pressed pudding. It was rather difficult to climb on to.

When he got to the top he was gradually able to make out what the rescue squad was doing. They were sinking a small shaft vertically downwards through the mound from its top. They worked much in the same way as archaeologists open up the debris of millennia; but this was the debris of seconds. The rescue men had blue overalls, instead of the brown overalls of the Chelsea wardens, such as Ford was wearing. The rescue men took no notice of him. They had only sunk their shaft about five feet down into the mound. They seemed to him to be working in an incredibly primitive and inefficient way—with their bare hands, and without any tools even, let alone any mechanical appliances.

One of them began to let himself down into the shaft, which was encumbered by ragged ends of floor joists and beams. He got to the bottom and then wormed his body round till he was lying in a knot with his head down by a crack, where some tattered rubble was held up an inch or so by a joist end. Ford moved to the edge of the shaft to see. The rescue men stood still, and one of them called down to the people by the mound to be quiet. Ford heard the river waves lap the mud. The rescue man down the shaft put his mouth to the crack and said; "Are you there, chum?" Everybody kept really still. But they heard nothing. The man down the shaft put his ear to the crack. The rescue man at the top, who had called to the people to be quiet, said: "Can't you hear him any more, Smith?" Smith said, "Yes, but he's getting very faint." Then he began to get out of the shaft. It was 9.30 a.m. Ford had not realised before that there were people alive under them in the mound.

The rescue squad went on digging, no faster but steadily, filling wicker baskets with rubble, passing them from hand to hand to the edge of the mound and emptying them.

The one who had called down to the people to be quiet said, "Cut away some of that stuff"—pointing to one edge of the shaft—"the weight'll be coming down on Smith otherwise." A couple of rescue men took up shovels and began trying to use them on that edge of the mound, pushing rubble down into the central crater. Ford felt restless. He saw a pick lying about, so he took off his coat, put down his gas mask and torch, and began to loosen the rubble so that the men with shovels could really get at it. The rescue men neither warned him off—as he feared they might—nor welcomed him. Rumbold came and worked with another shovel.

For about a foot down his pick made good progress; it was easy to loosen the broken brickwork, plaster, and the rest of the indescribable mixture of which the mound was made. Then his pick stuck in something tough and sticky. Using all his strength, he got it out. At the next stroke it stuck again. He got it out. Forewarned, he made smaller strokes, only attempting to loose tiny bits of the new material. He wondered what it was. He picked a bit up in his hands, and recognised it as the clay which is the universal sub-soil of London. If you dig down, say, ten feet almost anywhere in London this is what you come to. But he was working more than ten feet above street level. The bomb had picked up layers of the sub-soil and somehow spread them above the layers of obliterated houses.

After some little time the rescue man who had put them on (he was evidently called Frank) said, "That's enough." Ford was glad. His arms ached. But he didn't fancy standing about. So he got a place taking the filled baskets as the men in the shaft passed them out to be emptied. The rescue men still neither welcomed nor repulsed him. He could now see that their apparently primitive method of work with their hands was in fact the only possible way of dealing with the material of which the mound was made. It would have been quite impossible to swing a pick or shovel in the shaft, partly because it was too narrow. But even if they had dug it wider, as soon as you had got a few feet down a network of half-shattered woodwork would have prevented the use of any tool which Ford could think of. As it was, they were continually having to stop to saw through a wedged joist or beam. They used absurdly small, flimsy saws— they looked as if they had been bought at toy shops, and perhaps they had—in order to be able to get them into the corners of the shaft.

They began to smell gas—not poison gas, but ordinary domestic gas. As the shaft progressively opened up the mound, the shattered pipes of the houses permeated it with gas. "Nobody must strike a match," said Frank. But the rescue men went on smoking just the same.

Every now and then a rescue man would call out "Warden," and Ford or Rumbold would go over and take charge of some bit of personal property . . .