“Don’t panic—remember, we’re British,” David joked as they went up the stairs in the shadows, but no one laughed. From their vantage point on the roof, it looked as though all of London was burning. The entire horizon of the city glowed orange-red in the dark.
Sirens wailed and Messerschmitts screamed overhead. They could hear the great thudding boom of bombs ripping buildings apart, and could feel the answering shake from British gunfire. The building rocked and swayed in response; it was all so close. The savagery and destruction happening were almost too much to bear. A terrible tremor went through Maggie, and she involuntarily took a step backward, right into John. He put his hands on her shoulders for a moment to steady her; she was surprised and flustered by his touch. As John dropped his hands, David took her arm to give her a reassuring squeeze.
But David didn’t turn his eyes from the horizon. None of them could. The very air tasted of death—acrid, bitter, and metallic—and as Maggie looked up into the sky, she could imagine the souls of the newly dead hovering over them.
New waves of planes flew over them in two-minute intervals. Their motors ground and growled in vicious anticipation of dropping their cargo. Batches of incendiary bombs, clusters of lights called chandeliers, fell into the blackness, flashing with brilliance before burning down to pinpoints of dazzling white. They watched most of them go out, one by one, as firemen extinguished the blazes before they could rage out of control. But some burned on, and soon a yellow flame leapt up from the white center. Yet another building was engulfed in flames.
Above the fires, the sky seethed red. Overhead, making a ceiling in the vast heavens, was a cloud of pink smoke. Up in that shrouding were tiny, brilliant specks of flashing light—antiaircraft shells bursting. The barrage balloons stood in clear relief against the burning horizon, glowing crimson. Maggie was suddenly glad Aunt Edith wasn’t there to witness such an event.
They were silent in the face of such savagery, except for David, who let out a soft whistle as one particularly gorgeous chandelier exploded. It was the most beautiful and horrific sight Maggie had ever witnessed. She could feel the wetness of her sweat seeping from her armpits, pooling between her breasts, and running down her back, even in the cold.
As her thoughts went to her flatmates, out there, vulnerable, in that vast expanse of darkness, she could feel her shell of denial begin to crack. Fear had become a real person standing too close and pressing against her, hard and crude, daring her to cry out in panic.
“You all right?” John whispered.
She pulled herself up and stood straight. “Yes, I’m all right.” She was. She would get through this. They would all get through this. “And you?”
His voice was steely. “I’m getting back to work.”
Yes, work. Work was the only thing they could do.
The next morning, Maggie walked around bombed-out London. According to the BBC, the raids had been perpetrated by three hundred bombers, escorted by six hundred fighters. In just one night, more than four hundred people had been killed. Not to mention the bomb damage and resulting fires, including a huge one on the London docks. And the bombers were going to keep coming—night after night after night.
She walked past cats peering out from boarded-up windows, past houses with balconies, turrets, and Palladian windows. Past chimneys and church towers pointing accusing fingers up to heaven. Many of the once-proud houses were next to mountains of rubble or the skeletons of buildings. Maggie felt shock, disbelief, and overwhelming sadness at the violence and ruin and waste of it all.
As night after night of bombing went by, Maggie was beginning to feel, even amid the grief and loss, a sense of defiance emerging, a fierce solidarity that overrode the fear, and a wicked sense of black humor that outsiders might not understand. Bombed-out shops were open for business, regardless of damage sustained.
“More open than usual?” Maggie joked with one grocer whose front windows had shattered in the raids.
The man grinned back at her. “Right you are, miss, right you are.”
Another open store displayed the sign: They can smash our windows but they can’t beat our furnishing values. Even the police station posted: Be good—we’re still cops.
As the days turned to weeks, everyone in London learned to live with it. They learned to live with the dread and the fear, the sleepless nights and their churning, sour stomachs. They learned to get up and run to the flimsy corrugated-steel Anderson shelter in the dark without tripping and falling. They learned to live with the glow from fires burning in the East End and to live with the smell—the stench of thick, black smoke and an underlying scent of things best not discussed. Many people, more than 170,000 by some accounts, learned to live underground in at least eighty different Tube stations, sleeping on the floor, cooking over small grills, and using buckets for toilets.