The Battle of Britain Five Months That Changed History, May—October 1940 by James Holland (z-lib.org).epub

45
The Crux
‘THERE’S NO WORD I can start off with,’ jotted Olivia Cockett, ‘to give the
mood of these ghastly days and nights of bombs on London.’ Even so, she
was managing to keep a grip on herself; only once had she broken down
and had a good cry. She also felt better having seen one big, strong fellow
crumple up and sob like a child. Her home in Deptford was frighteningly
close to the London docks, and overnight she had found herself on the front
line of the war. On Sunday night she had put out an incendiary that landed
beside her coal cellar. These were small bombs containing an explosive
charge which would ignite some incendiary material inside the casing and
start a raging fire, and were thus potentially lethal if not quickly
extinguished. The following night a high-explosive bomb at the end of her
garden brought all the garden walls down and left a crater ten feet deep and
thirty wide, and smashed a lot of windows in the process. She had since
replaced the glass with cardboard and done the same for the lady living
opposite.
Every night had been spent in the cellar. ‘I cannot sleep,’ she wrote,
‘especially since I was the only one awake to hear the incendiary bomb…I
daren’t sleep now.’ She had ten sheltering with her, including a cousin of
forty with his mother of seventy, and her sister-in-law and two-year-old
nephew. ‘Brother a hero in the AFS,’ 8 she added, ‘doing rescue work and
laughing and joking and looking 20 years older in three days, during which
he had seven hours off duty.’ Her brother, like all those involved in civil
defence, had been fully mobilized.
On the 13th, Cecil Beaton was glad to escape London and get back to
his house in the country. Every night he had listened to the German
bombers from the basement of his South Kensington home. They sounded
to him like a slow swarm of bees. ‘Jerky bees – buzz-er-buzz-er-buzz,’ he
scribbled. He noticed that many normal household sounds, such as the
banging of a door or the crackle of wood on a fire, had now become noises
of destruction. On Monday, the third day, he had been taking pictures of
bomb damage when the sirens had gone again. ‘I wander deserted streets,’