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

he noted, ‘that, until the sirens had sounded, had been a hive of business
activity.’ The all-clear siren was, he thought, more penetratingly shrill than
the warning. ‘And so another raid had ended, and we buy more evening
papers to learn what damage has been done.’ Friends told him of bombs
that had fallen nearby but in just a few days he confessed he had already
become something of a bomb snob, only impressed when he met someone
who had been actually grazed by bomb blast.
He had spotted a wax head lying among the debris of a former hairdressing
salon in Albemarle Street, and later returned to try and find it
again, this time armed with his camera. As he arrived, a demolition party
was pulling down a large top-heavy facade. Watching the walls collapse
with a mighty ‘whrump’, he waited for the dust to settle then clambered
over the rubble and found a new wax head among the cracked mirrors,
shards of glass and other wreckage. Cecil asked the men whether they had
seen a head with golden hair flying wild, and to his surprise they had.
Unearthing it, they handed it to him, and he then photographed it against the
backdrop rubble. ‘I felt thoroughly sad and somewhat unnerved as I walked
down the havoc of Savile Row,’ he scribbled later, ‘where scarcely a
window-pane remains intact. And the East End is far worse.’
Harold Nicolson had driven back to London on Sunday the 8th, his
journey interrupted by some craters in the road near Maidstone. ‘When we
get nearer London,’ he wrote, ‘there is a great pillar of smoke rising like it
used to when an oil well was aflame in Persia or Iraq.’ The Ministry of
Information now braced itself to face one of its toughest tests: heavy air
raids over London and the prospect of an imminent invasion. Harold and
Duff Cooper urged Churchill to broadcast to the nation, to which the Prime
Minister agreed, and Harold prepared a speech for him, which he ignored.
However, as Harold admitted, the speech was nonetheless ‘effective’.
If the enemy were to try an invasion, it could surely not be much longer
delayed, he warned. They had therefore, he said, reached a pivotal moment
in Britain’s history, one that ranked with the days when the Spanish Armada
approached, and when Nelson alone seemed to stand between Britain and
the French armies at Boulogne. ‘But what is happening now,’ he said, ‘is on
a far greater scale and of far more consequence to the life and future of the
world and its civilization than these brave old days of the past.’ It was a
time for everyone to stand together, and hold firm, which they were already
doing. ‘This effort of the Germans to secure daylight mastery of the air over