In Europe

the next two weeks to bomb English cities, factories and airfields. Then, at 5 p.m. on 7 September, the first major attack on London began. The docks were the primary target, but working-class neighbourhoods, the East End in particular, were also badly damaged. Some 300 men, women and children were killed. The next morning Churchill paid a visit to a bomb shelter that had been squarely hit. Forty people had been killed. Churchill burst into tears. The people shouted: ‘We thought you'd come. We can take it. Give it ‘em back!’
    Five days later, Buckingham Palace was hit for the first time. ‘I'm glad we've been bombed,’ said Queen Elizabeth. ‘Now I feel we can look the East End in the face.’ On Sunday, 29 September, firebombs rained down on the City. The entire district, reduced to ashes in the Great Fire of 1666, was alight once again. Nineteen churches, thirty-one guild halls and all of Paternoster Row, including five million books, went up in flames. By late September almost 6,000 Londoners had been killed, and another 12,000 wounded. Harold Nicolson compared himself to a prisoner in the Conciergerie during the French Revolution: ‘Every morning one is pleased to see one's friends appearing again.’
    Something of the real story can be derived from the reports from Mass Observation. Some of the Londoners surrendered to their fear. Others tried, despite it all, in stubborn, angry fashion, to get on with daily life. Yet others kept their mortal fear in check with jokes and songs. Barbara Nixon, an Air Defence volunteer, saw her first victim: ‘In the middle of the street lay the remains of the baby. It had been blown clean through the window and had burst on striking the roadway.’ Celia Fremlin, a Mass Observation reporter, described the mood in a bomb shelter in Cable Street, at the start of the bombardments: ‘They were screaming and saying, “I can't stand it, I'm going to die, I can't stand it!.”’ When she came back to the same shelter three nights later, the people were singing. The reason was simple enough:‘Once you've gone through three nights of bombing and come out alive, you can't help feeling safe thefourth time.’ Bernard Kops, a fourteen-year-old at the time, remembered the first major attack on 7 September as ‘a flaming world’: the ground floor of a flat, filled with hysterical women and crying infants. The men started playing cards, the women sang songs. ‘But every so often twenty women's fists shook at the ceiling, cursing the explosions, Germany, Hitler.’
    In the course of October 1940, the Luftwaffe shifted its focus to cities such as Birmingham, Sheffield, Hull, Glasgow and Plymouth. On 14 November, Coventry was bombed for a full ten hours. Afterwards the cathedral lay in ruins, a third of the homes were uninhabitable, 550 inhabitants were dead and almost 900 critically wounded. The psychological effect of the bombardment was much greater than in other cities; Coventry was much smaller, and everyone had the feeling they had been personally attacked. The Mass Observation reporter noted more expressions of fear, panic and hysteria than in all the previous attacks put together. ‘Women were seen to cry, to scream, to tremble all over, to faint in the street, to attack a fireman, and so on …’
    There was little the Luftwaffe could do during the winter months, but from March 1941 the Heinkels and Junkers were back in full force. The heaviest and most prolonged attack of all took place on Saturday, 10 May, 1941. London was, as people put it, ‘Coventrated’. Westminster Abbey, the Tower and the Mint were heavily damaged, a quarter of a million books went up in flames in the British Museum, the north wing of the Houses of Parliament was destroyed. About 1,500 Londoners were killed, a third of all the city's streets were impassable, all train stations, save one, were blocked, and 150,000 families were left without water, gas or electricity.
    Then the bombardments stopped. The Luftwaffe sent all its planes east for the attack on the Soviet Union. There began an intermission that lasted almost three years, a sombre, dingy, frustrated period in the city's history that was later referred to as ‘no light in the middle of the tunnel’.
    Entire chunks of the city centre, including the busy shopping and office area between St Mary-le-Bow and St Paul's Cathedral, returned to the primal state of the old London, a wilderness of mud, rubble and tall grass, a plain where only a