“I was driving back from Oxford with friends early in the evening,” wrote a Daily Telegraph reporter, “and we were still miles out in the country on the Western-avenue when we saw a huge column of smoke hanging far away over the house-top’s. “At first we did not know whether it was merely a cloud. But we guessed what it was when we came on the dramatic spectacle of street after street lined with people, every head upwards and eastwards. 

   “I reached home to find a bomb had dropped in the next street. I was trying to investigate this when I got a call to go to the scene of the fire. A generals daughter of nineteen, an ambulance driver, begged to come with me.“We were waiting for the East London ‘bus when the warning sounded again. We knew at once where the fire was because this line of ‘buses immediately ceased. They were held up at the other end. “We walked some distance. There were heavy bursts of gunfire, and we put on our tin hats. A taxi drew up in the middle of the road. ‘Will you take me to the fire?’ I asked. ‘I will get you as near to it as I possibly can,’ the driver said. Then began a mad ride through London. Whizzing past us like a great news-reel were London’s lovely churches and buildings black against the glow of the fire—St. Paul’s and the sword-like shafts of the City churches. 

   “In one street the police stopped us, and said, ‘Drive a casualty to hospital.’ A woman was brought in, her arm in a sling. We left her at the hospital, and resumed our search for the fire. “We ended up at a point where the streets were running with water. About a dozen firemen, with hoses and fire-pumps, had just managed to extinguish one fire. They told ‘us factories had been hit. It was not too easy to breathe. Above the glare we could see the curtain of smoke, and above that two balloons. 

   “The firemen said that the chief difficulty at the start had been the lack of water. A water-main was hit, and the water was cut off for some time. They started using the river-water, but the tide was ebbing, and there was difficulty in getting enough. “In this district about twenty or thirty civilians had immediately come to the help of the firemen with buckets of water and sand. They did a great deal of good work. 

   “A motor-coach converted into an ambulance drove up, and the driver asked: ‘Where is your casualty?’ There was none, he was told. This was scarcely true. A boy helping the firemen had been hurt, but when the ambulance arrived, he hid behind me, his head wrapped in a bandage, determined not to go to hospital. 

   “The firemen left us to deal with a number of small fires to our left. We stood with a group of garage men listening to the drone of ‘planes overhead. Suddenly we heard a whirring rushing sound. ‘That’s a bomb!’ shouted the man behind me. ‘Fall flat !’ We all flung ourselves in the gutter, in a sort of human chain. A few moments passed. Then the same man ordered us to a shelter inside the garage. There the talk was not of planes and bombs, but of beans, home-grown. 

   “When the activity overhead died down we came out again. What we had seen before was nothing to this. The whole air was a bright blaze of gold, with those two balloons still floating above. We shouted for our taxi-man. When he arrived he said he had been blown to the ground by a bomb. Just as we started off again in the taxi we heard first a rushing, then a heavy explosion, and a brilliant firework display in the road directly in our path. A bomb had blocked the road. The magnesium flares all round it and the flash of the explosion looked like nothing so much as an old cinema, with its rows and rows of electric lights in arches and cascades. 

   “The taxi rocked from side to side with the explosion, but the driver soon found another road, and we drove on until we were in the shadow of the great City buildings. Later I talked with a woman who drove in a car over 
London Bridge and back over Tower Bridge during the evening. She said that nothing moved her so much as the sight of the Tower of London. ‘It stood there squat and solid and contemptuous, with the whole sky rosy behind it,’ she said. ‘It symbolised the whole of our history. It will take a good deal more than Hitler to shake us.’ 

Ninety-nine enemy ‘planes were brought down. 

Sunday, September 8th.
EAST LONDON CARRIED ON

   After a sleepless night, while their Anderson shelters rocked with the explosion of bombs and the crash of guns, the people of East London carried on to-day with their usual amazing spirit. 

   Several hundred began their search for new homes as soon as the “all clear” sounded. Whole streets had been destroyed and many other houses demolished. But people gathered their possessions together and piled them into perambulators. With children in their arms, they started their walk to friends or relatives. Their morale was astonishing. As they were walking to their new homes many were laughing and joking among themselves. Some families took care of children whose parents were dead or injured, and made long journeys across London to escort them to the homes of relatives. 

   Women went on preparing the Sunday dinner, even though they had no water or gas. They borrowed water from more fortunate neighbours and lit fires to roast the joints. One of them, Mrs. W. Johnson, who had spent the night in a shelter, was preparing her meal in a house where the dividing wall between dining-room and drawing-room lay in chunks across the floors. 

   In a dockland tavern, where every window had been blown out by a bomb which fell across the road, they were collecting for a Spitfire fund. The licensee of a hotel gave up his saloon bar for housing people whose houses were no longer tenable. In several streets neighbours were making a whip-round for those who had lost their belongings. 
“It was an experience far worse than the Silvertown explosion in the last war,” Mrs. Cook, who with her husband and five children escaped injury, said to me. “The heat from the fires was terrific. We do not intend moving from the district, despite this ghastly raid.”