A Paradise Built in Hell (16 page)

After the psychiatrist Viktor Frankl survived the Nazi concentration camp Auschwitz, he asked himself what distinguished those who made it from those who didn’t. He argued that finding and holding meaning matters most. He spoke of “a will to meaning in contrast to the pleasure principle (or as we could also term it, the will to pleasure) on which Freudian psychoanalysis is centered, as well as in contrast to the will to power.” Many were murdered outright, but in the harsh conditions of the camp those who lost their sense of purpose more readily died; those who had something to live for struggled and sometimes survived. Frankl concluded that it is “a dangerous misconception of mental hygiene to assume that what man needs in the first place is equlibrium or, as it is called in biology, ‘homeostasis,’ i.e., a tensionless state. What man actually needs is not a tensionless state but rather the striving and struggling for a worthwhile goal, a freely chosen task. What he needs is not the discharge of tension at any cost but the call of a potential meaning waiting to be fulfilled by him. . . . If architects want to strengthen a decrepit arch, they increase the load which is laid upon it, for thereby the parts are joined more firmly together.”

The evolutionary argument for altruism could draw from Frankl to argue that we need meaning and purpose in order to survive, and need them so profoundly we sometimes choose them over survival. The act of so doing bequeaths that meaning and purpose to the community at large—the moral equivalent of war that is already with us in myriad ways. Thus it is that a sacrificed hero is said to be immortal—which is sometimes a sentimental lie, sometimes a truth about the way a society is built out of such acts. In them, a more expansive idea of what it means to be human survives, and with it a stronger sense of society, those things that are killed by cowardice and selfishness. Or you could argue with Kropotkin that for those who feel a deep enough sense of connection to the larger community, sacrificing themselves to ensure its well-being makes perfect sense. The argument is often made that parents, particularly mothers, will sacrifice themselves to save their children. The usual explanation is about genetic survival, but a larger sense of social survival motivates the heroism seen in Halifax. Either way, it defines us as members of a larger whole.

The Halifax explosion was both a particularly hideous disaster and a particularly clear-cut example of such generosity beyond reason. And certainly there is more mutual aid and more than mutual aid in everyday life than has been accounted for. The real question is not why this brief paradise of mutual aid and altruism appears but rather why it is ordinarily overwhelmed by another world order—not eradicated, for it never ceases to exist quietly, but we miss it at the best of times, most of us, and feel bleak or lonely for its lack. Disaster, along with moments of social upheaval, is when the shackles of conventional belief and role fall away and the possibilities open up.

On September 7, 1940, flashes lit up the darkness of wartime London and the first of fifty-seven consecutive nights of aerial attack by the Luftwaffe began. The sky buzzed with fighter and bomber planes, the latter of which dropped more than a thousand bombs and incendiary devices, causing 250 acres near the London docks to burn, and igniting forty other major fires. The initial bombs targeted industrial areas, but during the Blitz, homes, shops, churches, offices, factories, warehouses, streets, and buses would be smashed and splintered, Buck ingham Palace would be hit while the king and queen were in residence, and a vast archipelago of craters began to dimple the city. Civilian air-raid wardens would try to guide their neighborhood’s denizens to safety; the newly formed civilian fire squads would rush to put out the fires, knowing that the bombers would use the flames as targets for another round; and ambulance teams would make their way to the sites that had been hit. Spotter lights raked the night sky; antiaircraft fire rattled. Over the course of the war about sixty thousand British civilians were killed in the attack on their island, and tens of thousands of buildings were destroyed. About half of the total losses in buildings and lives were in the London area, where more than eight thousand tons of bombs fell, and only a small percentage of buildings survived unscathed.

Military and government officials had worried for decades about how the civilian public would react to an air war and presumed they would react appallingly. As social scientist R. W. Titmuss summarized in 1950, “The experts foretold a mass outbreak of hysterical neurosis among the civilian population. . . . Under this strain, many people would regress to an earlier level of needs and desires. They would behave like frightened and unsatisfied children.” Eighteen “eminent psychiatrists . . . privately warned in 1938 that in the coming war three psychiatric casualties could be expected for every one physical.” By one estimate, this would have meant three to four million mental cases within months of the beginning of the Blitz. Certainly those directing the bombing raids on both Britain and Germany (and later, Japan) believed that the onslaughts would have profound psychological impact with important strategic consequences, and so the bombing campaigns were immense, taking a huge toll in human life—of both civilians and bomber crews—and city structures.

Benito Mussolini himself wrote, “Once a raid has been experienced false alarms are incessant and a state of panic remains in which work comes to a standstill.” Churchill worried that a helpless, hopeless public would overwhelm the army with the chaos of their neediness. The historian Mark Connelly adds, “The British working class was thought to be particularly susceptible to panic and disillusionment in the face of an aerial onslaught. . . . When it came to shelters, the government considered it best to protect people in small groups. Communal shelters, it was argued, would create conditions for an agitator’s field day. It would also encourage a ‘deep shelter’ mentality, leading people to become molelike tunnel dwellers who would never resume their jobs in vital war industries.”

People did take to the tunnels, despite the discouragement, and did so communally. The London public began buying tickets to ride the Underground system but went down there only to shelter overnight. “Thousands more turn the tube stations into vast dormitories every night—a kind of lie-down strike which at first perplexed the authorities, who could not think what to do with passengers who paid their threehapence and then proceeded to encamp quietly on the platforms,” wrote the journalist Mollie Panter-Downs in 1940. “The latest semiofficial ruling is that the practice can be continued. The Ministries of Transport and Home Security, however, have appealed to the public not to use the tube as a shelter except in cases of urgent necessity. The urgent necessity of many of the sleepers who doss down on the platforms nightly is that they no longer have homes to go to.” They had been bombed out. Eventually, those in charge were obliged to install bunks, sanitation facilities, and more, though the Underground never held more than a small percentage of the London area’s eight million. People found reassurance in the deep-underground station platforms and in proximity to others, though photographs from the time make it clear the concrete labyrinths were neither particularly comfortable nor clean. Some spread out to camp in forests, caves, and the countryside outside London. Many became so inured to falling bombs they chose to stay home and chance death for a good night’s sleep. Connelly says, “The people’s role in their own defense and destiny was downplayed in order to stress an old-fashioned division of leaders and led.”

When unfamiliar explosions went off near the Bethnal Green Underground entrance, hurrying people slipped on a wet, dimly lit stairway and fell atop each other—and 173 were suffocated, including 62 children. (This was due not to panic or selfishness but to the poor design of the place and the physics of tightly packed crowds: those in the back cannot see what trouble is up front, and any movement is amplified and extended by the mass of people—as happens annually in the crush during the hajj in Mecca nowadays.) That story was long suppressed. There was trauma, crime, and opportunism, and people knew it—but most people endured the bombings without losing their minds, principles, or sense of purpose. Despite early fears, Churchill and the government found the idea of unshakable British morale useful and made much of it. A 1940 film showing the nocturnal bombing, the defense, and citizens in the morning carrying on daily life amid craters, rubble, and shattered windows was titled
London Can Take It
. It featured an American voice-over saying in tough tones, “The army of the people swings into action” and “There is no panic, no fear, no despair. London can take it.” In recent years, the story of their resolve has been challenged from the left as right-wing propaganda, though the resoluteness can be spun many ways: as superior national disposition, as patriotic dedication, or as resilience that had nothing to do with nationalism, nationality, or deference.

As people strove to save themselves and their community, some lost conviction in the reality or the rightness of many hierarchies. Olivia Cockett, a government clerk in her late twenties, wrote at the time, “On the first night of the Blitz I put out an incendiary bomb, alone for some minutes, though help came after I had dealt with it. This incident has come back to my mind on unexpected occasions. I was being ‘put on’ by my boss, and had resented it for some time. After the bomb, I stood up to him, thinking, ‘If a blasted incendiary didn’t frighten me and I dealt with it, why should I be afraid of him?” This has resulted in a general boldness of thought and action.” A mother of two Cockett’s age wrote that after surviving the raids, “I feel much more certainty and self-confidence . . . as a result of the discovery that I am not the coward I thought, and have more good in me . . . than I would have believed.” Drawn away from personal problems and old concerns, people entered the intensified present of disaster. Virginia Woolf ’s nephew Quentin Bell reported that “from the time when she literally came under fire, the talk of suicide ceased” and commented, “Fate provided a sort of cure, or so it seems, in the form of actual rather than imagined dangers.” Woolf herself wrote on September 22, 1940, “This wet day—we think of weather now as it affects invasions, not as weather that we like or dislike personally.”

Tom Harrisson, who was there at the time directing the Mass-Observation surveys of wartime behavior, writes in his history
Living Through the Blitz
, that there had “in particular, been a massive, largely unconscious cover-up of the more disagreeable facts of 1940-1. . . . It amounts to a form of intellectual pollution: but pollution by perfume.” Still, he concluded that though the “blitz was a terrible experience for millions” it was not “terrible enough to disrupt the basic decency, loyalty (e.g., family ties), morality, and optimism of the vast majority.” The Blitz is unusual as a disaster in which public behavior is remembered in a positive glow, though that memory singles out the Britons in wartime as anomalies rather than akin to those in most other disasters. Three weeks into the London Blitz, Panter-Downs wrote, “The courage, humor, and kindliness of ordinary people continue to be astonishing under conditions that possess many of the features of a nightmare.” People adjusted to the horrific circumstances; wonderful or horrible, the extraordinary becomes the ordinary. One survivor said of the beginning, “Once you’ve been through three nights of bombing, you can’t help feeling safe the fourth time. So the only real panic I saw was then.”

Many felt private fear and enormous strain but braced themselves by putting on a good front, and one famous effect of the Blitz was the relaxing of boundaries between strangers and between types of people. Privilege mattered: the wealthy were often able to get out of harm’s way, while the poor and often the middle class were not, but some divides softened. Cockett describes herself whistling on her way to work after a particularly bad night of bombing and going up to a porter who was also whistling to say, “The tune for today is
Serenade in the Night
, please,” at which they both laughed. An American witness, Mary Lee Settle, noted that “the English were discovering each other with the freedom of strangers, lurched by war out of their silences, often friendly, sometimes with the direct belligerence of the stripped down.” A British writer added, “New tolerances are born between people; offsetting the paleness of worn nerves and the lining of sorrow there occurs a marvellous incidence of smiles where smiles have never been before; an unsettling vista of smiles, for one wondered how unsympathetic life could have been before, one was ashamed to reflect that it had needed a war to disinter the state of everyday comradeship.” Disinter—as if it were that something vital had been buried during peacetime and was resurrected amid carnage and ruin. The Blitz was like most disasters: one in which some were killed, many bereaved and injured, many escaped death by a hairbreadth, and the great majority were witnesses and survivors in a drama that left them relatively unscathed. By some accounts, the greatest trauma of the London Blitz was the mass evacuation of London-area children that tore apart families and placed children in unfamiliar, sometimes unfriendly, homes. Many, however, stuck it out in the epicenter of danger, some by choice, some for lack of choice.

One young woman sheltered with her boyfriend’s parents in northern London on the third night of the Blitz. In the long account she wrote the next day, she complained that her hostess made them all tea “ just for something to do” and added that “that’s one trouble about the raids, people do nothing but make tea and expect you to drink it.” The hostess, identified only as Mrs. R., would cry “Is that a bomb?” with every thud, and her husband would grunt back “No, s’a gun.” (An antiaircraft gun.) The anonymous writer commented, “I felt all swollen up with irritation, a bloated sort of feeling, but actually it was fear, I knew very well. A horrid, sick sort of fear, it’s quite different from worry.” She and her boyfriend went out into the garden, sat on the long grass, and found that the warm, beautiful summer night was “made more beautiful than ever by the red glow from the East, where the docks were burning.” She fixed the scene in her mind, knowing it was historic, and “I wasn’t frightened any more, it was amazing. . . . The searchlights were beautiful, it’s like watching the end of the world as they swoop from one end of the sky to the other.”