London is a beautiful city, and the Thames at night is always a particularly lovely sight. I love that the bridges are all different and, although I see it every day, I never tire of Tower Bridge. Last night I was a bit further up the river on the Albert Embankment which very close to where I lived as a child. This stretch of the river is lined with Victorian and Art Deco lamp posts and I remember as a child loving the cast iron fish curled around the posts. I used to be allowed to throw my bus ticket into the river (a real little litter bug) to feed the crocodiles I was convinced swam in the murky water. My friend M was in London to take part in the Remembrance Day parade and for the first time I watched the parade. It was very moving and I was struck by how much dignity the people taking part displayed and, strangely enough, how much of a sense of peace prevailed.
I don’t think I had ever seen so many old people in one place, not even in Eastbourne. I was also struck by how much old people look alike. If you live long enough your hair loses all its colour and vibrancy, your face crumples in on itself as your features enlarge and you just look like an identikit old person. Earlier this week I saw a large group of students making their way towards Westminster Bridge and they looked in good spirits. It was heartening to see people come together to present a united voice. Two very different marches, with very different outcomes. But I felt disconnected from them both. I am a March Virgin, but, I suspect, not for long.
Today is the 70th anniversary of the Coventry Blitz. Coventry saw one of Britain's largest raids of World War II on 14 November, 1940. An estimated 1,200 people died with most of the city centre destroyed. http://www.historiccoventry.co.uk/blitz/blitz.php
It is hard to believe that in the 1940s people lived with the daily horror of war. The war in Afghanistan is something you read about in the newspaper or watch on the evening news. Unless you have a friend or relative fighting in that war it is a war that is removed from our daily life. Living through WW2 was something very different. The sounds of sirens must have struck terror in the hearts of mothers as they rushed with their children to find shelter. Then, as they cowered in shelters and listened to the explosions, they must have wondered what they would find when morning came and they emerged into the dust and ashes of their cities.
When I was a kid there were still bomb sites around the Embankment and I remember playing in the rubble. There was always a group of people working on some cordoned off piece of ground, archaeologists who would sometimes shown us kids the broken pieces of crockery they found. Looking back these are unlikely to have been some Roman remains but some poor family's tea set buried under the rubble of their bombed out home.
Not long ago my sister was evacuated, along with her neighbours, from her home because an unexploded WW2 bomb was unearthed on a building site nearby. The disruption this caused for the 48 hours before they were given the all clear to go home led to a lot of moaning and complaining. At least they had homes to return to.
As I looked out across the Thames at the Palace of Westminster, Big Ben, the Bridges, the Tate Britain and all the other grand buildings that line the river it seems amazing that they survived the Blitz. I suppose it was because London was hidden under a cloak of darkness. Coventry was not so lucky.
‘A great war leaves the country with three armies - an army of cripples, an army of mourners, and an army of thieves.’ ~German Proverb
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