Their Finest Hour: Why Brits Celebrate The Blitz

Sydney Morning Herald

Wednesday October 31, 2007

James Button

OUR nine-year old was giddy with anticipation. At last the day came.

We dressed her in a brown tartan skirt, rollneck jumper, black jacket and red beret, with a name tied to the coat's lapel and cardboard box for her gas mask. She looked very 1940, very Nancy Wake, as she marched off to be an evacuee at her school's Blitz Night.

The children were to be locked inside the school for the night, with no mattresses and the heating switched off. They would have coal dust rubbed on their faces, and eat rations of toast, powdered potato and Spam. What sleep they got would be broken by sirens and the head teacher, dressed as an air raid warden, clanging a bell.

It is a very English caper. I doubt French schools do a Nuit d'Occupation, or the Italians an evening of Mussolini Memories. As for the Germans hosting an Off-to-Poland Picnic - I don't think so. But for the Brits, the show, Puttin' on the Blitz, of war never ends.

On just about any night there is a World War II documentary on television. David and Posh Beckham had a Spitfire fly over their country mansion when they threw a party to rev up the English players before the soccer World Cup in Germany last year. Prince Harry wore an SS uniform to a party - an upper-class-twitty thing to do but entirely in keeping with the English love of dress-ups and also the belief, unique in Europe, that the Nazis were a bit of a larf.

The historian Dominic Sandbrook recalls being in a Lake District pub on the night England played Germany in a soccer World Cup qualifier in 2001. Before the game, the pub heaved with tension at the thought of losing to the old enemy. But as England handed out a 5-1 thrashing, anguish turned to euphoria, and the pub began rocking to the Dad's Army theme So who do you think you are kidding, Mr Hitler? The next day a tabloid newspaper carried the headline: "Don't mention the score."

The war lives on because it expresses so many sides of the national character. There is the inexhaustible myth of a plucky, little island fighting a vast evil from beyond Calais (once it was Hitler, now it is the European Union). There is an enduring jingoism, insularity and tabloid triumphalism, but also a mockery of anything fanatical or earnest. And Hitler, among other failings, was way too earnest.

Above all there is a sense that the war was a harder but simpler, nobler time. Life is too easy now, the old people lament.

My son had to interview a survivor of the Blitz for school. We found an old people's home where one lady, Joan, told him with eyes shining what it was like to live off powdered egg and sleep in a Tube station. I found her stories very moving, but my son and his English friend nodded blankly. It was ancient history to them.

At 8am after Blitz Night the children were evacuated. Since they had been given the day off, we took our daughter to a caf, where she poured out stories of the dangerous night.

The day before, normal lessons had been cancelled. The female teachers put their hair in floral scarves as the evacuees played In and out the Dusty Bluebells, a game from the '40s, and sang A Long Way to Tipperary and We'll Meet Again by Vera Lynn.

In the evening they used ration books to buy their sorry meals and huddled in a room that had been turned into a Tube station, with girls and boys divided by a paper railroad track. Sirens went off through the night.

At 2am they were finally falling asleep when the theatrical head teacher, Jay, woke them with an air raid warning, and made the girls march around the school.

By now the combination of the phantom Luftwaffe and the lousy dinner was taking its toll on this bunch of mainly middle-class Londoners. Jacob vomited. Georgie vomited, exclaiming, "Oh, I feel horrible." Stan fainted from hunger.

The children emerged, pale-faced and black-eyed, as if they had spent six months in a tuberculosis sanitorium.

So, was it horrible, we asked our daughter in the cafe.

"Oh no, it was the best night of my life," she replied. She had tasted the Blitz Spirit.

Now it was time to demolish a plate of scrambled eggs, watercress and smoked salmon, washed down with a long glass of elderflower juice.

© 2007 Sydney Morning Herald

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