and heavy with the smell of broken sewage pipes and death. By night, too, London was coming to terms with life under the Blitz. In underground stations, in commandeered and improvised shelters, in ‘Andersons’ and ‘Morrisons’, in cellars, surface shelters, church halls and under railway arches, in whole sections of the tube network, equipped at last with bunks by authorities badgered and shamed into action, London sat, dozed, talked and grumbled its way through the raids. But, then, as Eileen wondered, what else was it to do? ‘When the papers say that people in London are behaving normally, they’re telling the truth,’ she wrote to Gershon, ‘everyone is pretending as hard as possible that nothing is happening … I don’t think Hitler will destroy London, because London, if its legs are blown away, is prepared to hobble on crutches.’
