The Blitz

History’s night had come, and we huddled together, leaning towards warmth and a sense of protection. But no shelter would be found; there was a terrible absence, alone in the Blitz.

London was burning and we were left trapped in her arms, breathing air like hot iron, wandering the streets of a city gone mad. I would often wake in the middle of the night, rising from my bed of torn newspapers which marked me with their ink and carefully pulling back black-out sheets of coarse war-time cloth from the windows to gaze with wonder at the city burning, the city’s metal buildings screeching upwards, reaching towards the sky in a final defiant gesture, and I knew that we had reached a point where all was changed. It was a terrible beauty, and as the flames licked the walls of storefronts and homes, I knew that I was also marked by that fire.

Then young and barely out of childhood, I had been jettisoned by the rational world into that maelstrom to be shaped by the cruel winds of war which blow in ways which no sane man can understand. Hair cut by rusted and blackened scissors found in the remains of a barber’s shop, face presenting a façade of toughness, with eyes small and bright, peering out from dirt and ash I wondered the streets, seeking meaning from Mother London.

I, orphaned by the German’s madness (later in college we would speak of the Teutonic myth and their vision of Götterdämmerung, but at the time I only knew them as the Enemy, seemingly infected by power and lightning), would wonder the streets during the day, when the alarms were silent and the windows lit where flickering lantern light met the sun, and one morning, crawling through a wreckage of soot covered masonry, soft rubble, and broken girders of wood thrusting out of the ground as in alarm or flight, I came upon a child.

She was young, a seraphic visitor to these all too human grounds, covered in a once brilliant white shawl now dulled by ground and ash, tangled hair doing nothing to hide her splendor.

I never heard this child, whether she was real or an apparition I am still undecided, speak a single word. Whether this was by choice or due to a malady I never knew and this non-knowing made her, in my eye’s searching for any sign, even more a symbol of my present situation. She would just sit, holding pieces of found string and yarn and knotting them together, again and again, in ever changing patterns, forcing order onto objects plucked from the ground. She would be totally absorbed in this, stopping only to gaze at the sky for stretches of time, and then her eyes would return back to earth and her fingers would resume their task, always weaving.

Later in life, blessed or infected with the gaze of education, I used to imagine what she would say if suddenly granted the power of speech. Perhaps she would rise slowly, her toes leaving the ground, cloaking herself in swirling electricity which would cause her to shine more brightly than any present fires, an angelic warrior spawned from the detritus of wounded London.

“Adonai! Adonai! You leave them here with no wings to escape death’s cruel flight, no caduceus to fend off the forces fearful and hungry. Protection! Sanctuary!”

Such a lament would have been wonderful, the shimmering light bathing us and making our shadows dance on the ground, and her call for sanctuary might have resulted with some white robed hand whose immensity would cover the sky, piercing down through the dark ash-filled clouds to shed light on a wounded city.

She never spoke though, no demanding plea with a voice like pipe organs and choirs, and no help ever came. We sat firmly clenched by history’s cruel fist and I would watch the horizon burn, vision occasionally glancing to her fingers flurried and moving, her thoughts oblivious to all but knotting and twisting, and I knew that she was a vision from the times as much as the bombs screaming down and I was enraptured.

It was a beautiful time to be alive.