When trees jumped and glass shattered
In 1943 John Steinbeck came to London as a war correspondent for the New York Herald Tribune. Some fifteen years later he rekindled his memories of those war days in Europe and Africa in a set of essays little read today called Once There Was A War (1958). If Steinbeck admitted himself that these were stories of questing heroes, as he undoubtedly saw himself in a way, they were also journalism. When he claimed his writing to be ‘as true and tested and edited as any other myth’ we are left in doubt as to their complete veracity. Many of the pieces explored the war as a personal initiation into the mystery of death and they are told from individual perspectives, it seems in the words of the people Steinbeck met. I find them tantalising.
When talking to Londoners in July 1943 about their experience of the Blitz he found that it was too much for them to put into words and instead a small incident would be recalled to serve as a symbol of all of it. Steinbeck wrote how people would ‘start with fire and explosion and then almost invariably end up with some very tiny detail … as though the mind could not take in the terror and the noise of the bombs and the general horror and so fastened on something small and comprehensible and ordinary.’
One man told Steinbeck of a dinner engagement curtailed by a bomb that wrecked the restaurant where he was to meet a female friend. More than the description of collapsed walls and a taxi cab buried under bricks, what sticks in the mind is this: ‘Thrown clear, right at my feet as I came out of the door, was one pale blue evening slipper. The toe of it was pointing right at me.’ The encounter with the slipper can’t be forgotten by the story teller or the reader. But we don’t find out what happened to the woman.
Another man when asked about the Blitz described how he felt when he heard ‘the sound in the morning of the broken glass being swept up, the vicious, flat tinkle’. He went on:
That is the thing I remember more than anything else, that constant sound of broken glass being swept up on the pavements. My dog broke a window the other day and my wife swept up the glass and a cold shiver went over me. It was a moment before I could trace the reason for it.
And then there was this from a man who couldn’t explain his actions in a day-time air raid as he passed Hyde Park:
I went down into the gutter. Always did that when you couldn't get a shelter. I saw a great tree, one like those, jump into the air and fall on its side not so far from me – right there where that scoop is in the ground. And then a sparrow fell in the gutter right beside me. It was dead all right. Concussion kills birds easily. For some reason I picked it up and held it for a long time. There was no blood on it or anything like that. I took it home with me. Funny thing, I had to throw it right away.
This man seemed to feel compelled to rescue this little Hyde Park sparrow, even though it seemed to be dead. It was a companion in the gutter that deserved attention. I could not just be left there. He had been luckier than the bird and he was grateful. His reaction was to dust it down and hold it. If he could not bring comfort to the bird it seemed at least to comfort him. Stunned by the bombing, the bird became his talisman until he returned to his senses and felt ashamed to be clinging on to a dead sparrow.