When World War I
began, the planet was only 12 years into its romance with aircraft. It was
still a novelty for the people of Europe to look up to the sky and see anything
but birds.
In a scene from my
novel, Albion’s Millennium,
eight-year-old May is staying with her sister who is in service at a house in
Sussex. It is early summer in 1914, and there have been rumored sightings of German
airships above the British coast:
May
looked upwards, shielding her eyes from the light pouring from the open French
windows. She could see there were gradations of darkness up there, different
layers of night like overlapping curtains, some denser than others, and behind
these shifting layers an occasional gleam of glassy, star-pocked sky.
She
heard a lady guest say, “How exciting. The Times said they’ve been taking
civilian passengers up. I can’t see anything, can you?”
The
second she stopped speaking, her husband shouted, “Look!” and pointed to the
sky. Something had moved out from behind a cloud - a long slim shadow, barely visible
against the greyness. A sinister, looming presence, so indistinct it could
almost have been an illusion of the retina, an image left behind on a closed
eyelid. But as May craned her neck, she saw it steal very slowly across a gap
between two night clouds, so high that she could hear no engine noise. Beside
her, she heard Tessie’s awestruck whisper, “How can there be people up
there in that thing?”
During the war, aerial
bombing was in its infancy, but there were several raids by German airships and
fighter planes on the mainland UK, particularly from 1916 onwards. The British
government instituted a rudimentary warning system consisting of maroons and
whistles and (absurdly) policemen cycling round the streets wearing sandwich
boards, while the end of a raid was signaled by boy scouts playing bugles.
Here is an extract from
Virginia Woolf’s diary describing a night raid near her home in Richmond, west
of London:
Thursday
December 6, 1917: Last night... nothing
was further from our minds than air raids; a bitter night, no moon up till
eleven. At 5 however, I was wakened by L. [her husband Leonard Woolf] to a most
instant sense of guns [anti-aircraft guns firing from nearby]: as if one’s faculties
jumped up fully dressed. We took clothes, quilts, a watch & a torch, the
guns sounding nearer as we went down stairs to sit with the servants [Lottie
the maid and Nellie the cook] on the black horsehair chest wrapped in quilts in
the kitchen passage. Lottie having said she felt bad passed on to a general
rattle of jokes & comments which almost silenced the guns. They fired
quickly, apparently towards Barnes. Slowly the sounds got more distant, &
finally ceased; we unwrapped ourselves & went back to bed. In ten minutes
there could be no more question of staying there: guns apparently up at
Kew. Up we jumped, more hastily this
time, since I remember leaving my watch, & trailing cloak & stockings
behind me. Servants apparently calm & even jocose. In fact one talks
through the noise, rather bored by having to talk at 5am than anything else.
Guns at one point so loud that the whistle of the shell going up followed the
explosion. One window did, I think, rattle. Then silence. Cocoa was brewed for
us, & off we went again. Having trained one’s ears to listen one can’t get
them not to for a time; & as it was after 6, carts were rolling out of
stables, motor cars throbbing, & then prolonged ghostly whistlings, which
meant, I suppose, Belgian work people being recalled to the munitions factory.
At last in the distance I heard bugles; L. was by this time asleep, but the
dutiful boy scouts came down our road [blowing the bugles] & wakened him
carefully; it struck me how sentimental the suggestion of the sound was, & how
thousands of old ladies were offering up their thanksgivings at the sound,
& connecting him (a boy scout with small angel wings) with some joyful
vision – And then I too went to sleep: but the servants sat up with their heads
out of the window in the bitter cold-frost white on the roofs-until the bugle
sounded, when they went back to the kitchen and sat there till breakfast.”
Twenty-two years later when
German flying machines once again dropped bombs on Britain, this was no longer something
new and inconceivable. This time the British people were all too prepared for the
fire that rained down from the sky.
