VI. THE CAVE DWELLERS

1. ALL I COULD BEAR

London, February, 1941

This war has driven millions of people to burrow underground like moles. On an average, one-fourth of London’s population has slept underground in the past six months.

On nights when the raids are bad, about half of London is below the surface. And in certain sections, such as the Borough of Stepney in the poor East End, with its population of a quarter of a million, they say that on bad nights ninety-nine per cent of the people are down below. It is a sorry life.

I have been in shelters night after night after night. I’ve been in about fifty of them in all, from the lowliest to the most luxurious, from vast stockyards of places that hold 14,000 people, on down to refined little underground homes buttressed like Gibraltar.

It is going to be hard to describe a shelter so that you can picture it; just as it would be hard to describe a ship to somebody who had never seen one. For there must be as many kinds of shelters under London as there are kinds of ships on the sea. But in general, sheltering falls into four classifications: (1) the tubes, which is to say the subways; (2) private shelters, under hotels and apartment houses; (3) vast public shelters in the basements of thousands of strong buildings, and (4) Anderson shelters—the artificial cave that the home owner builds in the backyard for his family alone.

I suppose that back home we have read more about life in the tubes than in any of the other shelters. Possibly that is because it is forbidden to name other big shelters, for fear of directing German bombs to them. Yet fewer people sleep in the tubes than in any of the three other types of shelter.

Here are some figures to show just how much of London can get under shelter at night, how much of it actually takes shelter, and where:

(The last column of figures comes from a shelter census taken throughout Greater London on a recent quiet night.)

CapacityCensus

Tubes 178,000 96,000

Private group shelters 930,000 209,000

Public Shelters 1,323,000 368,000

Anderson shelters 3,418,000 1,271,000

————— —————

Total 5,849,000 1,944,000

Taking into account the evacuation, on which there are no definite figures, let us assume that the population of Greater London today is eight million. Then these figures mean that there are shelter accommodations for nearly three-fourths of the people, and that on quiet nights only one-fourth of the population uses them. On bad nights this figure doubles.

When I say that only a fourth of London is burrowing in these winter nights, don’t get the idea that the other three-fourths are out around the town. Only a few thousand are. The rest are at home, behind their blackout curtains.

In the past few weeks bad weather has disrupted the raiders, and they have been over London on an average only four nights a week. And only about one night a week has there been really heavy raiding. People grow nonchalant about it, possibly too nonchalant. But just let London get two bad nights in a row and see what happens. You would see well over half of London diving for the basements.

Today, after six months of hiding from bombs, the shelter population has become pretty well settled. The same people go to the same shelters each night. They sleep in the same spots, either in bunks or on the floor. The Ministry of Health is installing bunks so fast there are now some 350,000, and before spring the number will probably pass a million.

There are all kinds of opinion about the people who live in shelters. Social workers think they’re wonderful. Some people consider them cowards. As far as I can see, they have the same strengths and weaknesses that people in the mass have everywhere, in war or out. They are just people doing the best they can with a situation that is pretty bad.

The shelters do harbor some conscription dodgers and petty thieves, and a horde of young men who refuse to act as fire watchers or do much of anything else. They are weak characters. At home they would be drugstore cowboys; here they’re called “tube Cuthberts.”

When life has simmered down to the point where you have to choose between being bombed and living like swine on the floor of a dungeon, then life has indeed become pretty bleak. And this isn’t just in London. All over England people are burrowing in shelters at night. Millions of them are living through these sixteen-hour winter nights like that—just down there waiting in a tube or a basement or a dugout.

There is no denying that it’s better than being dead, but it’s a hell of a way to live.

I got my first view of an underground shelter crowd at the big Liverpool Street tube station.

It was around eight o’clock on a raidless night. A policeman in the upper vestibule told us just to go down the escalator and take a look—as though it were a zoo. So we did.

Somehow I must have thought that there’d be nobody down there that night, or that if there were they’d be invisible or something, because I wasn’t emotionally ready at all to see people lying around by the thousands on cold concrete.

In my first days in England I had seen terrible bomb damage. I had seen multitudinous preparations for war. I had talked with wounded soldiers. I had gone through London’s great night of fire-bombing. I had listened for hours to the crack of guns and the crunch of bombs. And although I didn’t especially know it at the time, none of these things went clear down deep inside and made me hurt.

It was not until I went down seventy feet into the bowels of the Liverpool Street tube and saw humanity sprawled there in childlike helplessness that my heart first jumped and my throat caught. I know I must have stopped suddenly and drawn back. I know I must have said to myself, “Oh my God!”

We hunted up the shelter marshal, and talked to him for a long time. He was immensely proud of his shelter, and I suppose he had a right to be, for they say it is paradise now compared to what it was in the beginning. He told us to take a walk through the shelter and then meet him at the back entrance.

This is a new section of the tunnel, not yet used by trains. The tube is narrower than most of New York’s subway excavations, and it is elliptical in shape. It is walled with steel casing.

We walked to the far end, about an eighth of a mile, through one tube, and then back in the parallel tube. On benches on each side, as though sitting and lying on a long street-car seat, were the people, hundreds of them. And as we walked on they stretched into thousands. In addition, there was a row of sleeping forms on the wooden floor of the tube, stretched crosswise. Their bodies took up the whole space, so we had to watch closely when we put our feet down between the sleepers.

Many of these people were old—wretched and worn old people, people who had never known many of the good things of life and who were now winding up their days on this earth in desperate discomfort. They were the bundled-up, patched-up people with lined faces that we have seen sitting dumbly in waiting lines at our own relief offices at home.

There were children too, some asleep and some playing. There were youngsters in groups, laughing and talking and even singing. There were smart-alecks and there were quiet ones. There were hard-working people of middle age who had to rise at five o’clock and go to work. Some people sat knitting or playing cards or talking. But mostly they just sat. And though it was only eight o’clock, many of the old people were already asleep.

It was the old people who seemed so tragic. Think of yourself at seventy or eighty, full of pain and of the dim memories of a lifetime that has probably all been bleak. And then think of yourself traveling at dusk every night to a subway station, wrapping your ragged overcoat about your old shoulders and sitting on a wooden bench with your back against a curved steel wall. Sitting there all night, in nodding and fitful sleep. Think of that as your destiny—every night, every night from now on.

People looked up as we came along in our good clothes and our obviously American hats. I had a terrible feeling of guilt as I walked through there—the same feeling that I have had when going through penitentiaries, staring at the prisoners. I couldn’t look people in the face; consequently I didn’t see very much of the human visage that night, for I looked mostly at the floor. But I saw all I could bear. I saw enough.

Since that first night I have seen so much of it I no longer feel that way about the shelterers in mass. Repetition makes the unusual become commonplace. Enough of anything dulls the emotions. But I still think my first impression was a valid one. I still think it speaks the frightening poverty of character in this world more forcibly than do the bombs that cause it.

A bombed building looks like something you have seen before—it looks as though a hurricane had struck. But the sight of thousands of poor, opportunityless people lying in weird positions against cold steel, with all their clothes on, hunched up in blankets, lights shining in their eyes, breathing fetid air—lying there far underground like rabbits, not fighting, not even angry; just helpless, scourged, weakly waiting for the release of another dawn—that, I tell you, is life without redemption.

2. DOUBLE-X

London, February, 1941

I went into an East End shelter, beneath a railroad track, with a friend who supervises repair work on shelter buildings.

This railroad runs through the city on a high grade, the top of which is heavily arched over with stone. At the street level, under the tracks, are large rooms. And here underneath the rumbling trains people sleep at night.

It was about 11 P.M. when we went into one of the rooms. It was dungeonlike and gloomy, with only a faint light, and very cold. About twenty people lay on the floor on mattresses, covered with quilts. Everyone was asleep, or so we thought.

My friend looked at the ceiling to see if recent work aimed at stopping the seepage of water had been finished. We didn’t say anything, but suddenly from among the recumbent forms came a woman’s voice:

“When are we going to get bunks—after the war’s over?”

The voice was old, but it wasn’t a complaining voice, or a bitter one. There was even a note of gaiety in it.

The remark opened up other sleepers, and many of them put in an oar. They lay on their backs and talked up to my friend about the discomforts of this miserable place.

There were old men and women with lined faces. There were middle-aged men who said nothing. There were children. And side by side lay two girls—beautiful girls in their twenties—with nets on their hair and cold cream on their faces. At Ohio State they would be popular coeds. Here they lay on their backs on concrete floors, looking up as we stood and talked for some fifteen minutes.

And then in the midst of this conversation I heard—if you’ll excuse me—what seemed to be someone using the toilet. The room grew silent for a moment, and the sound was magnified.

I didn’t believe it could be true—here in public before children and elders and two lovely modern girls you’d have been proud to take to the Ritz for dinner. It seemed impossible among civilized people. But it was true. The only toilet in that room was a public bucket.

Nobody laughed or blushed. This vulgar intimacy had become accepted as a way of life under the whip of war.

As we left, the old voice with the gaiety in it called to me and my friend: “We’ll all be dead before you get this place fixed up, so you’d better leave a deposit on a wreath for me.”

They were all laughing as we left.

Shelter Double-X is in the East End. I call it Double-X because I can’t give its real name.

People feel sentimental about Double-X, they have been there so long. Some ten thousand people live there every night. It is one of the biggest shelters in London. It is so big it is like a state fair. It takes you hours to go through it.

Openings have been walled up, and shock walls have been built a few feet in front of the entrances. The great vaultlike space is divided into bays, each holding more than a hundred persons. Each bay is numbered, and each one has its own submarshals, selected by the people themselves.

At first, ten thousand people slept on the floor. But now bunks are going in.

Double-X has two big first-aid rooms, with Red Cross nurses in charge. It has canteens. It has a wagon refreshment stand, run by a Negro. It has one vast long promenade devoted to nothing but milling up and down on parade, just like the boardwalk at Atlantic City, except under cover.

Double-X is not modern and not too immaculate, but it has the saving grace of having become a social center. People like to be at Double-X because they have so much fun. It’s full of young people, handsome young people, walking and talking and laughing. And it’s cosmopolitan. There must be somebody there from every nation on earth.

Everything happens at Double-X, from births to deaths. Evening classes for adults are held. There is a library. There are romances. Multitudinous soldiers on leave go there to find girls. Double-X is a big, jolly city, all under one roof. Its inconveniences are overshadowed by its personality. It is a gigantic human omelet, fried in war.

Now to a private Anderson shelter.

This is a half-above-ground cellar, usually built in a backyard. As I have said before, there are thousands upon thousands of them in Britain—in the suburbs, the small towns and the country they hold more people than all other kinds of shelters put together.

Any person making less than $20 a week is supplied free with the material for an Anderson. Others must buy their own.

An Anderson shelter is formed of walls of sheet iron, heavily banked on the outside with dirt. A direct hit will demolish an Anderson, but it is good insurance against a nearby blast and flying debris. The other day I saw one standing quite unharmed not 15 feet from a bomb crater that was 20 feet across.

But four people are miserably cramped in an Anderson shelter. Often the owners have trouble with water seeping up through the floor. And it is a problem to heat them without suffocating.

At first the Andersons were considered wonderful, but now the government is threshing over a new policy of shoring up and fortifying one room in your house as a healthier and safer shelter.

The average Londoner who sleeps underground every night has done a lot of shopping around before settling down in a particular shelter for the duration. It is something like looking for a new apartment to rent. The choice is based on what looks safest, and on whether you like the crowd or not.

As horrible as shelter life seems to me, one marshal told me he felt sure that after the war many people would want to keep on living underground. Londoners are gregarious. They like to be in a crowd.

I’ll have to admit that the people I’ve seen in many shelters seemed to be making a picnic of it. Also, people have a feeling that the more of them there are together, the safer they are.

I was in a good-sized room that was only half-filled, and the people were grumbly and unhappy. The marshal said that if you’d pack fifty people in there they’d be as happy as June bugs.

Some people, of course, do prefer the quiet and privacy of the smaller public shelters, where just a few people can sit around, sew, play cards and talk.

I went into one basement that held only two dozen people, and they had a piano. They were all singing when I walked in. And they happened to be singing “Marching Through Georgia.”

In Soho I visited two or three shelters in the basements of small office buildings. They were cozy and pleasant, and you had at least a feeling of privacy. In the small shelters you can fix up a bunk in a corner with some permanency, and get a few little homey things around you.

People often go long distances to sleep in their favorite shelters. They say people travel by bus and subway four or five miles to sleep in the big, jolly Double-X shelter; yet other people who live within two blocks of Double-X will travel four or five miles nightly by tube to sleep underground at Marble Arch.

Although people in all the public shelters have to take their bedding home every morning, “guests” in some shelters are so permanent that they are allowed to install their own iron beds and chairs. You see whole rows of deep old leather chairs right out of the sitting rooms at home, with old people sitting up asleep in them. And there are hundreds of canvas deck chairs that people sleep in all night.

Whenever, late in the afternoon, you see somebody with a cheap brown suitcase going down the street, he is on his way to a shelter for the night. I wish I had been in the cheap-brown-suitcase business this past year. You even see people going to shelters in taxis, but with their cheap brown suitcases.

At Double-X you see hundreds of baby buggies parked around the walls. They didn’t bring babies; they brought bedding. Officials think they may be forced to forbid baby buggies, for people bring so much stuff in them. It takes up too much room. Some people come practically ready to set up housekeeping.

I was amazed at the number of soldiers in the shelters. That seemed dreadful to me. A soldier comes home on a few days’ leave for some life, liberty and a little fling at happiness. And then, because his home has gone or his folks have moved, he has to spend his leave lying on a dungeon floor.

However, not all the soldiers go to shelters because they have to. Lots of them go there to pick up girls. And officials at Double-X hint that some of the girls are not of the whitest virtue. The wardens worry about this; but virtue or not, I will say that there are girls at Double-X in the poor East End who are the loveliest I have seen in all London.

Incidentally, the girls over here are wearing coats with those Alaska-type parkas, of the same material, that pull over the head. And they look snappy.

Many people, after trying the new shelter bunks installed by the government, go back to the floor. The bunks are less than two feet wide, and too short for comfort. On the floor, people have room to stretch and roll around.

Most of the bunks are three-deckers. Those in the tube stations are made of steel. All the rest are of wood, pegged together at the joints so they can easily be knocked down and moved. They are unfinished, and look very home-made. Some have slat bottoms, others canvas bottoms.

The other night I was in a shelter that had not had the bunks installed yet, and the marshal said the people had taken a vote and only two out of the three hundred wanted bunks. But they have to take them anyway, for the Ministry of Health says so.

A few people, in the better shelters, bring pajamas and put them on before going to bed. But they are very few. Most people sleep with all their clothes on, even their hats. I have been surprised at how few slacks I’ve seen on women. I should think they would be ideal for shelter sleeping.

Before leaving home I was told by a British friend to bring a ski suit. He said it was just the thing for jumping into quickly, and for shelter wear. But I’ve been practically living in shelters for a week, and I haven’t seen a ski suit yet. Anyway, I would feel sort of silly stretched out here on a deep sofa in room 672 of the Savoy Hotel in a ski suit.

3. STARS AND STRIPES

London, February, 1941

A lot of mighty fine sacrificing is being done in the bomb shelters of London.

I don’t care where you go, whether to one of the vast corral-like shelters or to a small neat one in the West End, there is somebody there who is giving his time and his strength and his heart for his fellow humans.

Take one big basement shelter in the East End which holds around three thousand people. There in that vast hotel of sorts is a tiny, dwarfed man named Mickey Davis. He comes only to my waist. You have to lean over when you talk to him.

He has not been out of that shelter since last September except for an occasional walk. He works day and night. And he doesn’t get a cent for it. People idolize him.

“There’s something queer about living underground,” he told me. “You stay down here so long you don’t even want to go outside. Then when you do go out and get accustomed to the fresh air again you don’t want to come back down.”

There are thousands and thousands of “Davises” serving these harassed people of London.

I have a friend who works as an accountant all day and then serves most of the night as a shelter marshal, without pay. I’ve seen girls who clerk all day in a ten-cent store and then go to an East End shelter to serve thousands of people over the canteen counter till ten o’clock at night. And they are up at five in the morning to serve early tea and coffee. They do that every night, and they get no pay for it. In the West End I saw women of comfortable means who go every night to sit on stools and make sandwiches by the thousands to be sold to the shelterers at cost.

Britain’s civil army has its big blitz heroes who are the greatest this war has produced. But it also has its little heroes by the tens of thousands. I think it’s lots harder to be a little hero, because you have to keep so everlastingly at it.

Back in September, shelter management was in a state of chaos. They were just learning then. So great were the crowds that women would fold up their bedding and go out the front door of a shelter at eight o’clock in the morning, and then turn right around and stand there all day in line, waiting to get back through the same door at four that afternoon.

But now the population of each shelter is pretty well settled down into permanent residence. Also, each section or bay of a shelter is somewhat self-governing. A deputy marshal, chosen by the people, knows everybody in his particular bay, and where they sleep, so they no longer have to wait in line. The marshal reserves space for them.

All these deputy marshals are volunteers, serving without pay. Chief marshals get about $13 a week, and how they work for it!

It was amazing and touching the way the Christmas spirit was kept up during the holidays. People banded together and got up Christmas trees, and chipped in to buy gifts all around. I visited more than thirty shelters during the holidays, and there was not a one that was not elaborately decorated.

In all the shelters used by Greeks, the people have fixed up composite pictures of King George of England and King George of Greece alongside each other. Every shelter has a flag and at least one big picture of the King and the usual “God Save Our Home” mottoes. And that brings me back to a little incident up at the vast and conglomerate Double-X shelter, which has a heavily Jewish population.

The shelter marshal there asked me if I knew where he could get an American flag.

“It’s funny your coming here tonight,” he said, “for I just had that request this morning. Most of the people here have relatives in the States. They want an American flag. They say England and America are the only two countries left in the world.”

Well, I’m not much on flags, but I figured it was up to me. So I went down to Selfridge’s, bought the last American flag they had and took it out to Double-X.

The next day the shelter marshal called up, practically agog with gratitude, and said the people had made a great fuss over it. He said the women had started already making copies of it to hang all over the place. He said he had put twenty-four Greeks from a torpedoed merchant ship in that bay the night before, and they cheered when they saw the flag.

So I guess Ernest has done his good deed for 1941. The flag cost $2.50 too. I’m all torn now over whether I should be a hero and pay for it myself, or be a heel and put it on my expense account. I guess maybe I’ll wait until I can be a more expensive heel.

I want to tell you about two remarkable shelters in London. Both of them come under the head of private group shelters. They are not open to the public.

The first one I saw, I was taken into privately and half surreptitiously, for few people even know that it exists. It must be one of the safest shelters in all London. It is in the basement of an apartment building, in a business section, and there is a bank on the ground floor. The shelter is the basement vault of the bank.

They’ve spent more than $10,000 fixing it up. Not a cent of this went for fancy trimmings, for the shelter isn’t fancy at all. Every penny went for the physical strengthening of this vault.

There are five stories of strong building above the vault, and the ceiling of the vault itself is five feet of concrete. The vault consists of two rooms. In the smaller one, concrete has been added to make the ceiling eight feet thick. The walls are more than three feet thick. The doors are of heavy steel. On two sides of the vault are hallways, and beyond these another thick wall. Surrounding all four walls is old Mother Earth.

An elaborate arrangement of huge cogwheels manipulates a heavy steel trapdoor in the ceiling. This is an emergency escape door. Above this door, which leads to the ground floor, is the heaviest table I ever saw. Its legs are oaken posts a foot thick, and it has a heavy steel top to keep debris from choking down on top of the door.

The steel doors of the vault close on rubber strips, which make it gas-proof. If the lights are knocked out there is an auxiliary lighting plant, run from batteries. The ordinary escape doors out in the hall have been shored up with lengths of railroad iron to support debris.

At the door of the Savoy Hotel’s shelter a man in a tuxedo sits at a desk. He checks in those residents of the hotel who wish to sleep in the shelter.

Inside, the shelter is softly lighted and quiet as a grave. It is air-conditioned. Great heavy satin draperies hang at the doorways, and other draperies divide the shelter into bays holding about twenty beds each. There is a wide aisle down the center, and the curtains make it all resemble a gigantic Pullman car made up for the night.

The beds are soft and deep. They have mattresses of the same type as are found in the regular hotel rooms. The linen is fresh.

There is a separate lounge in one corner where you can sit in deep chairs at tables and drink coffee. Just one floor up is a small bar.

The whole shelter is shored up with an intricate framework of heavy steel piping to brace the ceiling against the weight of bomb debris. At the entrance are three separate doors, one after the other, and each has a gas-proof curtain that can be lowered.

The shelter has its own maids and porters. It also has a full Red Cross unit, manned by seven part-time nurses. During the early September raids they treated many bomb casualties brought in off the streets.

The Savoy shelter can sleep more than two hundred people. Many of the hotel’s guests sleep there every night, whether there’s a raid or not.

Single men and single women are assigned separate bays, and there are bays for married couples. And carrying shelter etiquette to the nth degree, they even have a separate compartment for chronic snorers. They just herd ’em all together and let ’em snore it out. In fact, when the blitz first started, and before they hit on the idea of segregating the noisy ones, the hotel had one man on its night staff whose sole duty was to go around and shake up snorers!

4. LOOKING AHEAD

London, February, 1941

As a whole, life in London’s public air-raid shelters reminds me of nothing so much as our own makeshift depression camps at home.

They sprang up suddenly out of a desperate need and amid considerable chaos. Like our camps, they are gradually getting better. As in our Okie camps, the people have set up a form of self-government. They elect their own leaders, and they have committees and representatives who sit on higher councils for making shelter rules and demanding better conditions—and God knows there is plenty of room for better conditions in some of the shelters.

The body heat of thousands of packed people makes some shelters stifling. In others, deep beneath stone arches and with concrete floors, the chill dampness is deadly. At one church in Stepney, people were actually sleeping until recently in stone coffins that once held corpses.

It wasn’t until my second week of visiting shelters, when I was taken purposely to certain places, that I saw what a modernized shelter can begin to look like.

Let us take the Borough of Stepney as an example of what they are trying to do. This borough of a quarter of a million people has 300 shelters. They are not at regular intervals, but they are never many blocks apart. Most of them are not marked. At night you have to know ahead of time which door to go in. It is possible to walk along a dark sidewalk at night right past a door behind which there are lights and three thousand people and not realize that there is a soul within miles.

All these basements are leased by the borough. When the blitz started they weren’t ready, and ever since they’ve been working on these basements right in the midst of all the people, trying to make them more habitable. But now Stepney has a program. More basements are constantly being rented and converted into shelters. When the program is finished, if it ever is finished, they hope to have 500 shelters.

Both for safety from bombs and for reasons of health, they want to disperse—to get the shelters thinned out. Under the new program they pick a strong basement, then work on it for weeks until it is fully ready before letting anybody in. At first it is shored up with a maze of brick walls, which also divide the basement into rooms housing twenty or thirty people each. Then wooden bunks are installed in rows. The ceilings are sealed with concrete so water can’t seep through. The floors are concreted, if they were not already. A first-aid room is installed, with medical supplies. Banks of modern private toilets are built. Some shelters will even have shower baths, for the disinclination of poor people to bathe is worrying the doctors. Canteens are installed so the shelterers can get something warm at a reasonable price. Last, and best of all, a system of forced ventilation is put in. It is really air-conditioning—it can blow in either hot or cold air, and suck out dead air.

That is what Stepney is aiming at. And other boroughs are doing the same. When all this program is finished, London’s shelters will be quite habitable underground dormitories. But right now too many of them are little better than underground Hoovervilles.

The churches have really done a great work in this shelter emergency. Many thousands of people are spending their nights in the lower depths of strongly built churches. In fact, of all the public shelters I have seen I like best the one in the basement of the Church of St. Martin’s-in-the-Fields, in Trafalgar Square.

This old church is known to all American tourists who have been in London. Until a year and a half ago its extensive crypts were filled with the bones of the ancient dead. But the rector had these taken out and buried elsewhere about eighteen months ago, preparatory to using these rooms for social activities. They got the job finished just in time for the war. The newly emptied crypts made perfect air-raid shelters. And that is what they are today.

The crypts are filled with double-decked bunks. Central heating has just been installed. Also banks of private toilets. Everything is clean. There is a separate crypt for mothers with small babies. There is an all-night restaurant for people in uniform. There is a canteen for civilians.

You don’t have to listen to a mission sermon, either. There are billiard and pingpong tables in the big central hall. It is more like a clubhouse than a church.

St. Martin’s can sleep 500 people. Although it is in the rich West End, anybody can come. And anybody does—well-dressed men of the world, old Jewish mothers, soldiers, girls, and a great run of just average people like you and me.

You warm to St. Martin’s as you do to a new acquaintance whom you like immensely. There is character here.

When you see a church with a bomb hole in its side and 500 fairly safe and happy people in its basement, and girls smoking cigarettes inside the sacred walls without anybody yelling at them, then I say that church has found a real religion.

Before I started over here I had a horror of being caught in some big wartime epidemic this winter. Well, it hasn’t happened. So far, England’s wartime health apparently is excellent. How or why, I don’t know; for it seems to me that with a fourth of London’s population crammed into holes beneath the earth’s surface an epidemic would be a setup.

It’s true that the city has been full of colds this winter. Many people who use the air-raid shelters suffer from something called “shelter throat.” There is always much coughing—heavy coughing. I’ve had my cold, along with the rest. It kept me in bed for nearly a week, and I didn’t feel so good. But I wasn’t half as sick that week as I was the day I got my doctor’s bill—$38.

Scarlet fever and diphtheria have actually shown a decline this winter. Pneumonia is up just a little. There has been no outbreak of real influenza. Typhoid has caused no worries. The only disease that has really gone up is cerebrospinal meningitis, known as spotted fever. This has jumped from 1500 cases in 1939 to 12,500 cases in 1940.

Right now London is in the midst of its most critical two winter months, and the doctors are keeping their fingers crossed, knocking on wood and throwing salt in seven directions. If they can go another month they’ll be over the winter hump, and if they do get through without an epidemic I think they should salaam three times to Allah—and then start on preparations for next winter.

Those shelters have got to be improved faster than they are being improved now, regardless of cost. An epidemic in London might give Hitler the opening he’s waiting for. These people simply can’t go on living through winters this way without grave trouble. It seems to me that before another winter every big shelter must have a system of forced ventilation, sanitary toilets, adequate heating and warmer floors. They must be made dry. They must have better medical departments.

They did the best they could this winter. The biggest shelters have nurses. There are some doctors on duty. But most of the smaller ones have nothing of this sort. I visited one where the people themselves had chipped in to buy a medical kit; and the shelter marshal, who knew nothing at all about medicine, was acting as doctor and nurse. In another, the medical box was padlocked, and whoever had the key hadn’t been around for days.

I remember reading a report by British doctors early last fall, saying that the lice and flea population of London was increasing alarmingly. I’ve asked about this at several of the poorest shelters, and so far as I can tell this increase has been halted. The smell of disinfectants is strong in all the big shelters, for they are cleaned and sprayed every morning. But, to my mind, they still aren’t clean enough.

The first-aid rooms in the larger shelters are really miniature hospitals, staffed by Red Cross nurses and doctors who volunteer their services nightly. At the Double-X shelter I looked over their records for the last two months. About a fourth of the cases they had treated were of people suffering from boils. This seemed odd, so I asked about it, and one of the nurses said it was the result of the poor people’s diet. Blood, toil, tears, sweat—and boils.

Shelter life in London, even at its best, is no bargain. I had thought I might find it exciting, or even romantic in spots, but I didn’t. It seems to me there is something degrading to the human spirit in lying all night, crowded among other people, on a basement floor, within arm’s reach of open toilets, in bad air and under constant supervision even on nights when no raid is in progress. I fear eventually it will do the same thing to weaken characters that being in prison does.

There are millions of people in London who prefer to take their chances in their homes, or somewhere else above ground. And I believe I am one of them.