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The grim business of real instead of imaginary air raids showed London something new: the best fun lives at the pit of danger. Concerts became enthusiastic patriotic festivals when bombers came overhead (see p. 56). In theatres there was an air of camaraderie. The manager of the Palace was roundly cheered when he interrupted Chu Chin Chow to announce that German planes were over the city. After Me and My Girl's 1,625th performance, the audience joined the cast on the stage and did the Lambeth Walk for hours. At / Lived With You, Ivor Novello spontaneously gave the crowd a piece he wrote a quarter of a century ago: Keep the Home Fires Burning. At the Hippodrome Winston Churchill's actor son-in-law, Vic Oliver, as master of ceremonies, invited each person in the audience to do an act. A youngster from the Canadian R. A. F., who until eight months ago sold women's shoes in Cleveland to earn himself a musical education, sang for the first time in his life in public, and brought the house down.
Out in the country neighbors more or less appropriated German raids as their intellectual property. Villages boasted having more bomb craters than nearby towns. Citizens sagely analyzed raids.
They discriminated knowingly between the noise of bombs and antiaircraft, between parachute and ordinary flares, between Whitleys and Messerschmitts—which they now call "Jitterschmitts." (London joked last week about a flustered gentleman who asked a telephone operator: "Quick, give me Messerschmitt 109.") Most London bars stayed open (against regulations), and restaurants also kept going after hours to accommodate customers who were stranded—for taxis, busses and trams halted the moment the warnings sounded. Diners at the Savoy moved down into comfortable shelters under the building where a dance band and cold buffet awaited them.
Many had not yet learned bitter lessons, and stayed out to watch the show from roofs and in parks. Roof-squatters presented a problem to the authorities, who feared that their cigarets might be seen. In open Hampstead Heath, overlooking the great expanse of the city, crowds discussed the fingers of searchlights groping above them, analyzed the beams' varying attitudes with an almost professional air, identified the locality of each light as it swung on the raiders.
A major loss was sleep. One morning-after a newspaper seller's placard read: "Good yawning." The nights were fun, but there was much to be done by day, and gradually the people rearranged their sleeping habits. They learned to nap between alarms. In large buildings, couches were wheeled into passages below stairs for those from dangerous top floors. In homes, mattresses were laid in unlikely places if they seemed safer than bed rooms. A deaf woman in London's brainy Bloomsbury each night tied one end of a long string around her toe and hung the other end out of a window. By arrange ment, the local air-raid warden jerked when the sirens sounded.