Early springtime, London, 1944: the Little Blitz period of suddenly redoubled enemy air-raids after the comparative lull that followed the Blitz proper of 1940-41. Two women sit drinking tea on a pile of sandbags on the Marylebone Road. The tea is grey, and probably made from chlorinated water; the powdered milk is lumpy; they nonetheless engage in 'the usual women's quarrel' over who should pay. A sandbag splits, revealing its stuffing of earth, and bits of grass and flowers. '"Nature triumphant over war,"' one of the new friends declares, 'in a wireless voice: for it was the sort of thing that people were always writing about to the radio - the new variety of wildflower they had spotted on the bombsites, the new species of bird, all of that - it had got terribly boring.' It is as though one of those muddy, confused old photographs has come alive and started to talk.

LRB 23 February 2006 | PDF Download