Long life | 3 September 2015

While the Germans were raining bombs on London during the second world war, the architects’ department of London County Council was busy colouring in Ordnance Survey maps of the city to record which buildings had been destroyed and which had not. These maps have now been published as a book by Thames and Hudson, The London County Council Bomb Damage Maps, 1939-45. Those buildings that had been totally destroyed were coloured black on the maps; those that had been damaged beyond repair, purple. And a review of this book in last Saturday’s edition of the Times was accompanied by a reproduction of one map covering the area around St Paul’s Cathedral, which is exactly where I was residing as a baby during the autumn of 1940 when the Blitz of the City began.

My father had rented a flat in St Paul’s Churchyard in a building called Wren’s View which looked on to the front of the cathedral that Sir Christopher Wren had built. Dad chose it because it was only a short walk down Ludgate Hill to the Fleet Street offices of Reuters news agency, where he then worked, and because it was cheap (not surprisingly, given its highly dangerous location). The map shows how lucky I am to be alive. Large areas all around the cathedral were coloured purple, but Wren’s View was one of a small handful of buildings close to it that were not. It wasn’t unscathed, however. A blast from a bomb blew out its bottom two floors, but my parent’s flat was on the fourth floor. Apparently I slept through it all.

I have often wondered why my parents exposed me to such risk when so many East End children at that time were being evacuated for safety to the countryside, but I like to think it was because my mother couldn’t bear to be parted from her new baby.