Digging for Mrs. Miller (1941) illustrates how, in the right hands, simple, undramatic, and limpid prose can have a stunning impact. Originally published as Post D in England, Digging for Mrs. Miller is John Strachey’s thinly-fictionalized account of his experiences working as an air raid warden during the most intense months of the Blitz in autumn 1940.
Strachey, who had been one of the most active members of the radical left in England in the 1930s, became a warden somewhat by accident. After one raid in September 1940, he came home to find his house roped off because of a nearby delayed-action bomb. Unable to sleep there, he bunked at the air raid post down the street, helping out with a few tasks to justify his place, and a few days later, he enrolled as an unpaid and part-time warden. His uniform was just a pair of overalls and a steel helmet. His equipment consisted of a flashlight (which had to be used sparingly in the blackout), a gas mask, some bandages, and a note pad.
Night after night, he would sit at an upstairs window in the house that served as the post for his sector–an area of perhaps 6-8 square blocks. The house belonged to his neighbor, Miss Sterling, who was also the head of Post D. Night after night, he would hear–and then see–the German bombers coming over London. And when a high explosive or incendiary bomb fell, he and the other wardens would run to locate the site, see if anyone was injured, and coordinate the work of the firemen, stretcher bearers, rescue workers, and the rest of the team that quickly appeared on the scene.
One of Strachey’s first realizations was how much working as a warden did for his own morale:
The main trouble of being a pure civilian during a prolonged air bombardment is that as such one’s only duty is to seek and to maintain one’s own, and one’s companions’, safety. And this is inevitably demoralizing. The instant that an individual is given even the simplest objective function, and becomes a member of an organized (and uniformed, this is notoriously important) group, the whole burden of deciding whether or not on any particular occasion to seek his or her own safety is automatically removed. While one is functionless one is continually irritated by such questions as, “Isn’t it really very silly to stay upstairs (or to go out) in this degree of Blitz?” The instant the individual has become a warden, ambulance driver, member of the auxiliary fire service, rescue and demolition squads, or stretcher-bearer, this question is, nine times out of ten, settled for him or her.
Though I’ve read several history books that dealt with the Blitz, Digging for Mrs. Miller was the first thing that really conveyed the sense of what it was like. Contrary to the impression one gets, the bombing was not on the level of the massive Allied raids against Germany. The Luftwaffe knocked out buildings more often than whole blocks, and Strachey’s team more often responded to single bombs than to wide scale destruction.
On occasion, though, a single large high explosive bomb could destroy the better part of a block. Strachey devotes 48 pages–nearly one third of the book–to “The Big Bomb,” a chapter detailing the hours of scrambling around and digging through the enormous piles of rubble left after a particularly large bomb exploded near their post. Hour after hour, working with no light and soaked with rain, he and other men tunneled their way in to locate victims, hauling away endless baskets full of rubble. In one case, it took the rescuers over 26 hours to reach a young woman buried under a small mountain of debris.
Strachey left the warden service at the end of 1940, when he joined the R.A.F.. Though he eventually wrote over a dozen works of political philosophy and advocacy, I suspect this short, simple tale is his finest legacy as a writer. It’s certainly one of the best books dealing with World War Two I’ve ever read.