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A piece on the radio yesterday about the Bethnal Green tube station disaster. Reminded me of something I was told by an old bloke from Bermondsey, a colleague working past pension age. He said where he lived people weren't so bothered about the air raid siren and noise of planes overhead as they were about the anti-aircraft fire. Regardless of whether they hit anything, the artillery shells would fall back to earth as hot heavy shards of metal, capable of causing anything from injury to death. He said something like: 'You didn't want to get caught out in it!', as if it were a shower of rain.

Then much later I read a piece in the New Yorker archive, written by their correspondent in London during the Blitz. I think most of the columns were about shortages of dress material, but this one mentioned the Bethnal Green incident and ascribed the panic to fear of falling shell fragments.


No mention of the flak in yesterday's news item, but perhaps it's been forgotten.