London's Burning by Lydia Syson

Of course I should have brought binoculars.  Vast though it was - this panoramic wooden sculpture of London’s mid-seventeenth-century skyline, rising from a flat barge in the middle of the Thames - it looked worryingly far away.  And there was a boat in the way.

As you can see, Sunday was a dull, grey afternoon.  We had pitched up absurdly early, friends and family, hoping to find a good spot on the riverbank, which we did.  Armed with a small picnic and some wine, we leaned against the very comfortable wall in front of the Sea Containers Building, watched the world and the water go by, and caught up on life. It was almost three hours before the burning was due to begin.  But I’m a committed queue-er.  I'm used to  sitting for hours by the river outside the Globe theatre to secure my favourite stage-side groundling view and conversation and good cheer always make the minutes slip by with amazing speed. Our previous experience of Artichoke public art events had convinced us it would be well worth the wait. 

The finale of the 350^thanniversary commemorations of the Great Fire of London - previewed in part here by fellow History Girl Imogen Robertson – was promised to be spectacular.  Hundreds of young Londoners - schoolchildren and young people 'not in education, employment or training' - had collaborated over months to bring to life American ‘burn artist’ David Best’s vision of the Restoration capital. 

London 1666, David Best, London's Burning,
a festival of arts and ideas for Great Fire 350.
Produced by Artichoke.
Photo by Matthew Andrews.

The crowds gathered behind us…we got talking to a few strangers…and joyous anticipation  flickered and caught hold.  Even the security guard who had to run along the sandy shoreline below us in pursuit of a few triumphantly stray spectators was kind and good-humoured as he retrieved them. Free public art brings peculiar health-and-safety headaches and London 1666 was ambitious: fire and water on top of unpredictable audience numbers.  The Great Fire 350website certainly suggested a slight anxiety about overcrowding with its insistence that the best views would be online. That seemed unlikely.

As darkness fell, we saw the dome of St Paul’s begin to move, washed with smoke and colour and finally flames: the beginning of ‘Fires Ancient’, a projection by Martin Firrell.  

From Martin Firrell's website.

Out on the river, pinpricks of torchlight moved about the framework of the small city, only to vanish.  Last checks, we assumed, and worried a bit about getaways.  A few pleasure craft seemed to be cutting it fine.  On the dot of half-past eight, the first spark appeared, right at the heart of the sculpture.

 

From the other side of the river...as it started.
London 1666, David Best, London's Burning,
a festival of arts and ideas for Great Fire 350.
Produced by Artichoke.
Photo by Matthew Andrews.

Just as it had in the city itself 350 years earlier, fire soon took hold and slowly spread.  Little by little, the exquisite intricacy of the sculpture’s latticework construction stood out ever more blackly against the flames, perfectly visible.  

London's Burning, as above, photo by Oliver Rudkin

A brief, southerly gust of wind, and we felt the heat of it on our faces. At first I thought I’d imagined its warmth, but then it came again, and it was even warmer.Building after building caught light, spire after spire. The crackling intensified.  It had begun like the sound of rain pattering on a hard roof – the kind of summer shower you don’t notice until you look outside and run outside to gather in washing.  Soon it sounded vengeful. The entire barge was alight. 

As above.

The clouds of smoke rushing upwards and eastwards developed an alarming but enchanting underbelly of embers, an abundance of golden sparks.  

The fire-fighting boat which had been hovering nearby moved swiftly in to direct a cooling jet of spray at the danger.

I no longer wanted binoculars.  It felt pointless even to take photographs, yet also impossible not to make an attempt, at least from time to time.  No image, moving or still, could possibly convey the complete experience of a performance like this – sounds, smells, sights and that invigorating sense of mass pleasure all combining to provide a extended magical moment, the more magnificent for being shared with so many. There were gasps as the larger structures collapsed, one after another, spires folding and beams breaking. At one point somebody tried and failed to set off round-singing - "London's burning, London's burning..." Mostly people stood mesmerised, from time to time confiding their wonder in low voices.  This was wonder laced with horror. The spectacle - a visual oxymoron, perhaps - lasted for almost three-quarters of an hour. It was the ultimate in twenty-first-century urban sublime. 

Yesterday morning I was working nearby and couldn’t resist stealing away along the Embankment to see what, if anything, remained.  

Nothing.  The barge had vanished, leaving thoughts and memories.  

Something I learned this year was that on September 6^th1666, London was a city of refugees: 80 per cent of the City had lost their homes. The rich rebuilt, but the destitute had to survive for years in shanty-towns on the outskirts of London. There will be events today in central London to commemorate this aspect of the Great Fire, and think about contemporary resonances. 

I’m also left remembering my very first introduction to the Great Fire – a lit-up scale model made for the old London Museum (originally housed in Kensington Palace) - and the memorable awe this always inspired when I went to see it as a young child.  As I got older, I noticed its flaws – the cotton wool smoke, the boy caught implausibly running through a flame.  But when Imogen wrote last month that she felt sorry for people born in London, as they could never have the pleasure of visiting the capital for the first time, it made me laugh. We're happy with that! I’m a Londoner, a proud Londoner, and brought up by several generations of Londoners too. The whole city was my playground, as it is now my children’s, and I was always blessed with older relatives who had long delighted in being Londoners.  They shared its secret spots and stories with me and my siblings and cousins, and untiringly took us up the Monument and St Paul's and on the river and in and out of the City's churches, squares, museums and parks. I’m thanking my family now. 

Photo by Oliver Ruskin, details above.

PS.  Some children's fiction thoughts for the Fire of London: Two of my sons were particularly gripped by Pippa Goodheart's Raven Boy.  My daughter read and re-read Mary Hooper's At the sign of the Sugared Plum and its sequel Petals in the Ashes to the point of obsession. Any other suggestions?

www.lydiasyson.com

'No more Hiroshimas' by Lydia Syson

Thirty years ago a new university friend invited me to come and spend Christmas with her family in Hiroshima.  Until I met her, Hiroshima was a word on a banner - an idea, a symbol of something so huge and terrifying and unimaginable that in my nineteen-year-old mind I think it was still a wasteland.  How could the city possibly have been rebuilt? Hiroshima was the cherry tree in Tavistock Square – a ‘never again’ reminder of the worst inhumanity I could conceive and most importantly, a memorial to its victims.  A Cold War child in a left-wing North London household, I had spent my youth marching for CND, passing round petitions, and organising film shows and discussions at school. ‘Enola Gay’ was on the radio and nuclear holocaust at the back of our minds and in our dreams, but we tended to think about dying, not surviving.

Tavistock Square, London
My grandmother, Moira Gaster, helped organise the planting of this tree in 1967
from the seeds of a Hiroshima cherry tree.
The memorial benches opposite are for both my peace activist grandparents.

‘Hiroshima’ seemed untranslatable into bricks and mortar…or as it turned out, concrete and cabbages. In the mid-1980s decorative brassicas were very much in fashion in the window boxes of one of the most modern city I’d ever visited. On my arrival, after a long and memorable Aeroflot flight via Moscow and a journey on a bullet-train, the first thing that struck me was my poor choice of footwear: I’d had no idea I’d have to remove it so often. My winter shoes - slightly Edwardian lace-up boots - took forever to get on and off, and I was shamed by the holes in the heels of nearly every pair of black tights I owned. In those days all the minutiae of everyday Japanese life were thrillingly unfamiliar – the very hot, deep bath, refilled once a week; heated tables and loo seats; wearable duvets; bento boxes, pachinko parlours and meals from slot machines. Meanwhile, although the knowledge of what had happened in Hiroshima hung over me, the city itself at first seemed bland and unexceptional. It was almost disconcerting.

Until my friend took me to the Peace Memorial Park, the open space which had once been the heart of Hiroshima.  Commemorations will be taking place there today as they do every year on the anniversary of the first atomic bomb to be used in warfare, remembering more than 80,000 people killed on the day of the attack, and 140,000-150,000 more who died from radiation poisoning in the years that followed. I saw the skeleton dome of one of the only buildings left standing, still preserved as a ruin. I learned of Sadako and her paper cranes. And I was overwhelmed in the museum, which was smaller then than it is today and offered less context to the whole ghastly war, its ending, and its aftermath. All these years later, it’s hard to write about what I saw and felt there. It seemed, and still seems, unspeakable.

The Genbaku Dome - also known as the 'A' dome -
amidst the devastation in October 1945. Photograph by Shigeo Hayashi

Yet somehow - remarkably - Kathleen Burkinshaw, author of The Last Cherry Blossom, published this week in the US by Sky Pony Press, has managed to put into words the experience of growing up in Hiroshima during the Second World War.

From her mother’s memories, and her own careful research, Kathleen has created an original and compelling novel about a twelve-year-old girl trying to make sense of the gaps between newspaper reports, government propaganda and what she gradually discovers for herself: neighbours going to fight who never come home, the pressures of ritual suicide, what it really means to serve your country.   Meanwhile, as her own household changes, with new marriages for both her aunt and her father, Yuriko also finds disturbing holes in her own family narrative. She is forced to rethink her identity at every level.

Kathleen's mother, Toshiko Ishikawa (1932-2015),
with her Papa, Hisao Ishikawa (1883-1945)
 in her most treasured photograph.

It’s a completely absorbing world. All the details of family relationships, school friendships, everyday life, customs, stories, and ideas about honour and shame are woven in beautifully. When pika don hits – the literal translation is ‘flash boom’ – we understand exactly what it has destroyed. Burkinshaw handles the moment and its aftermath with great sensitivity. The Last Cherry Blossom takes its title from a favourite saying of Yuriko’s Papa, and also evokes the spirit of endurance in Hiroshima, manifested in the blooming of cherry trees in Spring 1946 in soil where scientists had predicted nothing would grow for years. There are some books you read as a child which open your eyes, get under your skin, and stay with you forever. When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit had that effect on me. I think The Last Cherry Blossom will prove an enduring novel. I also believe that its young readers will grow up asking more questions about where we are now in terms of nuclear warfare, whether we have learned anything from the tragedies of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and asking themselves how they feel about that.

Kathleen with her mother in 2013 (above)
and with her daughter Sara in Hiroshima (below)

www.lydiasyson.com

Island of Last Hope by Lydia Syson

Left to right, in the front row: Pilot Officer Mirosław Ferić, Flight Lieutenant John A Kent (Commander of ‘A’ Flight – Kent wrote out phonetically on his trouser leg the Polish words for every procedure involved in take-off, flying and landing), Flying Officer Bogdan Grzeszczak, Pilot Officer Jerzy Radomski, Pilot Officer Witold Łokuciewski, Pilot Officer Bogusław Mierzwa (obscured by Łokuciewski), Flying Officer Zdzisław Henneberg, Sergeant Jan Rogowski and Sergeant Eugeniusz Szaposznikow. In the centre, to the rear of this group, wearing helmet and goggles, is the infamous ace F.O. Jan Zumbach.

Last week this image of a group of fighter pilots - all but one of them Poles - walking away from a Hawker Hurricane in October 1940 was posted anonymously on the door of the Welsh Polish Association in Llanelli with the words: 'Thanks for being here then...still glad you're here now'.  The photograph - apparently taken after one of over a thousand sorties made in just the first six months of Squadron 303's formation during the Battle of Britain - has also been doing the rounds on Twitter, as part of the effort so many people have been making to combat the poisonous resurgence of xenophobia and racism unleashed by the Brexit vote. Yesterday Michael Rosen offered Nicky Morgan a draft letter outlining ways in which education could lead the way in helping the population understand that migrants are not to blame for the pressures on schools and public services:

"My door is open to hear any possible approach to stop this happening," he suggests she should write. "Perhaps we should be holding a Celebrate Migration week? Or should I be asking schools to develop teaching materials that make the connection between now and times in the past in Europe when minorities were scapegoats for economic problems they didn’t cause?"

Historical fiction can be immensely useful in making those connections, allowing young readers in Britain to see that such scapegoating didn't just take place 'over there' in Europe but on this island too. At school visits, talking about the reasons why so many international volunteers went to help the Spanish Republic in the 1930s, after a right-wing military coup that was backed by Hitler and Mussolini and happened eighty years ago this month, I show students pictures of Oswald Mosley and the British Union of Fascists. Nobody ever guesses the photographs were taken here, or that the Blackshirts could be British. And, during discussions of the Home Front in the summer of 1940, although there is always one who recognises the flag on this memorial as Polish, most young readers know very little about the part played by Polish airmen at 'our finest hour'.

For a long time after World War II a myth persisted that the Polish Air Force was destroyed on the ground within days of Hitler's invasion of Poland on 1st September 1939.  In fact, despite their outnumbered and out-of-date planes, Poland's highly trained airmen fought bravely for several weeks before accepting defeat.  By 17th September, the country 'first to fight' had been invaded for a second time, by Russia, and would soon be doubly occupied.  But for the pilots the battle was far from over. 

This poster was designed in 1942 by Marek Żuławski,
a Polish expressionist painter and graphic artist
who settled in London in 1936.

Descriptions of their departure from Poland make heartbreaking reading. Adam Zamoyski, author of The Forgotten Few, reckons that about 80% of the PAF survived the first Blitzkrieg of World War Two and managed to escape capture. 9.276 crossed the border into Romania (not all as easily as Henryk, in my novel, That Burning Summer), 900 fled to Hungary, about 1,00 escaped via the Baltic states of Lithuania and Latvia, and another 1,500 were captured by the Soviets and sent straight to labour camps. The aim was to regroup in France.

In late December, 1939, Michal Leszkiewicz, a future Bomber Command pilot who had escaped from Poland via Rumania at the age of 23, was on the way to Beirut, though he did not know this when he recorded in his diary: ‘We’re probably sailing to Syria. A vague fear of the unknown – a purely human instinct. When you know what to expect, you don’t go to pieces. We have to – we must go on. The responsibility lies with us, the young people; they’re turning to us even in Poland – the innocent ones whom fate has wronged . . .we are their hope.’

Despite his great love and commitment to his homeland, Michal Leszkiewicz never again returned to Poland, and died in England in 1992. His diary made a huge impression on me when I was finding out about the odysseys so many airmen made before they reached Britain. I drew on his account for my descriptions of Henryk’s sea voyage from Bulgaria to Beirut, his arrival in the Middle East, the journey to France, and his frustration at the chaos there. On arrival, he found himself interned in miserable conditions in France with refugees from the defeated Spanish Republic.

By June 1940, France too had fallen. The remaining Polish airmen were evacuated to Britain. Arriving exhausted and battleweary in the only allied country left unoccupied in Western Europe, they called it ‘The Island of Last Hope’. On 18th June, Churchill famously declared: ‘Hitler knows that he will have to break us in this island or lose the war. If we can stand up to him, all Europe may be freed and the life of the world may move forward into broad, sunlit uplands.’ J.B.Priestley (‘That Yorkshire man on the radio – the one with the calming voice Aunt Myra loved to listen to’ TBS, p. 100) remembered the Germany he’d known and loved before the last war, and warned ‘any country that allows itself to be dominated by the Nazis will not only have the German Gestapo crawling everywhere, but will also find itself in the power of all of its own most unpleasant types – the very people who, for years, have been rotten with unsatisfied vanity, gnawing envy, and haunted by dreams of cruel power. Let the Nazis in, and you will find that the laziest loudmouth in the workshop has suddenly been given the power to kick you up and down the street, and that if you try to make any appeal, you have to do it to the one man in the district whose every word and look you’d always distrusted.’

The forty Polish pilots who took to the skies at the beginning of the Battle of Britain were scattered at first among a number of RAF squadrons. Most were among the 2,000 or so airmen who'd been kicking their heels in Britain for months already. When the earliest pilots arrived between December 1939 and February 1940, they were given a frustratingly slow induction into RAF life, involving English lessons, education in the King's Regulations, and endless parades and roll calls: it seemed they would never be allowed near an actual plane.

Co-operation across national boundaries is never easy, and a distinct clash of military cultures soon became obvious. Driven to distraction by British officers who seemed to be hiding their heads in the sand about the real nature of the threat from Germany, the Poles called their RAF colleagues 'ostriches'. Meanwhile, as Zamoyski writes, the British were disconcerted, to say the least, by the newcomers' manners: 'The Polish habit of saluting everyone, on station, in town, in restaurants, irritated the British officers, who found they could not cross the airfield or walk down a street without acknowledging several dozen salutes. "They were always giving you salutes even if it was their dispatcher handing you a cup of coffee," recalls an RAF officer. "The heel-clicking that went on was terrific," remembers one RAF fitter, "and they had a funny way of bowing stiffly, from the waist up, like tin soldiers."'

Despite this, the Poles did not take easily to the kind of hierarchical deference traditional in the British military. Group Captain A.P.Davidson, a former air attaché in Warsaw and the station commander at RAF Eastchurch, near Sheerness, where the first Polish airmen were based, was shocked and baffled by their attitudes: “Whilst on the one hand there exists a distinct class feeling between officers and airmen and the former often treat the latter with a lack of consideration unknown in our own Service, on the other hand, officers fraternise with airmen, walk about and play cards with them.”

Morale improved once the Poles were finally allowed to fly, but then they discovered that everything on a British aircraft was back-to-front, so all their reflexes had to be reversed. You had to push instead of pull to open the throttle, and even the toggle for opening the parachute was on the ‘wrong’ side. There was also the difficulty of judging in feet and miles, not metres and kilometres, and new navigational aids to master like radar (only just adopted, and still secret) and radios. The British tactic of close formation flying seemed suicidal to the experienced Poles, for pilots had to pay far more attention to not colliding with each other than looking out for attacking aircraft. Four tight ranks of three planes were supposedly protected by the middle plane of the last rank, known as the ‘weaver’, but 32 Squadron, based at Biggin Hill, lost 21 of these pilots in three weeks, each ‘picked off’ by the enemy without the rest of the squadron even noticing.

A myth that came to dominate war films and popular memory was that all Polish pilots were reckless and individualistic. The stereotype arose partly because they were trained to fire at much closer range than British pilots – almost at pointblank. (‘Those crazy Poles’, thinks Peggy in That Burning Summer.) This scene from the 1969 film The Battle of Britain (whose uncountable stars included Laurence Oliver as Hugh Dowding and Trevor Howard as Keith Park) is typical of British attitudes. 

(Incidentally, and somewhat chillingly, the German aircraft used in this film were provided by Franco’s Spanish Air Force: a mixture of Heinkels, still used for transport, and retired Messerschmitt 109s.)

In August 1940, two new Polish fighter squadrons were formed: No. 302, ‘City of Poznań’, and No. 303, ‘Kościuszko’. By 1941 a fully-fledged Polish Air Force was operating alongside the RAF. By the end of the war, Polish pilots had won 342 British gallantry awards, and 303 Squadron claimed the highest number of kills of all the Allied squadrons in the Battle of Britain yet its death rate was the lowest.

On 11th September 1940 at 16.15 hrs, Sergeant Stanisław Duszyński was shot down over Romney Marsh, not far from Lydd, while attacking a Ju 88. He was 24, and like Henryk in That Burning Summer, had initially been evacuated to Rumania in 1939. Neither his body nor his Hurricane were recovered at the time, although unsuccessful efforts, both official and unofficial were made in 1973 and 1996. Six months later, Pilot Officer Bogusław Mierzwa’s Spitfire came down in flames on the stony promontory of Dungeness, not far from the lighthouse. 

Another pilot of the 303 Squadron, Mieczyslaw Waskiewicz, crashed into the sea off the point and was never found. Both were returning from a mission to escort six Blenheims sent to bomb a fighter airfield in France. Mierzwa had been awarded his Pilot’s Wings in Poland less than two years earlier, at the age of 22, not three months before the invasion of Poland. For many years, a tattered Polish flag flew over the spot where his aircraft burned, next to a plastic garden chair and the rather makeshift memorial shown above.  It's now been replaced by this slightly less romantic but more informative noticeboard.

Between 1939 and 1945, well over 200,000 Poles fought in all the forces under British High Command. But for complex reasons, largely connected with post-war shortages of jobs and housing, anti-Polish sentiment in Britain had become so bad by 1946 that ‘Poles go Home’ graffiti began to appear near Polish Air Force bases. Squadron 318 Spitfire pilot Stefan Knapp, a sculptor and painter who suffered from recurring nightmares and insomnia for years after the war, recalled the change in his memoir, The Square Sun (1956):

‘I was choking with the bitterness of it…Not so long ago I had enjoyed the exaggerated prestige of a fighter pilot and the hysterical adulation that surrounded him. Suddenly I turned into the slag everybody wanted to be rid of, a thing useless, burdensome, even noxious. It was very hard to bear.’

In the programme for the Allied Victory Celebrations in London a year later, you will only find a mention of Poland under one heading – the Central Band of the Royal Air Force. By this time it was Stalin, not Hitler, who seemed to require appeasement. The fate of Poland had already been determined around conference tables at Tehran, Yalta and Potsdam.

Find out more: 

Adam Zamoyski, The Forgotten Few: The Polish Air Force in World War II (1995, Pen & Sword Aviation, 2009)

Lynne Olson & Stanley Cloud, For Your Freedom and Ours: The Kosciuszko Squadron – Forgotten Heroes of World War II, (2004)

Robert Gretyngier, in association with Wojtek Matusiak, Poles in Defence of Great Britain, July 1940-June 1941 (London, Grub St, 2001)

Josef Zielnski, Polish Airmen in the Battle of Britain, 2005 (A very useful book, with a short chapter on every airman, but not easy to get hold of)

Kenneth K. Koskodan No Greater Ally: The Untold Story of Poland’s Forces in World War II (Osprey, 2011)

Arkady Fiedler, 303 Squadron: The Legendary Battle of Britain Fighter Squadron (2010)

F.B.Czarmomski, They Fight for Poland: The War in the First Person, (1941 – Front Line Library)

Patrick Bishop, Fighter Boys: Saving Britain 1940 (Harper, 2003)

Jonathan Falconer, Life as a Battle of Britain Pilot (The History Press, 2007)

Battle of Britain monument…find out about the Polish airmen.

RAF Museum online exhibition on Polish Pilots

Polish Institute and Sikorski Museum

Commemorative site with information to help find all the cemetaries in the world where Polish airmen were buried during WW2

Polish War Memorial

Lydia Syson is the author of A World Between Us, about Britain and the Spanish Civil War, and That Burning Summer, the story of a Polish pilot suffering from flying fatigue (or 'Lack of Moral Fibre') during the Battle of Britain.  

www.lydiasyson.com