Liveblogging World War II: January 30, 1944
Londoners, normally as good-tempered a crowd of people as you could hope to find anywhere, are beginning to show the strain of these first keyed-up days of a year which by now every statesman must have hailed as one of fateful decision.
Tired bus conductresses, who have one of the most gruelling jobs on the women’s home front, are apt to bawl out passengers on the least provocation. Shop assistants snap at customers who timidly ask for half a pound of something which isn’t there, and the customers go home and snap at their families.
Naturally, a lot of the native good humor and manners is still around, but the surface impression is that everybody’s nerves are frayed. Possibly it’s the inevitable hangover of the winter’s flu epidemic, plus four years of wartime diet, but it seems more likely to be an inevitable result of simply waiting for something to happen.
The recent night in which London underwent two air raids was certainly the noisiest in months. Plenty of citizens, as their beds quaked, must have wondered if this was the answer to everyone’s question whether heavy raiding is to be expected again. The damage turned out to be nothing much, but the racket from the ground defenses was quite up to standard.
Raids or no raids, people keep on moving back into town. More and more Londoners who left during the blitz are opening up their homes again or trying to find new ones – a firm enough reply to those dark German threats of retribution any day now.
The government recently took some notice of the migration back to London by increasing the amount that anyone could spend for essential repairs from one hundred to two hundred pounds, but since it didn’t also increase the number of men with ladders and pots of paint, the process of putting an apartment messed up by the blitz into livable shape is apt to be difficult.
How newly married couples succeed in fixing up a nest for themselves, even if they find one, is something of a mystery. Most things made of linen require precious clothing coupons, and furniture, either new or in auction rooms, is selling at prices which even the dealers admit are fantastic.
The problem of getting homes and furniture has been called one of the reasons for a sudden and surprisingly sharp drop in the number of marriages — a phenomenon more gloomily attributed by the church to the chilling effect of the usual wartime increase in the number of divorces.
