London 1940

“The heavy raids continued. Their scale, both in time and space, impressed Ford. As he walked the streets, he could fancy that he heard the laboured breath of London. Her incoherent vastness was stretched beneath the night and the raiders. Then, and then again, the hammer stroke of a heavy bomb plunged into the body of the city. London stirred, quivered, and caught her breath as if wounded. She was wounded, again and again. Yet she was so gigantic that her wounds became insignificant, were rendered trivial, were dwarfed, till they seemed no more than cuts or sores upon the hide of some great, slow animal. Ford, who had never had much feeling for London – she had seemed too shapeless and unending – loved her for being the home of a steady, stubborn people. She lay, not passive, but growling back at the tormenting bombers from her hundred guns. Yet she took what she had to take with magnanimity, a city once more worthy of history”.