And so it was really fun. You know, Bangley is a tough nut to crack. He doesn't give away much. And his whole deal is about survival. It is about dotting your I's and crossing every T and about redundancy and about never slipping up and never making a mistake and never letting some situation get out of hand or letting the other guy win. And treating every other human being you may encounter as a threat.
We lost men. We lost dogs. We slept when and where we could. And some nights when it was safe and silent, we watched the men build their own fires on top of the earth that had already been burned by fires. And we all slept beside those new fires and woke and got up and started again.
I saw the switch flip in their eyes. I saw that flicker of threat. The way their stances shifted into those of aggression that made the hairs on my arms stand on end. They were disgusted by me. I was no longer a friend, a peer, someone to play with. I was an easy target. I was prey.
I think what interested me was the people who neither died nor left. I was interested in the people who survived and stayed behind. You know, a lot of history focuses, and rightly so, on the million or so people who died. And then also the people who emigrated. I feel as though those stories have been — we know those stories in a sense, and they're terrible, tragic stories.
For everyone in London, whether you lived through the night was, therefore, a matter of luck. The odds were long, only one in 20,000 chances of being hit, said the papers. But still, every bomb landed somewhere. Each bomb might be that one. You couldn't know it wasn't till it hadn't fallen on you.
6mo ago
Underscored — save the words that stop you in your tracks.
