Nothing like The Blitz

I had the huge fortune to speak with a lady in her nineties the other day. It was another quiet one so I had the chance to spend about 25 minutes discussing her life. She was kind enough to assent for me to tell some of her story.

She was in her late teens at the time of The Blitz and was living in London.

It’s rare to get time with folks from the Greatest Generation. I asked her straight out: how does COVID-19 compare to The Blitz? Her response was clear and ambiguous: coronavirus and the political response to lock down the country is nothing compared to the blitz.

She vividly recalled being bombed in her Anderson air raid shelter. She described how her neighbour was bombed just as he had finished on the WC in the back garden. As he was dug out of the rubble his first response was that he ‘just pulled the chain and didn’t expect this to create such an explosion’.

A real treat. Aside from our recent war vets - whose service I salute - we baby boomers and millennial snowflakes ain’t got nothing on this generation.

Let’s stop kidding ourselves: any comparison is simply wishful thinking.