They found an unexploded Nazi bomb on our street this week. The police knocked on our door just as I was settling down to half an hour of Call the Midwife while the baby finished his nap. Ten minutes later the baby and I were trundling around Bethnal Green with an overnight bag and a football, not quite understanding what had happened. In the photographs the bomb looks like huge old crustacean or a massive fossilised slug, lying in a hole in the dirt of a dug-up basement. Soldiers are crouched round it, peering down.
“They’re finding them a lot at the moment” said the 12-year old policeman setting up a cordon on Old Bethnal Green Road. “It’s because everyone’s building up. Building up, you’ve got to dig down, you see. So lots of bombs appearing.”
Down the street a photographer was kneeling to take an action-angle shot of a static fire-engine. “Unexploded World War 2 bomb!” called a traffic-officer, stopping a man in a van. “You’re joking my arsehole.” Said the man, looking slightly excited.
I keep thinking about how the bomb got there. Ours is one of the few streets in this neighbourhood that wasn’t bashed to pieces during the blitz – the houses are still standing, which means the bomb must have bashed through the roof of the building and through all the floors, right down to the basement, then stayed there unnoticed. Or perhaps noticed, ignored, then forgotten for 70 years, until the (rumoured to be) flash new owner decided to gut the place this summer to make room for his vintage car collection. Gossip like that happens on a street like ours. What a way to introduce yourself to the neighbours.
BLITZ SPIRIT REIGNITED IN THE EAST END said the newspapers, alongside pictures of annoyed looking pensioners drinking bottled water in a school lobby. We wandered to the park and it was true, I did talk to more strangers than usual. Mostly though, I was just alerted to which of our neighbours are on twitter.
I wonder about the builders on their normal day, hitting metal with metal and stopping in confusion, slowing down, uncovering the slug-bomb handful by handful. Do London builders know a Nazi bomb when they see one? Was there a moment when they felt their curiosity quicken to fear, or did they think, puh, another bomb?
If it had gone off when we were all evacuated, spraying blitz-era debris for 200 metres in every direction, would there have been a moment at the epicentre of the explosion where it was actually 1941 again? Of course not. But…a little bit, perhaps?