Memories of the Blitz

### Reader’s Letter to The Guardian, 21st June 2024 ###

Dear Editor,

I was interested by Jonathan Jone’s article on the Henry Moore sketches of life during The Blitz (The Guardian, 21st June 2024, link below). I felt the sketches to be eerie and quietly horrific. Indeed it is certainly horrific to be under bombardment as we, the current generation, have NEVER known.

I too have never been bombed or shot at but my grandfather showed me the fragments of shrapnel (still embedded!) that almost killed him in the trenches fifty years earlier. And my parents had stories of nights in the air-raid shelter from which they emerged to see whole rows of houses in rubble.

So I think it is impertinent to compare this with Covid: Covid was a dangerous illness but our massive overreaction is a sign that we would simply turn into “headless chickens” should we be confronted with the dangers earlier generations experienced.

Here let us consider other dangers such as climate-change and antibiotic-resistance: We hardly hesitated to take draconian action to combat Covid. But we are doing close to nothing to counter the causes of climate-change and the return of sepsis. That is to say we carry on driving and flying and we are still feeding a wonder-drug (antibiotics) to industrially-reared animals. That is utter madness, especially considering that it was in the 1940s when antibiotics started saving lives.

And it is wrong to compare The Blitz with the Ukraine war because “we” (ourselves) are not in the line of fire! No, we are sitting pretty here and sending over bombs and other deadly weapons so that the Russians and the Ukrainians can blow each other to bits … when we should really be getting them around a negotiating table!

But the event which exceeds Henry Moore’s sketches in the monstrous situation in Gaza: There the people don’t even have shelters to hide in. And even if they did, the Israelis are using US-supplied bunker-busting missiles! Yes, for over eight months now we have been twiddling our thumbs and squabbling over who is and who isn’t an anti-Semite … while tens of thousands of people die. And we call ourselves civilised?

I am sorry but I feel rather disgusted.

Yours,
Alan Mitcham

Link to original article: https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/article/2024/jun/21/no-perky-cockneys-how-henry-moores-sheltering-souls-puncture-our-blitz-bravado