London lockdown: Don’t mention the war!

WITH depressing predictability the old wartime comparisons have been wheeled out to show how the British are uniquely qualified to confront the coronavirus crisis.

“Queen invokes blitz spirit,” trumpeted the Sunday Telegraph, leading the charge ahead of an address to the nation by Elizabeth II.

Boris Johnson compared the challenge to a “war” before he went into Covid-19 purdah, since when we haven’t heard much from him.

Johnson is not alone in his judgment. The UN Secretary General António Guterres has also warned the world is facing its greatest challenge since World War II.

Pandemics can be just as destructive as wars. The Spanish flu of 1919 killed more people than the world war that preceded it.

The myth of wartime pulling together and bravely standing alone is uniquely strong in Britain and particularly irritating now, coming after four years of the same blether over Brexit.

The Brexiters peddled so much rhetoric about the war that you would almost think they’d been there. In fact, the Queen, 94 this month, is one of a dwindling band actually old enough to remember it.

One significant difference between then and now is that no one is dropping bombs on our heads. Back in 1940-41, my part of London, near the docks and a major rail terminal, was a major target of the blitz.

There is a blue plaque under the railway arch at Druid Street to commemorate the 77 who died while sheltering there during a 1940 air raid. The working class communities that lived near the docks and the railways and the factories were particularly vulnerable to the bombs.

When Elizabeth’s mother visited the working class East End with her husband, the king, there were boos as well as cheers.

There were plenty of examples of individual heroism from community wardens, firemen, the police. But there were also plenty of black-marketeers – yesterday’s version of supermarket hoarders – and burglaries went up courtesy of the blackout.

The myth-making started right after the war. Those of us born just after it spent long Sundays listening to relatives reminiscing about how people were much nicer during the war – pulling together, sharing what little they had, putting others first. Soldiers who actually fought tended to have much less rosy recollections.

The Brits did not have to face mainland Europe’s painful memories of occupation and collaboration.

The mythologising was encouraged by a range of British films that replayed the conflict over and over again with a familiar cast of plucky little Brits at home and abroad beating the Nazis pretty much single-handed.

As late as the 1970s, the TV series Dad’s Army showed us the quiet, comic gallantry of a group of south coast home guards. It’s still a favourite on the catch-up channels.

The rosy memories of the home front might also have been fostered by the fact that British life remained bleakly austere right up to the mid-1950s.

Maybe when this is all over, we’ll have to face a decade of cinematic replays of the present crisis with its heroes and its villains.

Perhaps, when extended families can get together again, children yet unborn will have to endure those endless Sundays of their parents and aunts reliving the dark days of the pandemic.

At least it will make a change from Brexit.