An Englishwoman's Home

by Annie S. Swan

I have tried to describe it to you before. It is a sinister grinding noise, unlike anything on earth. I flew down to tell them that the Zeppelins were out. Effie, eager with the quick longing of youth for every adventure, said, "No such luck," and we immediately went out on the terrace to crane our necks in an endeavour to discover the marauder's silver silhouette against the clear dark sky. Then quite suddenly there was the most terrific bang, and somewhere in the near distance strange lights like shooting stars seemed to descend upon our little inoffensive town—we stood dumb, holding our breath, while the bangs continued getting louder and louder. Presently, we were joined by the terrified servants, who, at their supper in the basement kitchen, unaware that the Zeppelins were in the neighbourhood, came rushing out. The young ones were inclined to scream. I remember laying my hand on somebody's arm, and saying, "Hush, be still!" To me it was a stupendous moment, during which the whole fabric of existence seemed to be tottering—and we on the edge of some unimaginable abyss. I remember Effie's face lit by the weird glare from the incendiary bombs now falling in rapid succession from the upper air.

There was no fear upon it, only a kind of uplifted spirituelle look. I seem to remember that she said, "Do you think it will be this one, Mummy?" but she stoutly denies having uttered any such words. Presently, however, "this one" descended and found its mark. The din was indescribable; conceive of forty-two bombs dropping in a limited area in the space of four minutes, the glare of their bursting, the air full of sulphurous fumes and an awful indescribable sense of evil, imminent, devilish, against which we were absolutely helpless and unarmed. As we stood there in absolute silence, holding on one to another, we had no sort of knowledge or information that our very own house was being destroyed. To you this may seem incredible, when you reflect that the terrace, though wide, is joined to the house.

It was all so quick and so terrible, that we felt it must be the end of the world, the total destruction of everything we had considered stable in our earthly life. Presently, the voice of the man beside us spoke: "I think it's over now, and we're safe." The air-ship, sailing low, so that we saw it distinctly between the cone of the cedar tree and the sky, disappeared rapidly and the noise of explosions ceased—only to be replaced by the cries of excited people, and the moans of the hurt and dying in the street. The darkness was profound, the power station having been destroyed early in the attack.

We pulled ourselves together, and proceeded towards the house with a view of entering. Part of the walls remained standing, but there was no house. There in the middle of the beautiful hall you so much admired the whole fabric seemed to have collapsed. Doors, windows, furniture, pictures, piled in an inextricable heap. We saw right out into the street in the further side, where already there were twinkling lights and moving figures as the work of mercy and assistance began. But where was Himself?

Quickly people began to climb in upon our ruins, seeking presumably for us or for our remains. Presently, among them, very white in the face, and very glassy about the eyes, appeared Himself, wheeling his bicycle. They had told him down the street that his home and every one in it had been destroyed. He counted us,—we clung together for just a moment, then he said, "I must go." "Where?" I asked, still holding on. "To my job," he answered as he unstrapped his emergency bag from his machine and strode away. We did not see him any more till the early morning, he and his colleagues being busy at the hospital. Then the whole population seemed to be crowding us where we stood. We had no lights but a few stray candles. Police and military presently appeared to take possession, and the general public were excluded. The accredited powers climbed across the debris to reach the garden, when a strange sight presented itself. Five incendiary bombs which had been dropped after the explosive ones and were intended to complete the work of destruction, had only sunk in the soft earth, and were burning there like bale fires. The authorities were hunting for unexploded bombs, always a terrific menace until handled by experts and shorn of their hellish power. They said, and say still, that one is at the bottom of the river where it can't do any harm. We tried to go up what remained of the staircase. The secondary staircase which connected the old wing with the more modern part, was blown into space; not a step of it remained. The beds, which had been in the rooms of the old wing, were outside somewhere, their twisted metal work and torn mattresses being afterwards found near the railings of the front garden.

You remember the mysterious little passage with the double doors that led from my bedroom into the old wing; well, it was entirely gone; cut off as clean as if a knife had done it. We were very adventurous, climbing about trying to see by candlelight the full extent of the damage, and with nobody to tell us that we took our lives in our hands every minute where walls were tottering, and ceilings, so to speak, hanging by a thread. My eight-foot old mahogany wardrobe which you admired so much had climbed upon my bed, and half the ceiling was on the top of that. Conceive what would have happened had the attack come without warning, when we were asleep in our beds!

It has happened in other places. The protecting mercy of God was over and round about us—our time had not yet come. I had then no feeling of anguish over my ruined home, none of us had. To Effie, it was a great adventure—the War in concrete visible tangible form! We simply did not realise what it all meant; I suppose we shall realise it right enough later on.

Midnight came—one o'clock in the morning—two o'clock—Himself turned up at last and insisted that I should find a billet somewhere and lie down. He and Effie determined to keep a vigil in the ruins. A fine rain had begun to fall, but there were dry places in the house, a corner of the drawing room queerly almost untouched. The vagaries of the concussion were beyond belief. The gable end of the dining room left standing was stripped inside of every scrap of plaster, leaving the lathes naked and bare. An old Chippendale mirror still stuck heroically to its nail, above the mantel, or rather the place where the mantel had been, not shattered or scratched. But all the lovely old ladder-back chairs are gone and the sideboard. I shan't really know till I go back whether we have anything left.

Effie took me up to my billet in a neighbour's house, and as we groped our way by the railings in the inky darkness I suddenly clutched something soft. The flashlight revealed part of our dining room curtains—heavy silk damask ones, that had evidently been blown clean out up the street, and twisted round the railings by invisible hands.

I did not sleep any, you may be sure. I was the slave of physical fear after the excitement had died down. Shaking in every limb, even to my lips, I lay till about six o'clock, then got up again and dressed to go and seek my treasures.