the splendid and the vile by erik larson

The coming destruction of London, he said, “would probably represent the greatest human catastrophe in history.” He hoped to blunt the inevitable world outcry by casting the assault as a deserved response to Britain’s bombing of German civilians, but thus far British raids over Germany, including those of the night before, had not produced the levels of death and destruction that would justify such a massive reprisal. In Berlin that Saturday morning, Joseph Goebbels prepared his lieutenants for what would occur by day’s end. Throwing caution to the winds, she bathed without a cap. “It was so lovely-joie de vivre overcame vanity.” That Saturday she chose Sonnet 116-in which love is the “ever-fixed mark”-and recited it to her diary. Mary Churchill was still at Breccles Hall with her friend and cousin Judy, continuing her reluctant role as country mouse and honoring their commitment to memorize one Shakespeare sonnet every day. John Colville had left London the preceding Thursday, to begin a ten-day vacation at his aunt’s Yorkshire estate with his mother and brother, shooting partridges, playing tennis, and sampling bottles from his uncle’s collection of ancient port, in vintages dating to 1863. Lord Beaverbrook departed for his country home, Cherkley Court, just after lunch, though he would later try to deny it. It was a fine day to spend in the cool green of the countryside.Ĭhurchill was at Chequers.

Alfred Hitchcock’s movie version, starring Laurence Olivier and Joan Fontaine, was also playing in London, as were the films The Thin Man and the long-running Gaslight. In the city’s West End, theaters hosted twenty-four productions, among them the play Rebecca, adapted for the stage by Daphne du Maurier from her novel of the same name. The late-summer heat imparted an air of languid complacency. After the August air raid when bombs first fell on London proper, the city had retreated back into a dream of invulnerability, punctuated now and then by false alerts whose once-terrifying novelty was muted by the failure of bombers to appear.

The giant barrage balloons overhead cast lumbering shadows on the streets below. Shoppers jammed the stores of Oxford Street and Piccadilly. People thronged Hyde Park and lounged on chairs set out beside the Serpentine. Temperatures by afternoon were in the nineties, odd for London.

The day was warm and still, the sky blue above a rising haze. An Excerpt from The Splendid and the Vile Chapter 44: On a Quiet Blue Day

The splendid and the vile by erik larson