STRANGE FRUIT

Last week marked the 70th anniversary of the night the Luftwaffe began to firebomb London into the dust.  Clerkenwell remained generally unscathed but St Pauls was left like an ocean liner sailing a sea of ruin. Despite the preposterousness of the War on Terror, for this reason if no other it's difficult to be a complete pacifist. So on Sunday we went to the tiny but magnificent St Clement Danes, the Christopher Wren Royal Air Force church on Fleet Street, itself a restored victim of the Blitz.

In fact the church is actually probably most famous for having the bells mentioned at the beginning of the children's nursery rhyme "Oranges and Lemons".  Like Cock Robin, this poem always struck me as a rather haunted thing with those two sinister closing lines - a feeling only re-inforced by its presence throughout Orwell's 1984.  That book was of course written in the aftermath of the London's near destruction and with St Clements just a little way from the BBC's Bush House where Orwell was once a radio announcer.

The Blitz was  one of the times when the battle for the London Stone was nearly lost.  Which event provoked which I wonder? Anyway, here is the rhyme  and the bells ringing at midday on Sunday for the fallen fighters of the air who saved the day and what remains to us of the lost city.