Page 49: The Blitz

I'm fascinated by fossils.

By fossils, I don't just mean coelacanths in limestone or ancient flies in amber (though they are great).

I also mean cultural fossils. These include rituals that we continue to go through without any memory of their original meaning. For example, have you knocked on wood today? You were saying 'hi' to the tree faeries.

They also include words or phrases that have been left embedded in our language, their original meaning left to rot away over time. The English language, for example, holds a huge number of seafaring fossils. Have you ever said 'there'll be the devil to pay'? Did you think you were referring to giving cash to a little red devil with horns? You weren't. The original phase is 'there'll be the devil to pay and no pitch hot.' The devil is the all-important seam where the deck and sides of a wooden ship come together. To 'pay' is the nautical word for caulking. Caulking, in the time of wooden ships, was done with tar (ever heard a sailor called a 'tar'? There you go). Tar is also known as pitch. So, having the devil to pay and no pitch hot means that you have a leak in your ship and nothing to plug it with. It is probably my favorite 'word fossil'.

A third kind of cultural fossil is a place or building with a meaning lost in time. Stonehenge is an obvious example, but there are a lot of others, from the profound to the mundane. Our grandchildren might wonder what all those little blocky, windowless buildings are that are scattered around. Some old geezer like me will remember that they were once 'telephone exchange' buildings where operators physically hooked up wires in order to complete phone calls. "That's weird," my grandchild will say, unable to imagine a time when phones even had wires. But I digress.

My favorite place, London, is marked by many cultural fossils embedded by the blitz. Do people wonder why a newish (usually ugly) building in London sits next to a gorgeous old one? More often than not, the original building wasn't torn down, but rather blown up. This link, protected by copyright, is a map of part of London that shows how bomb damage happened. Take a look:

http://www.locallocalhistory.co.uk/schools/jubilee/walk1/bombingmap.htm

It's amazing. One group of buildings (the black-colored ones in the circle) completely destroyed while the buildings across the street were untouched. By blind, stupid luck one building survived and another was blown away.

Hanover Square is an example. Here is a picture of what I had in my head as I wrote about an insufferable woman inside an insufferably horrible building.

Do you see that awful white thing rising from the street like a tumor? "Like a blackened tooth in an otherwise perfect smile"? That's a blitz fossil, a mostly forgotten memory of war.