A Sky Aglow with Death Machines For four children orphaned in the Blitz, the anonymous cruelty of aerial bombardment marked the rest of their lives.

It was the night that Londoners would call The Wednesday: April 16, 1941, the worst bombing attack yet on the capital by the Luftwaffe in Hitler’s seven-month campaign to force the British into submission.

Rather than unyielding unity before a foe that had already swept nearly all of Western Europe under its jackboot, on the minds of the Dark family that night was either blind rage or desperation to save one brother from the other’s murderous intent.

A mile from Kings Cross Station in north London, amid warehouses and crowded slums, three generations of the Dark family were piled into a three-floor, end-of-terrace house at 31 Carlsbad Street. Next to the murky waters of the Grand Union Canal, the house also had a stable, home to a horse that pulled a cart from which the Dark men sold firewood, collected scrap metal and transported bricks to construction sites. Anything, in short, to make money.

Family lore had it that thirty-seven-year-old Fred Dark was “hard as nails, soft as shit,” but push him too far and he could not be held back. That evening a confrontation had been brewing between Fred and his moon-faced, younger brother Charlie. Before anyone could stop Fred, he was choking Charlie with his own tie.

As a frantic, gasping Charlie turned blue, Fred’s oldest and youngest brothers, George and sixteen-year-old Walter, fought to prise open Fred’s fists. Walter scrambled for a pair of scissors and Fred suddenly fell backward, the front of the tie hanging limply from Walter’s fist.

Shortly after a badly bruised Charlie had recovered from his brother’s assault and left to join civilian defenders scanning the skies for enemy planes, sirens sounded, announcing yet more waves of German bombers and fighters heading for London.

From 9 pm to 5 am, 685 bombers in two waves hit sixty-six London boroughs. In all they dropped 50,000 incendiary bombs that set fire to roofs and buildings, followed by 890 tons of high-explosives that forced firemen back from putting out the blazes, and then parachute mines that delivered deadly clusters of smaller explosives. It was the most deaths yet for a single day: 1,179 Londoners killed, among them four members of the Dark clan, my family.

I thought of these events, which I had first learned of in detail in 2014 editing my father’s memoirs, on a grey Sunday afternoon on April 3, 2022, when I heard the opening lines to the Ukrainian national anthem, “The glory and freedom of Ukraine has not yet perished.” It was performed by a 40-piece orchestral flash mob huddled against the west walls of the 1,000-year-old Ely Cathedral, in the county of Suffolk, a ninety-minute drive north east from London.

Televised images of missile-devastated Ukrainian apartment buildings, of the elderly picking through the rubble of their former homes, of bodies in the streets and tanks ablaze may have stemmed from more evolved war machinery than employed during the Blitz. But for British viewers the footage echoed with reminders of the German aerial bombardment of the UK. It summoned images my early 1960s-born generation had been brought up on of British pluck and stiff upper lips in the face of the Blitz. And the blatant parallel of two power-hungry men, eighty years apart, using their military to realize their schemes of territorial expansion could hardly be ignored. In the small crowd people sniffed, blew their noses, and wiped away tears, myself among them, each perhaps mourning our own little corner of family history obliterated by a war more than three-quarters of a century ago.

The author’s paternal grandparents, Fred and Alice Dark, shortly before the Blitz. (Courtesy Stephen Dark)

Despite the longstanding anti-Europe sentiments that had gripped Britain during Brexit, this small crowd that wet April afternoon reflected a groundswell of emotional empathy among the British to Ukraine’s plight and bullish pluck in the face of aggression. In those first months of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, there had been not only military support, but also millions donated by the public and thousands of families wanting to take in Ukrainian refugees.

A British national raised in the rural county of Kent, I had recently become an American citizen after sixteen years in the desert-mountain state of Utah. In 2021 family concerns had led to me returning to a country I had left thirty-five years ago. I had never felt at home in England, haunted by a sense of dislocation, of a strange sense of inauthenticity that I did not belong there. Yet here I was, crying over this plea for peace by such a curiously twenty-first-century activist model as an orchestral flash mob. The roots of my response were not difficult to source. The protest had lit up painful associations inside me of relatives murdered by German bombers and the price their survivors had paid in trauma.

Over several early spring months in 2022, I went in search of my father’s family history. I visited homes in the English counties of Lincolnshire, Essex, and Suffolk to interview relatives, and walked along Grand Union Canal in north London in search of where my father’s childhood home in Carlsbad Street had been paved over in 1948 to be ultimately replaced by high-end lofts, apartments, and offices. As I talked to cousins on the Dark side of my family in an effort to understand the Blitz and how it shaped their sense of being British, one quote kept coming back to me. “That you never back down from a fight,” said my cousin Irene Jackson’s husband Bill. By comparison the Churchill-besotted politicians seeking to channel the Blitz spirit, whether after 9/11 then-New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani and President George W. Bush, or Brexiteers spouting xenophobic rhetoric, all sounded self-servingly hollow.

A bomb damage map from London’s Carlsbad Street near the Grand Union Canal, where the author’s family lived in an end-of-terrace house during the Blitz, Nazi Germany’s 1940-1941 bombing campaign across the United Kingdom. Encircled darker areas indicate areas of greatest damage. (National Library of Scotland; findmypast.co.uk)

What emerged about the paternal side of my family, whom in retrospect my two younger brothers and I knew little of growing up, was far more than a bomb snuffing out four lives. In a journey between a blood-stained, rubble-crushed bed in 1941 to a death bed in 2005, I got to know relatives who felt that their parents, much like my father, had never quite escaped the bombing’s shadow. Those conversations led in turn to complex questions that overhung my cousins and myself relating to the genetic inheritance of trauma. What I also discovered was not only an understanding of who my loving, gentle and supportive yet, to me at least, enigmatic father was, but finally, after fifty-nine years of existence, a visceral appreciation of my own family roots.

London on fire

The roots of the Blitz trace back to an Italian monoplane pilot, the glory-seeking Lt. Giulio Gavotti, who two years after Orville Wright first took to the air in 1909 dropped, one at a time, four grenades on Turkish troops camped outside Tripoli in Libya. “Gavotti officiated at the wedding of air transport and bombs,” Gerard J. DeGroot wrote in The Bomb: A Life (Harvard University Press, 2005). That act also exposed a fundamental tension when it came to aerial bombings’ inability to distinguish between combatants and civilians, noted Sven Lindqvist in his groundbreaking 2003 book, A History of Bombing. “Human rights seemed to forbid what military necessity seemed to demand—a contradiction that has colored the entire 20^th century.”

After news of the Kitty Hawk’s first flight reached British shores, Winston Churchill had ignored any potential moral quandaries and trumpeted to fellow politicians the bright future that this new mode of transportation offered when it came to waging war. But despite the Germans using Zeppelins to bomb London in World War One and the British launching successful bombing forays into Germany by the newly formed Royal Air Force, Churchill struggled to maintain political support for developing Britain’s bombing capabilities. Until, that is, he championed the cost-effectiveness of a few planes “policing” British-occupied foreign territories, as opposed to having to send in an army. European powers such as the British appreciated the simple, low-cost effectiveness with which aerial bombardment could protect their colonial empires against three categories of people, “rebels, infidels and savages,” Lindqvist wrote. But when Churchill read a report of how women and children in an Iraqi village fleeing RAF bombing for a nearby lake made a “good target for the machine guns,” he was horrified. “Churchill wanted results, but he didn’t want to know how they were achieved,” Lindqvist wrote.

Aerial bombardment first hit the world’s headlines in April 26, 1937. The German Condor legion, testing out methods for the forthcoming Blitzkrieg (“lightning war”) across Europe, for two hours dropped 5,771 bombs on the small, defenceless Basque town of Guernica, in support of Franco and the Nationalist government in the Spanish Civil War. One newspaper labeled the slaughter “the most gruesome episode in the history of modern warfare,” yet bombing campaigns had been rampant for years in colonial territories. What made Guernica stand out? The answer, Lindquist opined, was location. “In Guernica, we were the ones who died.”

In the following three months, a shocked Picasso painted the definitive statement on aerial bombardment, the white, grey and blue-black colors of Guernica blaring the eternal headline: war murders the innocent. I never understood that painting until I looked at it while working on this story and found my four family members who had died in the Blitz staring mutely back at me.

While historians have long debated whether Churchill or Hitler was the first to employ indiscriminate bombing against the other’s country, Churchill certainly authored the idea of carpet-bombing Germany into surrendering. Shortly after he replaced the appeasement-minded Neville Chamberlain as prime minister, he wrote to the Minister of Aircraft Production on July 8, 1940, urging him to focus more on building bombers than fighter planes. The one thing that would both draw Hitler’s attention and ultimately defeat him, Churchill wrote, was “an absolutely devastating, exterminating attack by very heavy bombers from this country upon the Nazi homeland.”

Not that Hitler needed much encouragement as far as bombing the UK was concerned. As early as the first months of 1940 he was advocating for firebombing London. At a dinner in the Reich chancellery, Hitler noted that London’s building density made it easy prey to incendiary bombs. “We can destroy London completely. What will their firemen be able to do once it’s really burning?”

The Blitz against London began on September 7, 1940. An off-duty fireman in his London back garden saw black dots in vast numbers coming up the Thames towards the capital. “There were the heavy thumps of distant bomb explosions,” the fireman wrote, “and then column after column of black smoke, growing up like trees, merging into a curtain, spreading out into a great rolling cloud.”

If aviation was a celebration of the democratization that global travel offered the middle class, the Second World War, argued Richard Overy in The Bombing War: Europe 1939-1945 (Allen Lane, 2013) was the first time civilians were on the front line. Bombing from the air, Overy wrote, exposed “the democratic nature of total war, which insisted that all citizens had a part to play.”

That included children. Days before a bomb fell on his home, the specter of the capital in flames left a deep impression on seven-year-old Ray Dark, walking home from school holding his elven mother Alice’s hand. “It was as though the whole of London in my small mind was on fire,” my father wrote. “It was a terrific red glow all around us.”

Top ’n’ tail

It took studying a 1942 painting by war artist Leonard Rosoman to get a glimpse of what it must have been like inside my father’s house when it collapsed on top of his family.

A painter, muralist, and teacher, during the Blitz, Rosoman was an auxiliary fireman who witnessed the horrific death of a colleague while fighting a fire in the heart of London’s financial district. To exorcise that image, Rosoman said, he painted The Falling Wall.

Two firemen point a hose through a ground-floor window, only to look up at a molten-white wall about to hit them, a carpet of blood-red at their feet. The wall hangs there, if only for the second it takes for the air in the men’s lungs to evaporate in terror as they realize what is happening. As I looked at Falling Wall, for a moment I was in bed in Carlsbad Street, north London, waking up as the ceiling fell.

The Falling Wall, a 1942 painting by British, war-era artist Leonard Rosoman.

When the sirens had started on The Wednesday, Fred and Alice’s oldest child, ten-year-old Alice, and her aunt Bessie went down into one of the thousands of air-raid shelters built by street curbs that was right outside their house. The rest of the family ignored the sirens and went to bed. One other child, one-year-old Johnny, was in hospital with pneumonia.

They had survived the depression of the 1930s, were used to physical labor and the petty larceny it took to bring in a few pennies, such as Fred stealing copper wire from a building and getting his much younger brother, also named Fred, to cut it up so they could sell it for scrap metal. The Freds were always amenable to skullduggery. Young Fred would swim across the canal to a brewers’ warehouse where a friend smuggled him out bottles of beer, which he put into the front of his shorts and back-paddled home.

That same hard-times survival culture also extended to the family’s philosophy of keeping the front door open for anyone who wanted to come in for a “cuppa” tea and a chat. Families down on their luck could find shelter at the Dark home, so it was not uncommon to come home and find six to a bed, sleeping head to toe–top ’n’ tail–leaving late-arriving family members with nowhere to sleep but the floor.

Living near their jobs in industry or transportation hubs like Kings Cross that were key targets for the Germans, the poor suffered disproportionately in the Blitz, especially in the East End. Then-Queen Elizabeth, grandmother to King Charles III, opined after Buckingham Palace was hit, “I am glad we have been bombed. It makes me feel I can look the East End in the face.”

Fred and Alice went to bed, four-year-old Jim snuggled between them. In the kitchen was Fred’s mother, the recently widowed Nan, holding three-year-old Charlie-Boy in her arms by the stove, while talking to teenage Walter. George, home on leave from riding dispatch for the army, was either in the house or in the room above the stables. Seven-year-old Ray, my father, was also in the kitchen. And then, just as the front door opened and fourteen-year-old Fred walked into the kitchen, the bomb hit. It not only collapsed half of the terrace row on its residents but in the Dark kitchen ignited the gas stove, unleashing a devastating explosion.

Teenage Fred came to, floating on his back in the canal, with only two black eyes to show for surviving the blast. He swam to the canal wall as rescuers pulled out Walter’s decapitated remains from the water. As Charlie Dark ran down the street, screaming, “My whole family is under there,” little Alice and Aunt Bessie exited the shelter to find rubble where their home had stood.

In all the chaos, firemen had tossed unconscious Jim Dark among a pile of the dead. The four-year-old came to, his pajamas soaked with blood, lying under arms and legs. Terrified, he managed to wave his arm for help, and a fireman pulled him out. Ray had been found unconscious and taken to hospital, where he woke up the next day with no memory of how he got there, his broken leg in plaster.

Jimmy, Johnny, and Ray Dark with their sister Alice’s firstborn, Linda. (Courtesy Stephen Dark)

Four other household members were not so lucky. Fred and Alice were killed by falling debris, Walter the explosion, and three-year-old Charlie-boy by the blast concussion.

Charlie Dark organized his parents’ and siblings’ group funeral, the dead laid to rest a week after the bombing in the St Pancras and Islington Cemetery. They were interred in one long plot, their four names etched into the marble at the bottom, each with the same date of death.

A chance for forgiveness

The Blitz ended on May 16, 1941, but not Hitler’s attempts to break British morale. In 1944, the Germans sent pilotless V1 flying rockets on a one-way ticket to London (V for Vergeltungswaffen, meaning revenge weapons). The British nicknamed them doodlebugs after the whining noise they made flying.

Five out of six London children were evacuated to the country. My mother was one of the one-in-six who stayed. Seven-year-old Heather Vincent’s older sister Joyce had been put on a train to Wales, a bitter memory Heather often returned to over the years. She would get under a table made from Anderson shelter metal–repurposed from air-raid shelters–with her mother, Winifred, to wait out the passing flying bomb. Once Heather found herself alone in the street as a V1 flew overhead. She stood there trembling, frozen in terror that the doodlebug’s engine would cut out and float down to kill her. The whining continued onto someone else’s garden or house.

The doodlebugs were easy to shoot down in many cases and the subsequent V2 rockets the Germans had developed were too expensive to mass produce. By this time Churchill and the head of Bomber Command, Arthur “Bomber” Harris, were well into plans to carpet-bomb Germany’s cities and towns. In one night’s Allied bombing of Hamburg, the same number of people were killed as during the entire six-month Blitz. And as with every bombing campaign, it was the elderly, the women and the children who bore the brunt of the casualties.

Watching footage in 1943 of a RAF bombing of a German town, an alarmed Churchill, once more confronted with the on-the-ground realities of his policies, turned to his companion. “Are we beasts?” he asked. “Are we taking this too far?”

If he had asked the Germans, some might have said no. In a 1997 series of lectures in Zurich, writer W.G. Sebald dissected post-war German authors’ seeming refusal to address the Allied bombing campaign’s slaughter of 500,000 German civilians (published in book form two years later in Germany as Air War and Literature). He noted some viewed the firestorms inflicted on their cities as a form of just, if not divine, punishment, “an act of retribution on the part of a higher power with whom there could be no dispute.”

Trapped in grief

In William Wyler’s 1946 Hollywood classic The Best Years of Our Lives, three members of the Armed Forces, struggling with physical and mental wounds, returned from serving overseas to an American heartland untouched by conflict. They crouched down in the nose of the plane, where the bomb-aimer would lie directing the pilot until he released the bombs. Now they gazed in awe, and some trepidation, at the rural landscape and small-town U.S.A. sweeping past beneath them, foreshadowing the clash between men traumatized by violence and a world sleepy with the comforts of home.

In Britain, however, civilians had had firsthand experience of combat, whether from the Blitz, witnessing Spitfires and German planes dueling overhead, or taking part in the civilian armada to rescue soldiers from Dunkirk. If in the United States “people didn’t have that inherent sense that we were in it as well, in the UK there was an almost enforced sense of collective suffering and endurance,” said Edgar Jones, professor in the history of medicine and psychiatry at Kings College London and an expert on the psychological effects of modern war and conflict. Government-developed slogans such as “Keep calm and carry on,” “Keep smiling through,” “Do your bit,” were reminders of the Victorian paean to stoicism known as “the stiff upper lip,” a phrase also long synonymous with emotional repression.

Jones expressed concern about attempts to invoke a perception of the Blitz as somehow conveying that the British have an inherent resilience that other nationalities do not, “that we went through the Blitz, and we came out of that without widespread trauma or mental illness.” The myth of the stoic, unshakeable Londoner and British citizen—embodied by Churchill as the British bulldog—was employed by UK government propagandists during the war to “stiffen resolve,” he said, much as with the rhetoric from Ukraine’s leadership in the first weeks of the Russian invasion. Whether in 1940 or 2022, in the face of an aggressor, Jones said, “you can’t show weakness, you’ve got to be positive, you’ve got to say we’re going to win.”

Yet what the British and Londoners endured was not comparable to other countries. While 17 percent of Poles died in the war, 13 percent of Russians, and 5.6 percent of Germans, 0.9 percent of the UK’s pre-war population died. The French suffered similar civilian casualties (57,000) to the British (65,000). The only problem was they were killed by Allied forces bombing French cities in the build-up to France’s liberation from the Nazis, using seven times the tonnage of bombs the Germans dropped on the UK during the Blitz.

“We’ve kind of deluded ourselves into thinking that we went through an equivalent experience and that we came out of it better,” Jones said. Worse, he added, was that Londoners and residents of other cities targeted during the Blitz, such as Coventry, Birmingham and Hull, did not grieve because it was seen as unpatriotic. “They were trapped by their grief,” he said.

That stoic resolve came with a sting in its tail. “In the post-war period, it prevented people from seeking help when they really were suffering from long-term effects,” Jones said, of mental illness and trauma. Once the war was over, the British not only never grieved, they kept to themselves their night terrors and trauma.

When the National Health Service was created in 1948, as part of a new welfare state where everyone could access health care regardless of resources, for the poor struggling with memories from the war, psychological trauma was not included as a focus of treatment. Some took the view that the asylum system provided sufficient services to address mental illness, which they classified as schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. “So that if you’ve been through the Blitz, and you’ve got a post-traumatic illness, there was virtually nowhere for you to go apart from one of these mental institutions, which nobody wanted to go to,” Jones said. It was not until the 1959 Mental Health Act that the NHS finally included outpatient psychiatry and the treatment of psychological illnesses.

Even by the 1990s, when Jones worked in a psychiatric ward, staff were good at dealing with severe depression or psychosis, but not mental health problems linked to trauma. An elderly woman who was repeatedly admitted for severe depression had stumped his staff. When Jones talked to her, she revealed that as a child she had been the sole survivor in her family’s East End bombed home, buried alive with her loved ones’ corpses. Jones was the first person she told.

“At least I can understand why you’re having all these repeated admissions,” Jones thought. “You’ve got PTSD, but we haven’t spotted it.”

A private lament

The British high court gave custody of the four Dark orphans to Nan and Charlie Dark. Fred and Alice Dark’s estate totaled £111, which did not last long, so fifty-five-year-old Nan had to raise the children best she could on the proceeds of a ration book, while boot-repairer Charlie, married and with children of his own, helped where he could.

Nan and the children crowded into a three-floor, eighteenth-century terraced house on Danbury Street in Islington. Fred’s brother, George, and wife May lived on one floor, a now married “young” Fred and his wife Joan lived on another with the four orphans, and Nan in the basement. Long-distance lorry driver George announced his return home from work by sticking his feet in holed socks out between the railings over the street.

A terraced flat on Danbury Street in Islington, where the author’s family resided during the Blitz, dressed in bunting for VE Day, or Victory in Europe Day, May 8. (Courtesy Stephen Dark)

Ray and Jim were close growing up. They would skip school to explore an old army pillbox and come home covered in sand. In the winter they would kick a football around a cinder pitch behind an eight-foot fence in Highbury. In the summer, in a narrow street just round from Danbury, they would take turns bowling to the other wielding a bat, cricket stumps drawn in chalks on the facing walls. Their youngest brother, Johnny, seemed to drift away from them both, something my father regretted in later life.

In the early 1950s, the adult siblings went their separate ways. First Ray, then Jim did National Service, Ray in Germany, Jim in Cyprus. If Ray impressed his young cousin Irene with his classic Dark good looks, wavy hair, and seriousness, the more happy-go-lucky Jim would show off his matinee-idol looks in photos, sprawled out languorously on the beach or on a barracks cot in shorts.

Ray Dark (left), the author’s father, during a race while serving in the British Army after WWII. (Courtesy Stephen Dark)

Alice Dark got married and emigrated by ship to Brisbane, Australia, in the late 1950s, “£10 poms” as Australians called them. Jim was not happy at the news and refused to go to the docks to see them off.

Each of the siblings formed their own matrimonial bubble, which Fred privately lamented to his son Keith. The survivors of The Wednesday saw each other at weddings and funerals. In my family’s case, my mother said that they did not go to people’s houses because they could not afford to reciprocate and invite them back. They were working too hard, saving every penny for our education, for a rainy day, for holidays when they retired that Ray’s Alzheimers largely denied them.

Johnny married and had a daughter. He separated from his wife and at age thirty-one had a heart attack in hospital and died. Ray and Jim only learned of his death because it was announced on the radio and TV that the authorities were seeking any surviving relatives of John Dark. Ray had Johnny’s ashes interred with their parents.

An unexpected inheritance

On those few occasions the Dark orphans did gather, the one experience that bound them was never discussed. That silence extended to their own families.

Alice never talked about the war with her children. “Too many horrific memories I guess,” emailed her eldest daughter, Linda, from New Zealand.

Ray had no memory of it and told me he doubted it had impacted him. Losing his beloved Nan in 1955 to a pulmonary embolism while he was on National Service was far more devastating.

But his memoirs provided a more ambiguous view of that cataclysmic event’s lasting impact. “I can’t remember how I felt then,” he wrote about his seven-year-old self. “I was so young and for many years afterwards I looked for ways out of rooms, as if I was afraid the house I was in would come down on my head. How I felt about losing Mum and Dad, Charlie and Uncle Wally also eludes me. People pulled together back then. They did their best around us to make us feel wanted—not lonely.”

Professor Jones drew a parallel between responses to COVID-19 post-infection and surviving the war. “You don’t really want to talk about COVID,” he said. “You want to get on with your life. I think there is a very natural thing which all societies do after wars is that for at least a couple of years, you want to forget about it and rebuild your life.”

The surviving Fred Dark never wanted to talk about it. Every time his eldest son, Keith, tried to bring it up, Fred bent his head forward, put it between his clenched fists and shook it back and forth.

Jim never talked about the Blitz either. When the topic came up, the De Havilland aircraft mechanic who was usually the life of the party and a big practical joker would quietly leave the room. But when his aunt Flo Bailey came to visit one day and reminisced about the war with Jim and his wife Val, Jim burst into tears. Val thanked Flo afterwards. “I’m so pleased you did it,” Val said. “He’s kept it all bottled up inside him.”

Such behavior is textbook PTSD, Jones said. “You avoid talking about it or meeting people you know who want to talk about it, because you know it will lead to a flashback where you’re back in a bombed house,” Jones said. “Any mention or experience that reminds you of that you want to get away from, because all it’ll do is bring back these awful memories.”

Might the trauma that the siblings experienced have been passed down to their children? Could I and my cousins have inherited PTSD, anxiety or depression from our parents? Some researchers in the controversial medical field of epigenetics–alterations in how our genes are regulated–have claimed that childhood trauma can become intergenerational through leaving a chemical mark on a person’s DNA-coded sequence, which then passes onto the next generation, although not necessarily leading to the same symptoms. “Current scientific knowledge largely suggests this isn’t possible but some have argued it might be,” Helen Fisher, a professor of developmental psychopathology at King’s College London, told me in an email.

The implications of such research—which led to a lot of overwrought media coverage—are nevertheless disturbing. “This is really scary stuff,” a biologist at Washington State University told Science. “If what your grandmother and grandfather were exposed to is going to change your disease risk, the things we’re doing today that we thought were erased are affecting our great-great-grandchildren.”

Had my father’s trauma left its mark on me, passed on some form of anxiety that I have struggled with all my life? That, Jones felt, was unlikely. Where he did feel trauma might in some form be passed down the generations was through behavior. His father at a young age lost his own parents and never discussed it. That in turn meant Jones couldn’t talk about father-son issues with his father. “I do believe it has an impact on the way children see the world and their emotional responses to it.”

What for?

The final piece performed by the fifteen-minute orchestral flash mob next to Ely Cathedral was Tchaikovsky’s Adagio lamentoso from his Symphony No. 6 (“Pathétique”). In defense of including Tchaikovsky, the conductor had told the local press, “It could scarcely be more apt as a hymn of universal grief for all victims of oppression.”  As the searing strings swirled up the towering buttresses and around the spires, climbing towards a remonstration with the brutalities of life, there was almost as if in response an ever-rising, growling, deep-throated drone. High above, against the cloud-drenched sky, a military plane passed overhead, its engines too insistent, too loud to be ignored.

This was what my relatives went through, this is what Ukrainians experienced every day: fear of the skies, of anonymous violence delivered imperiously from above, whether from planes, missiles, or drones, this overwhelming sense of powerlessness in the face of the unknown hand determined to smite you down.

Yet mother and daughter cleaners of a Fleet Street-based newspaper who had been bombed out of their home, wrote literary editor Viola G. Garvin, when she asked how they were, told her, “Mustn’t grumble.” In a lengthy celebration of London history and life to accompany twenty watercolor plates by Warsaw refugee Wanda Ostrowska of London’s bombed-out streets in the 1945 book London’s Glory, Garvin wrote, “We were all brothers in those days, as perhaps we never were before and never will be again. The City was ours: we were the City. It is something to have known it.”

That is what politicians who cite the Blitz spirit do not understand. It was a moment in time, unrepeatable, until, as in Ukraine, you are facing overwhelming forces determined to terrorize you into surrendering.

One of Ostrowska’s watercolors, a desolate image of broken cement and hollowed-out, black-toothed windows, was titled “What for?” That question was echoed by photographs of civilians shot dead on the streets in Bucha, Ukraine, by the huddled bodies of a mother, two children, and a guide shot by Russian troops.

When Jim Dark was dying, if he did not need to ask that question, he did, however, need to say something to the nation who had killed his family. In 2004, he was diagnosed with colon cancer. Several weeks before his death, he returned to hospital. A nurse from Germany examined him while his wife Val and middle daughter Lisa Milne waited outside. She waved them back in.

“How did you get on?” Val asked Jim.

“I forgave her,” he said.

In his last days at the beginning of January 2005, Val brought Jim home so she could care for him. As a nurse, she understood intimately the death process and encouraged people to visit, to say their goodbyes. The day before he died my parents came to their home. Heather sat downstairs with Val at the kitchen table, while Ray went upstairs to Jim’s room. Jim lay in bed under a blanket Val had knitted. My father lay down beside him.

Later Val popped her head in and saw the brothers relaxed, side by side, talking quietly, laughing softly like two boys in the hush of a library. Brothers, husbands, and fathers facing their mortality together, Ray accompanying Jim for an hour or two near the end, that gentle voice of my father wrapping itself around his younger brother one last time. Val gently closed the door on the two brothers, leaving them to the evening-shadowed comforts of their memories.

Author’s note: Stephen Dark would like to thank Stephen Farrell for his help in researching this story.