AIR RAID STORIES

Dominion, Volume 11, Issue 208, 22 May 1918, Page 8

AIR RAID STORIES

4 - A BISHOP'S REMARKABLE BOOR,

A most effective answer to the German air raids on London,- designed largely to ikstioy the morale of our people-and primarily that' of the pWple in the poorer quarters—is contained in an unpretentious little book, "Records of the Raids," by the Bishop of Stepney (Dr. Paget). In all the churches, crypts, and other church buildings throughout London the dwellers in frail houses «tek shelter on raid nights, and it is from the clergy in all parts of North and East London, who care for these people w solicitously upon these occasions, that the bishop has collected hie striking little stories of heroism in humble places, The eelf-control of the people is wonderful, even, when the bombs are dropping within a few yards of them. But most wonderful of nil are the children. A tram conductress, hastening home through the bombardment to her seven children, arrived to find that her eldest child, a girl of seven and a half, had got her four little brothers and sisters out of bed 'at the beginning of tho mid, dressed them, brought them downstairs, gathered them all under the kitchen table, had lit a candle, and was reading to them out of the Bible." Two little girls, children of a minesweeper, put under the bed for safety, quite unmindful of their own peril, prayed, "Please God, don't let the Germans hurt our daddy." The seven-and-a-half-year-old child of a woman who makes Christmas crackers in tho East End wrote, entirely unaided, the following expression of her faith:—

God ie our refuge; Don't bo dismayed; He will protect us All through the raid. When danger is threatening, We never need fear; He'll waTcli over the weakeet Until tho "All Clear." Humour, too, is not lacking in these humble "Kecords" upon which future generations of men and women will look back with pride. An old woman of Bi, who had, in her own phrase, "seen tho front door' go past me up the front staircase," refused to leave her home for shelter. "I'd sooner die among me pots and pans; , ' she said. A resident' in a large model dwelling said, "You see, we are quite safe, because all here are contrite.' Sho really meant concrete, says the Bishop. Another old woman, afraid to go to bed on possible raid nights, said she knew what she would do when peace came: "I shall take me etockin's off. I haven't had 'em off for two years." Once only does tho Bishop leave the subject of the raids, and that is to tell tho "story of a ten-year-old heroine who, with her little brother, was rendered homeless by the Silvertown explosion. Their mother was missing, and after the Belief Committeo had sent thorn to a shelter the girl remembered "tho lady upstairs" had a baby, which was asleep at the time of the explosion. Sho and her brother, a boy of seven, started to find the baby. The boy's courage failed him, and ho ran buck, but Maggie went on, and in the dark groped about among the ruins mid piles of bricks until sho found the baby, It was then too dark to venture back, and sho sat nursing the baby in the ruins all night, and arrived tri'uiiipliaully nt the Belief Depot the next morning with the baby in her arms. Notwithstanding its unpretentioueness, tho book is by no means least in iiiiv;»H'anco among tho contributions to the history of the war. Incidentally, it is a well-deserved tributo to the splendid and quite unadvertised work that is being dono among their people by the London clergy.