‘London Can Take It!’ Residents Tell World

It was a week of extremes quite possibly unmatched in this indomitable city’s history -- the euphoria of Live 8, the thrill of Wimbledon, the jubilation of winning the 2012 Olympics, followed by sudden carnage and a poignant search for the missing in a terrible attack on everyday Londoners. Yet the slogan that has captured the mood dates back more than 60 years.

“London can take it!” they wrote after the Blitz -- and the people of this city were repeating the sentiment Saturday as the official commemoration of the end of World War II converged with the threat from a new enemy.

“We did not waver then. We shall not flinch now,” said Baroness Betty Boothroyd, a former speaker of the House of Commons, as she and Queen Elizabeth II unveiled a memorial to the women who served Britain in that war.

Gnarled veterans in their 80s, rows of medals displayed proudly on their chests, shrugged off the multiple bombs that unknown attackers set off Thursday on the London Underground and on one of the city’s iconic red double-decker buses. And their Churchillian spirit of defiance has been taken up seamlessly by their grandchildren’s and great-grandchildren’s generation.

As an anonymous sign left at the site of the bus bombing said: “Yesterday we fled this great city, but today we are walking back into an even stronger, greater city.

“The people who did this should know they have failed. They have picked the wrong city to pick on.

“London will go on.”

The group that claimed on a website to have planted the bombs crowed, “Britain is now burning with fear.” But anyone in London this weekend would have seen how wrong that was.

Harrods, Marks and Sparks and Lilywhites were all open and bustling. Tourists and natives crowded the pavement and stretched out on striped lawn chairs in Green Park, the street artists were hawking their bad art along Piccadilly, the buses were running and so were most of the Tube trains, and people still had to stand in line for a strong latte at the Pret a Manger in Knightsbridge.

On a fair July Saturday, London still looked like the capital of the world, a place where the person you stopped randomly in the street was as likely to be Hungarian, Polish, American or French as English.

In St. James Park, just down the Mall from Buckingham Palace, thousands of British families took advantage of the day to reexamine the history of World War II at a “living museum” that has been running this month to mark the 60th anniversary of the war’s end.

It was a typically understated display of wartime scenes from around the world, with veterans and present-day soldiers mingling, actors and actresses in 1940s costumes, old weapons and cultural objects, all evoking the spirit of the time. Visitors were offered a small paper Union Jack with “Thank you” printed on the other side.

They could listen to a stand-in for a Gurkha officer describing crawling for hundreds of miles through the jungles “for a go at” the Japanese, or hear elderly men who were once physical-training officers on the home front, describing how the British built up sinew and muscle to beat the Germans.

Steve Hughes, 44, who works in the Royal Mews as a coachman for the queen, said he readily saw parallels between the attitudes of the World War II generation and what he and his cohorts feel about the latest attacks in London.

“It’s a case where you can’t let [them] get you down. We have to keep on what we’re doing. Why should we give in?” he said. “Our resolve is well and truly behind whatever our government decides.”

“The spine is still there,” said a ramrod-straight Victor Jones, 87, a resident of Glastonbury who survived the retreat from France at the start of the war and took part in the invasion of Normandy in 1944. He apologized for his ostentatious medals. (“Sorry, I shouldn’t be showing off.”) As to why the city responded the way it has to last week’s bombings, he said: “It’s the Dunkirk spirit. It carries on.... Life will be difficult for a while, but they won’t get us. We don’t give.”

Farther on in the exhibition, Patricia Pearson, 81, a member of the Women’s Timber Corps from 1942-45, remembered diving into the mud during those Blitz years when the sirens warned of incoming German bombs, which killed 40,000 people. “We’re used to bombings, aren’t we? The doodlebugs and so on.”

Not everyone was sanguine about the new threat. Evoking the Blitz in a different way, author James Meek said in an essay in the Guardian newspaper that there were also distinct differences for London in this new, complex war.

“In the last century ... the Underground protected the people of London from bombs. One ad for the Tube in the First World War read: ‘It is bombproof down below. Underground for safety; plenty of bright trains, business as usual.’

“In this century, in a war without clear aims, and/or sides, it has become -- as for four years we have more than half-expected -- a place where bombs go off.”

Novelist Ian McEwan, also writing in the Guardian, said: “We have been savagely woken from a pleasant dream. The city will not recover Wednesday’s confidence and joy in a very long time.”

Still, many evidently intended to try.

Roy Murfin, 21, a blacksmith who was in London as a member of the Fire Service Preservation League, said as he lounged on the steps leading to Pall Mall: “The thing is, with the British, we’re used to it. When I was growing up, the IRA was kicking up. Now it’s these ones. When it happens, everyone is sticking together. Everyone was helping each other out.”

The BBC’s Radio 4 tried to dissect London’s newfound spirit after the roller-coaster week, inviting Ekow Eshun of the Institute of Contemporary Arts and historian Max Hastings to debate whether the Blitz or the multicultural image that was projected in London’s successful bid for the 2012 Olympics was the correct model.

“It seems to me that they tell almost different stories. One, that first story, the Blitz story, which was important in its time, was all about unifying, almost kind of closing in a city that looked in on itself during the war years,” Eshun said.

“Now we have a completely different story, actually, which is a multicultural story, which is a city looking out and connected to the rest of the world,” he said.

Hastings agreed that London was a different city today, “but I don’t agree at all with the view that we can’t expect everybody to share common values.”

It is one thing to face the future stoically, he suggested, but not with eyes closed. Even if Britain does not feel it is at war, the people who are bombing it do, and so it is necessary to be on guard.

Nevertheless, as the city looked at itself 48 hours after the bombings, there was a general sense that, on the whole, it had come through all right.

“Londoners have done well -- they always do,” said Yong Sung Lee, a 50-year-old shopkeeper, speaking to the Independent. “It was a strange week. To celebrate, then mourn. But everything always continues as before.”

London’s winning Olympics bid campaign had an anthem. The song by Heather Small, herself a Londoner, asks in its refrain, “What have you done today to make you feel proud?” The answer this week: Quite a lot.