I look back to that Friday night of September I,
1939, when the. lights went out in London. We had been told that the black-out had been decreed, but we had expected only some diminution of lighting ; it was with astonishment and fear that, on emerging that evening into the streets of the capital, we found ourselves faced with a velvet curtain of impenetrable dark. Since that day we kiye accustomed ourselves to blackness, and the star-lighting which
was subsequently introduced did at least enable us to trace the outlines of the streets. But in those first nights of 1939 we stumbled, miserable and afraid, along pavements which had ceased to be familiar and had become suddenly hostile, tumbling over dust-bins, twisting our ankles at curb-stones which in the nights of peace we had taken in our stride. A primaeval dread of darkness gripped our heart, and as we pushed the curtained doors which led from the black streets we felt within us a happy surge of safety as when travellers lost in some dark forest see the lit window of a woodman's but glint- ing through the trees. There were, of course, many moments of compensation ; on moon-lit nights the jumbled streets of London became transfigured, and the houses in the Strand, even the Charing Cross Hotel, lost their horrid detail, and assumed the shapes which their architects had once dreamt of, glinting like palaces at Padua or Rimini. There were nights also when one would look up and see the stars scattered like a handful of rice above the spire of St. Martin's, and when the Nelson statue, that unfortunate grotesque, was crowned by the Great Bear. It may well be (since the memory of man has a strange selective habit), that after Sunday next we shall forget about the gloom and apprehension of the early black- out, and recall only the moments or rare beauty which it gave. And that when in after years we find in some drawer the discarded remnants of our batteries and torches, we shall think only of the shifting diadems of searchlights and murmur to ourselves, " How beautiful it was, how strange! "
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