Bomb Shelter

Here is Sonnet in front of a bomb shelter, which once was a standard extension to any London house, indeed - a sought after item raising the value of the property, I am told. Most likely the last ones from the 1930s - by the time WW II under way, nobody building construction. Those who had 'em were relieved: The Blitz, or Nazi Germany's sustained bombing of Britain, endured from September 7, 1940 to May 10, 1941. While many towns and cities were hit, it began with London for 57 consecutive nights. By the end, over 43,000 civilians, half of them in London, killed and more than a million houses destroyed or damaged in London alone. Miraculously, St Paul's survived despite being the biggest bulls-eye imaginable from the sky above. And lest you think London lives in its past, consider that in June 2008 an unexploded World World War II bomb weighing 2,200lb was found near the Bromley-by-Bow Tube station by a digger clearing a site being prepared for the 2012 Olympics. Fifteen disposal experts from the Royal Engineers made the bomb safe after it started ticking and carried out a controlled explosion. The bomb was discovered next to a gasworks and police were initially considering evacuating 40,000 people.

"But it is a curve each of them feels, unmistakably. It is the parabola. They must have guessed, once or twice -- guessed and refused to believe -- that everything, always, collectively, had been moving toward that purified shape latent in the sky, that shape of no surprise, no second chance, no return. Yet they do move forever under it, reserved for its own black-and-white bad news certainly as if it were the rainbow, and they its children. . . ."
--Gravity's Rainbow, Thomas Pynchon