WAR/INSIDE THE VIDEO GAME
When I heard severeal years ago that a bomb had been developed to kill people and spare buildings, I thought the bomb’s inventor had to be mad. Surely we identify with the people, whatever their language or race, in a war zone? Sometimes in that zone coping with a lot of little battles adds up to survival.
Flashes light up the night. Flickering orange and red flames stretch high into the darkness. The drone of bombers, the crackle of fires, and the touchdown of explosives deafen. Acrid smells seep under doors. Searchlights comb the sky. Incendiary bombs fall in clusters called breadbaskets on London.
Soon after the sun comes up, Mom, hearing on the radio of the damage to streets near the Hounslow airport, places me in a stroller and pushes it the four miles to my cousins’ home. Since enemy aircraft frequently targets trains and buses, public transport is dangerous and rare.
When we arrive on the street where my cousins live, two houses still smolder. With walls and roofs missing, they display the intimacy of what remains in bathrooms and bedrooms. A bright blue sofa rests on the sidewalk. I walk beside Mom to the front door of my cousins’ home.
Almost as soon as Mom rings the bell, the door is yanked open. My aunt thrusts her baby into my mother’s arms.
"Look at her foot," she screams.
Carrying my six month old cousin, Cynthia, wrapped in a blanket, Mom steps inside the cottage, and follows my aunt into the kitchen. I catch a glimpse of Cynthia’s foot before I join the other kids to play. It’s red and purple where the skin peeled off. Cynthia keeps crying so maybe her foot hurts. I wouldn’t want my foot to look like that.
I pick up what happened in snippets of conversation, the way nosey kids do. As soon as the air raid warning sounded the previous night, my aunt and uncle took their kids to the Anderson shelter at the bottom of the garden. There they listened to the whistling flight of bombs and the cracking sound of anti-aircraft guns. Every window in every house is covered with blackout material. Some people are afraid to strike a match in the open in case it is seen by someone above. When the bombs fall, the night sky is lit up brighter than any Fourth of July. Blitz is the German word for lightening. Like thunder, noise, louder than day traffic on Fifth Avenue, follows the light.
During the night’s raid, my uncle saw a fire flare up in his cottage. He and my aunt spent the rest of the night putting out fires with water and sand while their three kids stayed in the garden shelter. When dawn came, my exhausted uncle cycled to his job with the municipal water board. After a night during the Blitz, England, the land of rain and mists, had to worry about its water supplies.
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