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of war, clipping on her earrings, even though they hurt, because ‘going on night duty you had all the same to keep up a certain style’.
    Working alongside women like Connie, Bowen was coming to believe in this as a democratic ‘People’s War’. In the earlier draft of the ‘London, 1940’ article, she stated that in the previous six months British class-consciousness had faced a severe challenge. The spell of the Old School Tie had lost its power; people walked the streets shabby, with grooming now limited to the effort to clean the brick dust from their faces and hair. Liberated from checking for signs of status, Londoners looked straight into each other’s eyes. All over the place there was an ‘exchange of searching, speechless, intimate looks between strangers’. Indeed, there were no strangers now; everyone was part of a collective community. ‘We have almost stopped talking about Democracy,’ Bowen went on, ‘because, for the first time, we are a democracy. We are more, we are almost a commune.’ Now that everyone faced the same risks as their neighbours, they were levelled by danger. ‘All destructions make the same grey mess; rich homes, poor homes, the big store, the one-man shop make the same slipping rubble.’ Identifying herself collectively with ‘the people’, she announced that this ‘ is the people’s war, for the people’s land, and what we save we rule’.
    Although Greene was dismissive of cantish propaganda, he, like Bowen, was sold on the idea of the democratic spirit of wartime London. ‘This is a people’s war,’ he had declared in a review of British newsreels at the end of the first month of the war, suggesting that the American public should learn about the war in Britain through ‘the rough unprepared words of a Mrs Jarvis, of Penge, faced with evacuation, black-outs, a broken home’. He was impressed by the courage of the civilians he saw every night, hurrying to the shelter, making do amid bombed buildings. Reviewing a theatrical revue-satire two months into the Blitz, he commended Edith Evans’s portrait of a hop-picker returning to the fields from her bombed home. The ‘unembittered humour’, the ‘Cockney repetitions that move one like the refrain of a ballad’ and the ‘silly simple smile’ came ‘very close to the heroic truth at which the world is beginning to wonder’.
     

    A London air-raid shelter, autumn 1940
     
    For Greene, the camaraderie in the warden’s post transposed wartime London onto the comic world of his own stories. This was largely the result of a colleague called Charlie Wix, the ‘heroic raconteur’ of the post, whose chief occupation before the war had been giving evidence in divorce cases. Anecdotes with punchlines like ‘Mr Wix . . . what ’ave you done with the bodies?’ gave Greene entertaining material for his war diary. Later, he realised that his most humorous stories all dated from the Second World War, as though the proximity of death provoked an irresistible urge to laugh. Together, the wardens united in the face of the surprising nervousness of the police, who disappeared from the streets during bad raids, with one mistaking a new heavy gun for a landmine. And Greene found similar material for humour in the shelter at 221 Tottenham Court Road, which was on the edge of his patch and was frequented chiefly by good-natured prostitutes from the bar opposite. ‘Molly Hawthorn,’ he reported in his diary, ‘is a whore and likes it.’ A former pillion girl, she became a prostitute when she discovered ‘that people would actually pay her’. Before the war, she had married, but then her husband was called up and sent to Ireland ‘and back she went to whoring’. Greene had wandered once again into Greeneland.
     
     
    At 8.30 p.m. on 26 September the sirens in both Bloomsbury and Marylebone began to wail. The main sirens sounded for two minutes: a mournful and ominous howl, gliding slowly up and down between two notes.