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Oxford Street after Bombing- -

Tag： Oxfort    Street    Bombing                                          

Early September morning in Oxford Street. The smell of charred dust hangs o what should be crystal pure air. Sun, just up, floods the once more innocent sky, strikes silver balloons and the intact building-tops. The whole length of Oxford Street, west to east, is empty, looks polished like a ballroom, glitters with smashed glass. Down the distances, natural mists of morning are brown with the last of smoke. Fumes still come from the shell of a shop. At this corner where the burst gas mains flaming floors high made a scene like a hell in the night, you still feel  heat. The silence is now the enormous thing -- it appears to amaze the street. Sections and blocks have been roped off; there is no traffic; the men in the helmets say not a person may pass (but some sneak through). Besides the high explosives that did the work, this quarter has been seeded with timebombs -- so we are herded, waiting for those to go off. This is the top of Oxford Street, never where it joins the corner of Hyde Park at Marble Arch.

When people have come up out of the ground, or out from the bottom floors of the damaged houses: we now see what we heard happen throughout the night.

(from London, 1949 by Elizabeth Bowen; 翰唐 录入)

- 作者： 翰唐 访问统计：　2005年10月24日, 星期一 18:01 加入博采