Letter from London
By Mollie Panter-Downes
In recent weeks, as New York City has dramatically transformed around us, I’ve been looking back at Mollie Panter-Downes’s compelling dispatches from London during the Second World War. A well-known novelist and columnist, Panter-Downes contributed more than six hundred and fifty pieces to The New Yorker between 1938 and 1986. She published more than a dozen books, including “The Shoreless Sea” and “One Fine Day,” and she wrote a regular column from London for the magazine for forty-five years. Some of these pieces were collected in “London War Notes,” an anthology of her wartime letters, which was published in 1971. In the letters, Panter-Downes elegantly, lucidly describes the effects of the Blitz and the hardships borne by the city’s residents during the nineteen-thirties and forties. Reading these pieces while living under quarantine, one can stumble upon surprising, uncanny moments of familiarity. In September of 1940, Panter-Downes published a Letter from London about how residents were faring during the difficult early days of the bombings. “For Londoners, there are no longer such things as good nights; there are only bad nights, worse nights, and better nights,” she writes. As the piece unfolds, Panter-Downes documents the heroic efforts of relief workers amid the bleak, ghostly avenues and buildings. She describes the sleepless nights, the cacophony of sirens, and the sober determination of the British people to carry on. As she chronicles the steady bombardment of attacks during the Blitz, Panter-Downes deftly illuminates the eerie moments of silence that would often descend upon the city. These are scenes that defy our sense of normalcy and can make our own reality seem unreal. A city in shock can bear a lot, she seems to be saying, yet even the quiet moments are never completely quiet. If we listen closely, they bristle and hum with a resilient energy, as the city’s heart—the constancy of its people—continues to beat.
—Erin Overbey, archive editor
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