But the persistence of the raids and the increasing destruction also had a darker effect. Wrote novelist Rose Macaulay, on Monday, September 23: “I am getting a burying-phobia, result of having seen so many houses and blocks of flats reduced to piles of ruins from which people can’t be extracted in time to live, and feel I would rather sleep in the street, but know I mustn’t do this.” Harold Nicolson had a similar fear, which he confided to his diary the next day. “What I dread,” he wrote, “is being buried under huge piles of masonry and hearing the water drip slowly, smelling the gas creeping
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Awful yet potent description
