Silence On Hoe Street

“But my silence is unique
Without colour”
- Iraqi poet, Ghareeb Iskander, Poems of Silence

“In crust we trust!” declares a banner hung from the ceiling of Today Bread — a bakery and café alive with tapping keyboards and earnest chatter; the air is heavy with coffee and sourdough. Walthamstow has changed.

Today Bread is one several new shops in Central Parade — a listed building designed in 1954 as a perfect representation of Festival of Britain architecture, with its sumptuously curved awning, a modernist clock tower and clean lines. The inclusion of a line of chimney pots belies the modernity of the age, still mired as it was in pre-war technology, but nothing could repress its energy and optimism.

Central Parade was formed on the brick dust, rubble and blood stained debris of a V-1 flying bomb attack that killed 22 people and injured 144 in August 1944, 75 years ago this summer.

Despite all its complex engineering, a V-1 rocket was brutal in its simplicity; designed to be launched across the channel and then its fuel to be cut somewhere above London. It was not the menacing rumble of the pulsejet engine that people learnt to fear — it was the silence as the engine cut out. Two tonnes of sophisticated Nazi technology became nothing but an explosive lump of falling dead weight. This was the Doodlebug; codename: Kirschkern, the Cherry Stone.

That moment of silence would have fallen like ice on the shoppers in Walthamstow that Saturday morning. A suspended moment in time that stretched like molten glass before shattering into panic as people ran in all directions.

Up in the clear summer sky, with the whole of London shimmering below, the V-1 would have left a beautiful trail of vapour; the silencing of its engines replaced by a rushing of air as it dropped 9,000 feet, reducing to a small black dot. Then a sudden demonic noise as it hit Livermore’s Drapery and, at the heart of the explosion, a momentary vacuum — a silent blank void, like the depths of the ocean beyond the reach of sunlight — before everything was sucked roaring back in on itself once again. And then a terrible stunned silence.

The bomb decimated both the drapery and Hitchman’s Dairies. It ripped the front off the local branch of Montague Burton’s, the tailors — leaving it open like a dolls house.

When Montague Burton, then known as Meshe Osinky, was just fifteen, he escaped Tsarist-era pogroms in Lithuania to come to Yorkshire, where he created a bespoke tailoring business of astonishing scale. At their post-war peak, Burton’s were selling 850,000 suits a year — dressing a quarter of the adult male population. Their staff canteen in Leeds could feed 8,000 people in one sitting. Montague Burton himself was teetotal and abstemious; he opened billiard halls above his shops in the belief that this would keep young men out of trouble. This did not prevent an air of smoke and vice from seeping under the doors of Burton’s billiard halls up and down the country, at odds with the respectability of the shops themselves.

The Hoe Street branch was like many others: deliberately situated on a busy junction to create a landmark — a ‘Burton’s corner’ — where lovers would meet before crossing the road to go to the pictures at the Walthamstow Granada, one of the London’s vast art deco theatres. The front of the cinema was damaged in the blast, and its foyer became a makeshift mortuary — nineteen bodies laid out. Three more lay dead in hospital.

When a car bomb killed 48 people in Baghdad in 2013, local shop keeper, Suhair Gadhban, told Reuters: “I was sitting in my store when I heard a huge explosion. I could not recognise anything because dust engulfed the place. Shattered glass was everywhere… Some of them [were] killed and others were seriously wounded and were screaming for help.”

This violent loop is repeated in every war zone: shop door conversations, a car horn, laughter, then sudden catastrophic noise and a return to silence. In Walthamstow the silence unfolded like a slow moving glacier over the weeks, months and years that followed — just the intermittent creaking of settling rubble and decaying timbers.

Local people recount how the billiard tables hung out of the upper floors of Montague Burton’s for many years, like the carcasses of large animals. Open to the snow, the frost and the summer heat, the green baize would have become dark and sodden and then silently disintegrated under the scurry of silverfish and woodlice; bats flitting about in the darkness above.

There are places where we hold on to those silences and the stillness that follows war and catastrophe: graveyards, memorial grounds, chapels and mosques. But in Today Bread the loaves slowly rise and down the High Street the market noise has returned: “any bowl a pound”; “Jesus loves you.” At the multiplex, young people in 3D glasses spill popcorn in the aisles and even the old Granada cinema is stirring — a lottery grant will soon see it restored and set to reopen with repackaged nostalgia. A return to the raucous good old days after years of silent decay.