McMinn and CheeseUnder Cover of Darkness: murders in blackout London by Amy Helen Bell
As promised when I reviewed Dark City, here is a recent variation on the theme. I said that Dark City, though well-researched, read like True Crime, and Under Cover is a book that reads more like history—even though it covers a lot of the same ground.
As I hoped, Amy Helen Bell spends less time on visceral details of wounds and autopsies and has done much more research on the lives of victims especially. She gives shape to their lives and considers the circumstances that led them into the paths of their killers. Early on, the author states that she’s refocusing away from the detailed examinations of people’s bodies towards the particular circumstances of their lives. This, for me, is much better, as it’s the social history that interests me more than the detailed descriptions of what happened to the people’s bodies.
On the other hand, I think both books are misleading in both their titles and sub-titles. The book opens with an interesting statistic: there were 480 unidentified bombing victims found in London streets and shelters during the war. And while some killers tried to hide their crimes by planting bodies in damaged buildings, there’s a far more interesting story behind that statistic.
Because the darkness of blackout London isn’t really the point. It’s not as if killers were lurking in doorways (for the most part). Maybe there were a couple, and for sure there was an epidemic of sexual assaults, but for me there are two main takeaways from these two books.
One: yes, it’s much easier, during the blackout, to dispose of a body without being seen. There are a number of examples of people who went out into the night with bodies over their shoulders or in a wheelbarrow, etc. But these illegal disposals would include abortionists as well as murderers. And the terrifying reality of frightened women trying to deal with unwanted pregnancies in wartime was ever present. The husband is away, she’s pregnant, and there’s a network of amateur abortionists out there. Additionally, more than one murder victim in the pages of this book was pregnant when killed.
Two: the real story about what happened on the home front during the war concerns anonymity, mobility, and flexibility in terms of identity. There was a trade in illegal abortions, yes. There were deserters and psychopaths living an underground life in the metropolis, also. And the trade was in names, addresses, ration books, clothes. Where to stay, where to go, what to call yourself, and how to survive in a bureaucratic world in which paperwork was more important than ever. Even after the war, because the process of demobbing took so long, there were so many deserters who had no access to ration books and identity papers.
So many people lost their homes due to the bombings. So many people were displaced, evacuated, separated, lost. And its these people, living on the margins, who were the most vulnerable when it came to meeting their fates.
A fascinating read. Perhaps the most remarkable thing I learned, however, is that many of the records concerning these victims are still sealed.
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