NIXON, Barbara. Raiders Ahead. London: Lindsay Drummond. [1943].
8vo. Original grey cloth, decorated and lettered in gilt; illustrated wrapper (retaining price); pp. 165, illustrations to the text after drawings by the auhor; marginal and surface wear to wrappers, light even toning due to wartime paper; otherwise very good.
Very rare first edition of this gripping first-hand account by an Air Raid Warden in Finsbury, London, the during the Blitz, experienced by the actress and playwrite Barbara Nixon (1907-1983), who kept a dairy throughout the war. On September 2, 1940, five day before the continuous bombing campaign started she witnessed the beginning of the Blitz when 300 German bombers and 600 escorting fighters arrived over London. Although miles away she could see that "the East End were getting it… we could see the miniature silver planes circling round the target area in such perfect formation that they looked like a children's toy model of flying boats or chair-o-planes at a fair … Presently we saw a white cloud rising; it looked like a huge evening cumulus, billowing outwards and always upwards … The cloud grew to such a size that we gasped incredulously; there could not ever in history have been so gigantic a fire" (pp. 13/14). First working part time, Barbara Nixon later became one of the first women to be employed as a full-time Air Raid Warden in London.
Barbara Nixon was active in the Labour Party, whilst her husband, Maurice Dobb, was a Cambridge historian and Communist. His house "St Andrews" in Chesterton Lane was a frequent meeting place for Cambridge communists and known locally as "The Red House". The publisher Lindsay Drummond was strictly anti-Fascist and employed the exiled modernist book designer John Heartfield.
Len Deighton described this narrative as a most fascinating book which brought back memories of his childhood during the war (see the new publication of 1980).
LibraryHub locates copies only in British deposit libraries, and at the Bishopsgate Institute in the East End of London; WorldCat does not locate any copies; not in the Imperial War Museum.
SKU: 2125053