‘down in the terraces between the targets’ These were marginal people I had met only rarely
Andthe end of the whole household meant that no grief was seen;
Never have people seemed so absent from their own deaths.^72In the remainder of the poem, Fisher reports how ‘This bloody episode of four
whom I could understand better dead|Gave me something I needed to keep a long
story moving’, and adds that ‘had my belief in the fiction not been thus buoyed up|I
might, in the sigh and strike of the next night’s bombs|Have realized a little what
they meant, and been for the first time afraid’. His child’s-eye view of the bombing
occasions the effective disappearance of both the victims and the enemy—yet
perhaps in this he is only underlining something that is the case for ‘the Home
Front’. Most of the time you are not eye-deep in corpses, and if you are, then you
are likely to be one of them; most of the time the enemy is nowhere to be seen.
When Fisher revisits the topic in ‘Wonders of Obligation’, he fills in the missing
elements, by taking a more historically and culturally perspectival view of the events.
He had seen ‘the mass graves dug|the size of workhouse wards’ which had been
made ‘ready for most of the people|the air-raids were going to kill’, and explains:
Once the bombs got you
you were a pauper:
clay, faeces, no teeth; on a level
with gas mains,
even more at a loss than before
down in the terraces between the targets,
between the wagon works
and the moonlight on the canal.^73Thephrases‘downintheterraces’andthe‘moonlighton the canal’quietlyswitch the
perspectiveinthepassagefromtheciviliansandtheir massgravetotheimpliedpilots
and bomb-aimers up in their planes, seeking out the indicators of their targets. In
doing this, Fisher underlines both the banal industrialization of such death delivery,
and also the way in which industrialized death is an analogue, at the very least, for
the peacetime treatment of its workforce. Total war reveals class structure in the
forms of domestic architecture, because the factory targets are surrounded by the
poor accommodation built for the working people. Collateral damage to civilians
is likely to have an uneven distribution over a nation’s social strata.^74 Here Fisher is
presenting as a considered point what Field had revealed with his word ‘dumped’.
(^72) Roy Fisher, ‘The Entertainment of War’, inThe Long and the Short of It: Poems 1955–2005
(Tarset: Bloodaxe, 2005), 33–4.
(^73) Fisher, ‘Wonders of Obligation’, ibid. 14–15.
(^74) Joe Kerr reports a campaignc.1995–7 in the East End of London to erect a monument to the
2,193 local civilian casualties of the Blitz, noting that this was ‘the most heavily bombed area of any
British city’. See Kerr, ‘Uncompleted Monument’, 86.