Warden's-Eye View

DIGGING FOR MRS. MILLER -- John Strachey -- Random House ($1.25).

John Strachey (The Coming Struggle for Power, etc.) stopped his fellow-traveling with the war and became an air-raid warden. Digging for Mrs. Miller is a classic account of what a warden does and sees.

Strachey's warden (whom he modestly calls Ford) covered a poor section of London near the Thames River. "A bomb, or bombs, had hit the last five houses in Beaton Street . . . and a small tenement.

. . . Where they had stood there was a crater, with two mounds of debris on each side of it. ... Ford climbed on to the debris ... he found that it was made up of an extraordinary texture of brick and plaster rubble . . . pieces of crockery, often unbroken, all made into a homogeneous, tight-pressed pudding."

The rescue squad sank a shaft into the mound to look for bodies. While they were working, "a smallish, quick-moving man came up and asked: 'Where's my rabbits?' He received no answer. 'Four I 'ad,' he said, 'kept 'em in the-Anderson [shelter], and this morning I saw two of 'em up the top of Beaton Street.' Ford wondered if his warden's training should have included elementary rabbit catching.

But one of the rescue men said unexpectedly that he had seen a rabbit on the embankment. 'There,' said the small man, 'how they do stray.' "

Two bodies were uncovered in the shaft.

" 'Which way are they lying, Frank?' Smith said. 'Head here, legs there, body bent round here.' 'Very awkward,' said Smith." Then Ford looked. "There was no blood or gross mutilation. But the bodies had become part of the debris; they had become one constituent of the many constituents of the mound. They had been crushed and pressed into the decomposed raw material of the five houses."

When they were lifted a little, Ford saw that they were a man and a woman.

"Smith got the woman's body a couple of feet up. Frank took up one wrist, round which was an identity disc. 'Mrs. Miller,' he read off. Mrs. Miller had been a very big, strong and vigorous woman. 'Get a rope,' said the man in plus-fours. . . .

'Pass it under the buttocks.' . . . Her black hair was mingled and matted with the brick rubble."

Then the sirens shrieked. "The stretcher party began to carry the body down from the mound. There was a heavy thump as a big bomb fell somewhere. . . .

The mound shuddered. So they took Mrs.

Miller away, and the sounds of the new raid were her only requiem." And that last line is nearest thing to a literary false note in one of the most vivid and sensitive accounts of the great London raids, from the viewpoint of people on the ground, that has come out of England since the Battle of Britain began.

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