I researched the Balham tube WWII bomb blast, and found this. Definitely not as beautiful as Atonement’s take on the incident. The movie pursues a ‘beautiful’ agenda – the sequences with Keira Knightley’s emerald green evening dress push wardrobe excellence to new levels – a welcome and for this novel appropriate emphasis on artifice in historical drama adaptations. It fails only in so far as the novel itself is frankly unfilmable.
[Edit 23/10/09] Wow! This is a pretty sensational find. Londonist has been researching Pathe's archives and has come across this originally unbroadcast material showing a bus in a huge crater in Balham High Street. I suspect this is the incident which flooded the tube tunnels at Balham Station and inspired Ian McEwan.
London Transport museum also has a photo of the bomb crater with the bus.
2 comments:
You say its not a 'beautiful' - meaning that the tube tunnel didn't fill up with water, that music didn't play while drowned bodies floated around 'poetically'??
65 people died in that blast alone. I think it was good that another 'danger' of the war was used in the book and film; it shows McEwan's done his homework and not just done the usual portrayal of the war.
Incidentally, the tube tunnel would have been drained before the photograph you have posted was taken...
Alas, even when fully flooded the scene would have been less 'poetic' thah the movie - the pipe that burst was the sewage pipe . . .
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