20 BBC Robin Duff Sees London Burning

St. Paul's Cathedral was the fillet of the main fire. All around it, the flames were leaping up into the sky. There the cathedral stood, magnificently firm, untouched in the very center of all this destruction.

As I walked along the streets, it was almost impossible to believe that these fires could be subdued. I was walking between solid walls of fire. Roofs of shops and office buildings came down with a roaring crash.

Pains of grass were cracking everywhere from the heat, and every street was crisscrossed with innumerable lengths of hose. Men were fighting the fires from the top of hundred foot letters, shot up from the street.

Others were pushing their way into the burning buildings, taking the jets to the core of the fire. There was a vast number of men there, and apart from occasionally helping to lay out a hose, I saw that there was nothing I could do to help.

And so I went instead to some of the public shelters. They were underground shelters, mostly, and the buildings on top of them were light. The people had to be got away from them, and got away quickly, and then taken across to the underground station.

Sparks were driving down the street like a heavy snowstorm. Obviously, if more children couldn't walk across to the station in this. And so some of us went backwards and forwards carrying them in our arms.

I took off my Macintosh and covered them up completely with it. It must have been rather frightening for them to be carried across by someone they didn't know, and not being able to see anything.

But it was the only way to protect them from those sparks. And by the time we got the last one across, we should have had to do it anyway, because the building above the station was on fire.