From Cumorah’s Southern Messenger (the magazine of the South African Mission), March 1945 —

I Was There

By Edith Russell

I was there when the robot planes were foiling in a frightful rain on London. I was a missionary at the headquarters of the British Mission in the south-west of the city. I was there when they took out an old Jewish woman from the ruins of what had been a rest home for aged Jews. She was quite dead — and among the rubble a small dog whimpered and showed the whites of his eyes in an agony of appeal for help which never came.

I was there when the windows of the mission office ceased to be windows and lay in long slivers of silver upon the dust-stained carpets. We had tried to sleep but all night the hideous buzzing had come at intervals and, on its heels, the death ridden silence as the engine ” cut.” One was absurdly relieved to hear the explosion — didn’t people say you didn’t hear the one which killed you?

I was there the night our chief, President Hugh B. Brown, with characteristic disregard for the conventional, took a pick and opened up the cellars beneath Ravenslea, and swept and cleared them and erected beds there for the rest. He was badly soiled, his hands bruised. He looked like a labourer.

I was there one morning when the mission office staff knelt in prayer and the soft voice of an Irish girl supplicated our Heavenly Father for his protection. We heard the ominous buzzing approaching, nearer, ever nearer. The voice, low and soft, never faltered. The explosion blew open the French windows. A strange peace persisted in the room when we rose from our knees.

I was there when a small notice, announcing the untenable condition of Ravenslea was inserted in the Millennial Star. I put it in the same sense of sorrow one feels at publishing the death notice of an old friend.

Birmingham received us with quiet nights of bombless skies. I was there when the font room of Handsworth Chapel was converted for our use. One room, and in it were the secretary to the British Mission, the finance department, the editorial office of Millennial Star, the circulation department and the mission book-store, together with such trifles as rescued files, suitcases and sundry pieces of furniture.

Dunkirk would not have been glorious had the evacuation been accomplished with pomp and adequate equipment. It was the fact of those ridiculous pleasure steamers, supplementing the British Navy, of those solitary life boats manned by civilians — some of them women, and the whole splendid, supremely absurd “spunk” of it all, which made it an epic in British history.

During those months in Birmingham, a spirit of surpassing beauty crept into our topsy-turvy world. We used ink in tumblers and sat in our coats in unheated rooms. The president opened his mail in the bathroom, the one room in the establishment possessing a hot water cistern and, though we laughed with him at his ludicrosity, it gave one a lumpy throat too.

I was there a few days ago, when a young American boy stood on his feet to address a gathering of Saints in Northern England. He had been born into the Church somewhere in California, and somehow he had contrived to take the whole thing for granted. Then the war came and service overseas — in England. He met the saints there — he lived in their homes, attended the small chapels with them — learned to know them —

“They showed me all the gospel could mean,” he said, “and all I’d missed back home where the facilities and opportunities were greater. The British Saints made me appreciate what it meant to be a Mormon under fire. …”

I was there, and suddenly I was proud.