household was instructed
that if, in Rossiter's absence, official warnings of an air-raid
were given, certain jars were to be lifted carefully off the shelves
and brought either into the library or taken down below in case,
through shrapnel or through the vibration of neighbouring
explosions, the glass of the studio roof was broken.

One day in October, 1917, the German air fleet made a determined
attack on London. It was intended this time to belie the stories of
the heart of the Western district being exempted from punishment
because Lady So-and-so lived there and had lent her house in East
Anglia to the Empress and her children in 1912, or because Sir
Somebody-else was really an arch spy of the Germans and had to go on
residing in London. So the aeroplanes this time began distributing
their explosives very carefully over the residential area between
Regent's Park and Pall Mall, the Tottenham Court Road and
Selfridge's.

Lady Rossiter in her overall was disturbed at her indexing by the
clamour of an approaching daylight raid; by the maroons, the
clanging of bells, the hooters, the gunfire; and finally by the not
very distant sounds of exploding bombs. She called and rang for the
servants, and then rushed from the library into the studio to
commence removing the more important of the jars to a place of
greater safety. She had seized two of them, one under each arm, and
was making for the library door, when there came the most awful
crash she had ever heard, and resounding bangs which seemed to echo
indefinitely in her ears....

Rossiter was working in the Prosectorium at the Zoo when the
daylight air-raid began. It seemed to be coming across the middle of
London; so, hastily doffing his overall, he left the Gardens and
walked rapidly towards Portland Place. He had hardly got past the
fountain presented by Sir Jamsetjee Jeejeebhoy in wasted
benevolence, than he heard the deafening report of the bomb which
had wrecked his studio, reduced it to a tangle of iron girders and
stanchions, strewn its floor with brick rubble and thick dust, and
left his wife a human wreck, lying unconscious with a broken spine,
surrounded by splinters of glass, broken jars, porcelain trays, and
nasty-looking fragments of sponge and vertebrate anatomy. With an
almost paralyzing premonition of disaster he ran as quickly as
possible towards Park Crescent. The Marylebone Road was strewn with
glass, and a policeman--every one else had taken she