Residents of Golders Green often experienced a particular kind of collective dread during the V-1 flying bomb attacks of the Second World War. My father, Lionel, a Golders Green boy, used to recall that the spookiest moment was not the unmissably jagged engine noise overhead but its sudden absence. When it cut out, a weapon was usually falling and gravity taking its pull, somewhere in the darkness high above London’s most visibly Jewish neighbourhood, seeking out whomever it might to devour.
"Any load left over 'surplus to requirements' was dumped,” as a survivor of these suburban raids later described it with brutal economy, “waiting for the next almighty crash, which spelled doom for some poor soul."
One high-explosive bomb that famously thudded into the backyard of a nearby residential house during Lionel’s childhood, in September 1940 became the stuff of my family’s lore. The story was retold years later when we visited the home they shared during those wartime years at 209 Golders Green Road.
Not to worry. Those bedraggled days were supposedly long gone of course, and one only had to look out my grandparents’ lounge window to appreciate why. The peaceful pavements. The steady rhythm of pleasantly serious life in a community that had not only survived but thrived, “established, visible and unashamed”, as the cliché had it.
Everywhere, or so it seemed, there was the reassurance that one was culturally among one’s own, as much so in terms of wider Britain as my North London subset.
And yet, adjacently just over the way, at 208 Golders Green Road, there was the back entrance to what would become the same community’s Hatzola ambulance service, which ought to have been just another instrumental symbol of communal self-help. But it was here this week that one of the same area’s most venomous attacks over the subsequent 85 years has now also taken place. Talk about an adjacent view.
The events of Monday morning offered none of the clarity of those earlier historical assaults, when at least the enemy was external and universally recognised as such. But they summoned some of the same feelings. Fear, obviously. Anger. A sudden swoop of awful vulnerability – not so much having to do with foreign enemies in the sky but new enemies within.
Shortly after 1.40am, three hooded figures were caught on CCTV slithering into the small parking area where the volunteer organisation’s ambulances were parked. Accelerant was poured over the vehicles, engulfing four of them in flames. Oxygen cylinders exploded, sending shockwaves through nearby homes. By the time the fire was brought under control, three ambulances had been destroyed and the fourth badly damaged. Mercifully, no lives were lost.
Detective Chief Superintendent Luke Williams, who leads policing in north-west London, has called it a “shocking” development, confirming that the attack was being treated as an antisemitic hate crime, “ a devastating incident for our Jewish communities”. Hatzola, he said, exists for one purpose only: “to protect life, Jewish and non-Jewish alike”. To target it is to strike at that principle.
Something else, though, disappeared into the night. A vanishment obvious enough even to me following the coverage from far-flung New Zealand with a splitting moral headache. Something worth infinitely more (or perhaps a lot less) than the fee I had only just forked out for the new British passport we dual nationals now need to have in order to visit the old country.
But what exactly, I found myself wondering, does that even mean in 2026?
“Old country” has long been a harmless, if hackneyed, sentimentalism when applied to Britain. The term suggests stability, continuity, a quiet confidence in institutions and values. But never before has it felt like an oxymoron.
A country, after all, is not simply a territory or a passport; it’s a social compact. People bound together by a broad consensus about justice, under a common sovereignty, a place that knows what it is and what it owes its citizens.
Well, that consensus has frayed, mere anarchy is being loosed and – notwithstanding the late-learner prime minister’s “let me be perfectly clear” homilies – the centre certainly isn’t holding. Since the wintery end of 2023, it has often seemed absent altogether. But when those tasked with saving lives become targets, something else has shifted as well.
Golders Green has ingested slow-motion fear before, but its resilience in the face of it is also one of the oldest cultural stories I know. The question now to be loudly asked, for those of us afar as well as close at hand, is whether the nation around it remembers that promise – and whether it’s willing to keep that promise at a moment when new enemies circle overhead. Can you feel the silence?
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