It is commonly considered rude to keep silent in the company of others, but voluntary silence connects rather than distances us from others whose individual differences temporarily fade away creating a shared feeling of harmony and oneness.
The stripping of pettiness from life in those early days of the war, the sense of unity and mutual help among all sorts and conditions of people, was a thing no one who was in England at that time could ever forget. There was an atmosphere of forgiveness everywhere, that most rare of human qualities...such moments reveal the beauty hidden in the most unlikely persons and affirm the truth, "what a piece of work is man, is woman!"