‘I have to tell you now that we have received no such communication from Herr Hitler and consequently, from 11.00 am this morning, this nation is at war with Germany. You can imagine how I must be feeling after all my strivings for peace …’ To hell with his feelings. How dared he lumber us with them! What arrogance and insensitivity. Who gave a damn how he felt when every family in the land knew that it was threatened, that it must face pain and tragedy for years to come, until peace returned to a world that could never be the same again.

Martin Boyd, the Australian novelist, was staying with us at Newlands. Neither of us had a gas mask so we walked down Eltham High Street to the Civil Defence Unit. We were each given a ridiculous cardboard box which might have contained anything. A looped length of string enabled them to be carried from the shoulder and we made for home. Entering the ‘in and out’ driveway, my sister Joss opened the front door and from the top step greeted us with her finest example of British sang froid. ‘I'm afraid we're at war.’ And then the air raid warning sounded, a banshee wail if ever there was. Would London be flattened in the next hour or so? I climbed the front steps and wondered how many times I'd done so since Joss and I returned from a visit to an uncle to find the blind and curtains drawn and to be told of Kit's death. None of us had ever got over it and never would. Maybe in the near future, an hour or so, I would be reunited with him.

We went inside to the drawing room and listened to the B.B.C., which was giving half-hourly bulletins. The R.A.F. had sent out a raid on the Kiel Canal, almost immediately after war was declared—a bellicose gesture if nothing else. Hibberd, the chief announcer and news reader, was his cool Edwardian England self, oozing King's English with every vowel and relishing them, and then the ‘All clear’ went, half an hour after that first siren sounded. How many thousand times were we to hear it?