But all the same, the cheek of it! The lengths that women will go! Sometimes you can’t help kind of admiring them.

SIX

AFTER BREAKFAST I strolled out into the market-place. It was a lovely morning, kind of cool and still, with a pale yellow light like white wine playing over everything. The fresh smell of the morning was mixed up with the smell of my cigar. But there was a zooming noise from behind the houses, and suddenly a fleet of great black bombers came whizzing over. I looked up at them. They seemed to be bang overhead.

The next moment I heard something. And at the same moment, if you’d happened to be there, you’d have seen an interesting instance of what I believe is called conditioned reflex. Because what I’d heard—there wasn’t any question of mistake—was the whistle of a bomb. I hadn’t heard such a thing for twenty years, but I didn’t need to be told what it was. And without taking any kind of thought I did the right thing. I flung myself on my face.

After all I’m glad you didn’t see me. I don’t suppose I looked dignified I was flattened out on the pavement like a rat when it squeezes under a door. Nobody else had been half as prompt. I’d acted so quickly that in the split second while the bomb was whistling down I even had time to be afraid that it was all a mistake and I’d made a fool of myself for nothing.

But the next moment—ah!

BOOM—BRRRRR!

A noise like the Day of Judgment, and then a noise like a ton of coal falling on to a sheet of tin. That was falling bricks. I seemed to kind of melt into the pavement. “It’s started,” I thought. “I knew it! Old Hitler didn’t wait. Just sent his bombers across without warning.”

And yet here’s a peculiar thing. Even in the echo of that awful, deafening crash, which seemed to freeze me up from top to toe, I had time to think that there’s something grand about the bursting of a big projectile. What does it sound like? It’s hard to say, because what you hear is mixed up with what you’re frightened of. Mainly it gives you a vision of bursting metal. You seem to see great sheets of iron bursting open. But the peculiar thing is the feeling it gives you of being suddenly shoved up against reality. It’s like being woken up by somebody shying a bucket of water over you. You’re suddenly dragged out of your dreams - by a clang of bursting mead, and it’s terrible, and it’s real.

There was a sound of screams and yells, and also of car brakes being suddenly jammed on. The second bomb which I was waiting for didn’t fall. I raised my head a little. On every side people seemed to be rushing round and screaming. A car was skidding diagonally across the road. I could hear a woman’s voice shrieking, “The Germans! The Germans!” To the right I had a vague impression of a man’s round white face, rather like a wrinkled paper bag, looking down at me. He was kind of dithering: