The first action we saw was four nights later when Luftwaffe bombers, perhaps mistakenly, dropped a few loads on the City, reddening our eastern skyline. The RAF retaliated the following night with a raid on Berlin. Sporadic bombings ensued, enough to send us scuttling to the shelter, but not to keep us down for very long. Dovidl and I whined to be let out, ostensibly with bursting bladders, actually to witness the aerial ballet of tracers and planes. ‘Just don’t go getting yourselves killed,’ Florrie would cry, as we ran up before the all-clear sirens sounded.

The war finally came home on 7 September, a summery Saturday, when the Luftwaffe gave up trying to outfight the RAF for aerial supremacy and sent hundreds of bombers to flatten the docks and industries of the East End. Night after night they returned, straying and spraying death indiscriminately all over London, sometimes perishing in a hail of flak. On 9 September, I saw two bombers falling from the sky, pierced and blazing; Dovidl claimed to have counted four. ‘Get the Fokkers,’ exhorted Florrie, in her Hampshire burr; at least, I think that’s what she said. We were quickly learning to tell a Messerschmitt from a Spitfire. The battle of Britain had become the battle for London and we were thrillingly on the front line, or so we told ourselves.

In reality, we were about five miles from the incendiary epicentre but enough bombs came our way, either in error or jettisoned as the German killer packs wheeled off homewards, to crater the district with crashed houses and casualties. One street after another suffered hits, known as ‘incidents’. The stench of burning timbers, brick rubble, broken sewers and putrefaction was inescapable. Death could strike any of us, with the courtesy of three minutes’ warning.

‘Aren’t you scared?’ I asked Dovidl one day at sunset, as we gazed down from Primrose Hill on the smouldering city.

‘It’s so beautiful,’ he gasped. ‘Look at the tracers, the reds and yellows shooting up through grey smoke, the green fire of those incendiary bombs. It’s magnificent, like a ballet, a Firebird.’

‘This is not art,’ I said tartly. ‘It’s life and death.’

‘So is art,’ he said, ‘when it’s good.’

The absence of fear was striking, not just in Dovidl but in our schoolmates and most of the adults we knew. Mortality became matter of fact. Perhaps lack of sleep disabled the panic button, or maybe it was fatalism. A neighbourhood pub, the Queen’s Arms, proclaimed itself ‘More Open Than Usual’ after losing half its roof and the saloon bar. ‘We can take it,’ was the common slogan, uttered not so much in defiance as in dull determination. Coping with nightly air-raids became a routine like any other.