On St John’s Wood station, one did not speak to a platform neighbour unless formally introduced. The Underground, never officially designated a place of refuge, lacked the most elementary conveniences. Urgent calls of nature were attended to at the edge of the platform, spatteringly over the line. The St John’s Wood Society delicately erected a large pair of portable screens, Victorian and lacquered, at either end of the platform (men to the north, women to the south), and a uniformed Bakerloo Line official would appear each morning to hose down the lines before the first trains passed through. But the stench, by midnight, was suffocating and the haughtier type of resident, huddled over coffee cups, sought scapegoats for their discomfort. Foreigners and Jews were the obvious target. I was so relieved that Dovidl had shed his accent.

Florrie, ten years our senior, attended energetically to a burgeoning social life. ‘I’m a girl that respects herself,’ I heard her tell a soldier in the Underground stairwell. ‘He was coming on a bit fast,’ she explained next morning. ‘Nice fellow, though. I expect I’ll be seeing him again tonight.’

Florrie had a responsive eye. She was soon running three other-rank boyfriends, with a fourth in Egypt. Primping and perming her dancing blonde curls as she prepared for the night’s skirmish, she regaled us, half comprehending, with the uncomplicated foibles of fighting men on furlough. ‘I told Derek we couldn’t go any further without us getting engaged,’ she prattled. ‘Of course, he doesn’t know what I get up to with Stanley.’ Florrie handled her young men as capably as she coped with us boys, reducing virile masculinity to pliant, amusing companionship.

My parents, after the first intensive onslaught, came home more nights than not. They were needed in their own neck of the Wood as bombs fell and the privileged were imperilled. Father joined a Home Guard unit under Sergeant Eric Blair, whose political essays, signed ‘George Orwell’, I devoured in the weeklies. The St John’s Wood Company met in a drill hall in Allitsen Road and spent its time struggling to master an archaic artillery piece. Most nights Father fire-watched on the roof of Langford Court, a modern block off Abbey Road where Orwell lived in a fifth-floor apartment. His future publisher, Fred Warburg, volunteered to join the unit and the rooftop tone was intellectually elevated. I begged Father to introduce me: Orwell was more of a hero to me than Dan Dare or Winston Churchill – he was the epitome of distilled wisdom.