It’s the opening he wants. The proof that he’s not talking nonsense – how would anyone without an intimate knowledge of that psychological study of children in Hull, and the effects of the bombing on them, ever know that I was involved? It certainly wasn’t something I’d ever advertised – it brought back too many painful memories. He began to pull various documents from his briefcase, and then leafed through them.

And there I was. In an appendix to the main study – reference to my fifteen-year-old self.

‘You were one of the exceptions,’ he said, pushing his glasses back up the bridge of his nose.

‘What do you mean?’ I took a couple of large gulps of my pint of bitter. I’d wanted a beer because I’d known parts of this might be personally painful. Lindemann’s former secretary – he still didn’t have a name because he evidently didn’t want to give me one – had insisted he only wanted a mineral water.

‘The Hull study was quite remarkable. The psychologist in charge of it concluded that the children and people of Hull were amazingly resilient. That despite it being the most heavily bombed city outside of London, even though at the time the rest of the country didn’t realise—’

‘A “north-east coastal town”.’

‘Exactly. Hull was almost never mentioned by name. But despite all the bombs, despite the loss of life, despite the massive number of homeless, there was no sign that the people of Hull would break. That’s why you were noted as an exception.’

‘The guy who interviewed me felt I had broken?’

‘I’m not saying that, but he concluded your reaction wasn’t typical and might have been due as much to an unhappy home life as to what had actually occurred as a result of the Hull Blitz.’

‘So the study concluded that mass bombing wouldn’t break a population’s resolve? Interesting. I’d not heard of the results before.’

The man leafed through his documents. ‘More than interesting. There were forty psychologists involved in the team, and as well as interviewing children like yourself – and getting them to write essays about their experiences – they also interviewed around seven hundred adults. So it was a very comprehensive study, and hard to argue against the results.’

‘Yet Churchill still gave the go-ahead to Bomber Harris’s campaign?’ It seemed astonishing. ‘Why?’