Then blow me if the air-raid siren didn’t go off! For a good few seconds all three of us stared at each other. We’d heard it before, taken no notice of it. But that was before the war, which was only a few minutes ago. Now it was the war, so there was every chance that we were going to die.

Bernard moved first – not towards me: he lunged for Arthur’s gas mask, grabbed it from the sideboard and threw it at his father. I waited for him to throw me mine but it was his next. I had to grab mine myself and Bernard was yelling, ‘Gas masks! Gas masks!’ And any loud noise made Arthur shake. So ‘Gas masks! Gas masks,’ and the siren made Arthur tremble so much his fumbling hands could make no sense of the box let alone the mask – even though we’d practised it often enough. And I was wondering, Will he start coughing, choking, spluttering with the poison while I’m putting on mine?

Bernard was still shouting although his voice sounded like it was coming from a deep hole with his mask over his face. And for the first time I had to tell him, ‘Oh, please, shut up,’ which was a bit of a turn-up considering they might have been the last words I ever said to him. But he didn’t hear, too busy unlocking the back door. I couldn’t breathe with the gas mask on – no air let alone poison gas was getting through. Arthur’s was round the back of his head, the straps pressing down over his nose and he was shaking so much that anyone else seeing him might have thought he was trying to make us laugh.

Then I heard, ‘Schnell, schützen Sie sich!’ being yelled. And I thought, the war’s on for, what? no more than five minutes, and there’s Germans coming down our stairs. I was trembling then. ‘Bernard,’ I shouted, as he heard it – ‘Schützen Sie sich!’ and some other foreign words. And I swear he looked startled, which is odd because he had a gas mask on. It was me that remembered, ‘It’s Mr Plant!’ just before our lodger, a refugee from outside Berlin, ran into the room. I let out such a long breath it steamed up my mask. And Mr Plant’s arms were flapping like someone was pulling them on a string from the ceiling.

‘Gas mask?’ Bernard asked him. And he looked at us one at a time, then slapped his hand to his forehead muttering something nobody could understand – except Hitler if he was here. ‘You’ll be gassed alive, man,’ Bernard shouted at him. And this gent started to walk out of the room, to go up the sixty-five stairs to get his blinking mask.

I grabbed him. ‘No, get in the shelter, there’s no time now.’

Bernard shouted at me then: ‘He’ll need his mask.’

He was not a young man. ‘It’ll take him till next Tuesday to get it,’ I said. ‘There’s no time.’

With the door open I looked up at a blue sky. Dazzling sun threw the shade of next door’s tree across the garden, while a blackbird on the wall held its head up to let out its song. Until, that is, it saw the four of us scrambling across the yard. I thought the sky would be blackened with the gently floating wings of parachuting Nazis. But nothing. Just the bird watching us silently from the safety of the tree.

So much for women and children first: Bernard helped Arthur on to the steps of the shelter, whispering for him to ‘get a grip’, while I was still hurrying along Mr Plant, who was grumbling away in German. Then I stepped on to the ladder of the shelter and that was when I looked down. Blow me, Arthur had been out there day in day out and he’d not dug us a shelter: he’d burrowed a tunnel. I swear I couldn’t see the bottom. I climbed out again as Mr Plant passed by me, and Bernard managed a look of confusion behind the mask.

‘I’m not going down there – we’ll be buried alive,’ I told him.

‘Come on, Queenie,’ he said, all agitated.

‘Not on your life. They’re not meant to be that deep.’ I knew it had taken Arthur a long time to dig it, coming in night after night mucky and excited as a boy from a sandpit. Bernard would help at weekends. ‘How’s it coming along?’ I’d ask him. ‘Fine,’ he’d say. I didn’t know they’d dug half-way to Australia. ‘I’m not being buried alive, Bernard. I’ll die up here, if you don’t mind.’

And I thought I heard my husband say, ‘Suit yourself,’ but it might have just been the mask. He started to climb in but then the all-clear sounded. The half of him still sticking out of the ground reminded me of a worm. I took my gas mask off to giggle.

When I got back inside I talked to no one. I went straight to our bedroom, shut the door and turned the key in the lock. That raid was the most exciting thing that had ever happened in this house. Tingling with life, that was how I felt. I took two steps and leaped up on to the bed. There was no doubt about it, I was looking forward to this war.

When the real war started Mr Plant was gone.

‘That’s better all round,’ Bernard said.

‘What do you mean?’ I asked.

It was all that ministry stuff Bernard complained about, although he was always at the bank and never at home to deal with it. The sinister government man with his notebook and sly looks over my shoulder, wanting to know who visited Mr Plant. Where did they go, what did they say?

‘He sits in his room,’ I told him. Sometimes he would come down and sit with Arthur on the step looking out on to the yard. He’d tell Arthur, in English with an accent better than Lord Haw-Haw’s, about the things he and his wife used to grow in their garden just outside Berlin. So when this ministry man visited to check up on our refugee, all I had to do was tell him, ‘Nothing and no one.’

But Bernard said, ‘These Jews are more trouble than they’re worth.’

They came really early in the morning to get him. ‘Where are you taking him?’ I asked. Internment for his own protection. He wasn’t the only one who went from the street. There was a woman, too, and a family with little children from further down the road. They were put in the back of a lorry, although they were only taking them to Olympia. Mr Plant just had the little leather case that he’d first arrived with when Bernard couldn’t find an excuse quick enough not to give him the room. Just before leaving, Mr Plant tipped his hat at me. On seeing the lorry, he had stopped, frozen, for a second then shrugged.

‘He was German, you can’t be too careful,’ Bernard said, before going upstairs to lay newspaper down in the room.

‘You devils, you devils!’ I yelled, when I heard the first bombs exploding. ‘You devils.’ Those terrifying noises. They were hardly real – I had no image in my mind that went with a racket like that. It wasn’t wardrobes falling down the stairs. It wasn’t a lorry full of cans spilling over a road. It wasn’t the coalman dropping hundreds of sacks on the pavement outside. Our neighbours weren’t all slamming their doors at once. But somewhere people were learning about that din. Someone now had a vivid picture of what went on with all that commotion.

Bombers arrive like thunderclouds. Can you see them? Maybe not. But the threat sits on you like an ache. Majestic almost, those dark formations grimly determined on their target. Acks-acks shouting, ‘Over here, over here!’ trying to distract them but making no difference. We couldn’t get Arthur into the shelter when the real bombs came. No amount of coaxing or pushing could get him into another trench during a bombardment. He was off. Into his room and under the bed as if a bayonet was prodding his backside.

So it was just me and Bernard in the shelter, which was now a regulation four feet down. A little bunk each. A chair that Bernard usually sat on, it being next to the little table with the lamp. His knees seemed to be everywhere I turned, knobbly as a hammerhead even through his trousers. He read his paper, sniffing and making that queer dislodging-a-tickling-hair face. He’d clear his throat with such a phlegmy noise I thought he’d have to spit but then he’d blow his nose pushing his crumpled hankie up each nostril in turn to scour it out. The shelter started with the smell of damp earth, sharp as manure, and I felt like a daffodil waiting for spring. But after a few hours it became his breath – tobacco mixed with whiffs of digesting potato from dinner. Then the stale, under-the-blanket smells of a lifeless mouth. And there was me saying, ‘What was that? Did you hear that one? Oh, God, someone’s got it tonight . . . I hope Arthur didn’t hear that . . . Do you think he’s all right? That was close. Was that closer?’ and hearing absolutely nothing in reply. That shelter was so blinking noisy and so bloody quiet all at once.