‘The sky split open. A sky of brilliant yellow light; a world of noise that filled his ears like sand at the seaside, so that afterwards there was only total silence’.

But silence...

Mum and Dad were taking their time getting to the shelter tonight. What was keeping them? When the whistling sound of the bombs began, Harry started counting - if you were still counting at ten...

‘Until last year we would have called ourselves an ordinary English family. I mean, you may think that Figgis was pretty odd - the way he could get so upset about an injured squirrel or an...