It has been an almighty week of up to 250 enemy planes at one time filling my screen and the sudden feeling that the war is actually HERE, rather than over the Channel or in the air alone, after the radar station was bombed on August 12. I was secure in the well-protected bunker, our ‘tomb for the living’, when the bombs hit and though I felt them through every bone, muscle and nerve of my body, I was safe. The station even remained operational throughout the attack and we could see more enemy aircraft flooding in later on in the day. When I walked out after the all-clear had been given though, I was shocked at the mess that the bombs had caused: earth flung everywhere, a car destroyed, trees reduced to splinters.

On almost every day this week something enormous has happened. Yesterday Biggin Hill was bombed, though a message got through to say that George was alright. On the 15^th hundreds of German aircraft poured in over the skies of Britain but according to the papers the Luftwaffe was crushed.

I received a letter from George telling me about him shooting down an Me 109, crash-landing at Hawkinge and surviving a further bombing there. But even this news was not as exciting as what happened to me on the 16^th. I was in the garden of the cottage pulling up potatoes when I saw something in the sky from the corner of my eye. It looked like a dandelion seed far in the distance, slowly falling to earth. I had only just noticed it when a cry came up from next-door. ‘It’s a parachutist!’ said Jimmy. ‘Let’s go and get him.’ He was jumping up and down and pointing at the seed, which the wind was pulling closer and closer to us.

‘I’m getting my air-gun,’ shouted Jimmy and ran back to the house. A few seconds later he was running through the fields behind the houses with the gun in his hand.

‘Wait!’ I said.

‘Come on!’ he called back to me, still running.

What if Jimmy pointed a gun at the pilot and the pilot shot him, or twisted the gun from his hand and whacked him over the head with it? I ran back to the house and pulled out the air-rifle that Violet and I have been using and sprinted after Jimmy, shouting his name as loudly as I could. He was far ahead of me and I could see the airman dangling from his parachute just a few hundred feet up in the sky now and falling, falling, falling.

‘Jimmy, wait for me,’ I yelled, but still the boy kept running, scrambling over a field gate and past some horses. Just before I reached the gate I lost sight of both the parachutist and Jimmy behind a hedgerow. I tried to speed up and as I reached the gate I saw Jimmy already pointing his gun as the airman fell the final few yards to the ground and his parachute sank onto the grass. The airman had fallen over and the time it took him to pull himself up was just enough for me to catch up and stand alongside Jimmy. I was completely breathless but mustered the strength to put the gun up to my shoulder and point it straight at the airman’s head.

He stood up. I felt my heart booming in my temples and my sweaty hands shaking.

‘Good afternoon,’ he said in an almost perfect English accent as he stood up slowly, bringing his right hand to his forehead in a mock-formal salute.

‘Put your hands up, mister’, shouted out Jimmy with shocking assurance.

And the German airman put his hands above his head and smiled. ‘Please don’t shoot me, young man, or you, pretty lady,’ he said to us. ‘I will do anything you say.’

I had expected to hate this man but I was surprised by how handsome he was when he smiled, shocked at how he looked the same age or younger even than George, and alarmed by my feelings of sympathy rather than rage even though, for all I knew, he may have shot George out of the sky that very day.

‘Go that way,’ I said without smiling, pointing with my gun at the gate we had just come through, and we started walking.

When we reached the gate, though, a gaggle of armed men of middle to old age were trotting down through the next field with shotguns and pitch-forks at the ready. It was the Home Guard.

‘We’ll take over from here, miss,’ said the farmer at the front of the group. I loosened my grip on the rifle I’d been pointing and for the first time realised that if the gun had been a small animal I would have crushed the life out of it.