My concern that central London would be bombed has been realised and my fear now is that this is just the start of a long and exhausting bombing campaign by the enemy which will kill thousands if not millions of civilians. The first attack came on the night of August 24. Bombs fell in the City, on department stores on Oxford Street, in Bethnal Green and there was a direct hit on the north door of St Giles’ Church in Cripplegate, near the old London Wall.  Only nine people were killed in the raid, and 58 injured, but a raid on Portsmouth earlier on the same day killed more than 100 people and injured many more. Civilians have been the victims of bombing attacks for almost three months now – more than 900 of them in all – but bombs dropping in the middle of our greatest city is a new development.

Churchill would not stand for it, of course, so Bomber Command retaliated by raiding Berlin the following night with Hampden and Wellington bombers. I understand that Goering once boasted that Berlin would never be bombed, so this is an embarrassment for him. Not much damage was done but I’m sure it’s enough to mean that retaliation will follow retaliation and we are now locked in a tit-for-tat battle in which civilians effectively become combatants.

It is not only aerial bombardment that we face in Britain now either. For the first time ever, Britain has been under attack by land-based artillery on the continent. Enormous guns sited near Calais have been pounding the coastline around Dover. Our bombers have been relentlessly attacking them, but at the moment it is unclear whether the guns have been put out of action in the long term.

I’m pleased to be writing in my diary though, that I’m nearing completion of at least the first draft of my novel. I’ve written it in a real hurry over the past few months. I’ve had the idea for so long but it has only been with the threat of invasion hanging over my head, a little like the threat of a deadline at the newspaper, that I have been able to put in so much work on it. Before there were always other things to do instead, like going to the cinema and the pub when I wasn’t at work. But now I’ve realised that time is finite and that if I do want to achieve my ambitions then I have to do something about it now.

The threat of invasion does still loom very large, of course, and while I try to find a publisher for the book, the landing barges could arrive, and by the time the book is printed, Joseph Goebbels could be in charge of everything to do with ‘culture’ in this country. I don’t think he’d like my book; he’d have it burnt no doubt, like the Gestapo did with so much literature they didn’t like when they strengthened their hold over Germany. I thought that was a bad omen at the time and it reminded me of what the German writer Heinrich Heine once said: ‘Where they burn books, so too, in the end, will they burn human beings.’

This reminds me that I need to plan another visit to the hospital at East Grinstead where they are doing so much work to help men who have been burned already in this war. I want to do a proper feature about the place and I hope I’ll get round to it this week.

I note that the RAF Benevolent Fund has started an appeal this week in the Chronicle; it’s a worthy cause and I must remember to donate some money to it myself.