I followed Churchill to the City the following day and interviewed people who had seen what had happened. There were terrible stories and there have been many more since: direct hits on bomb shelters and hospitals; charred bodies being pulled from the remains of buildings and shelters, whole families wiped out in seconds. 400 more civilians were killed the following night. I was not prepared for the reality of how awful it would be, even though the numbers are actually less than what was feared in such a scenario.

The newspapers have been reporting the incorrigible spirit of the people facing up to these attacks with bravery and courage. And it’s true; they have. But there is also real terror as well. I share it. I’ve seen what these bombs can do.

I had planned to go to East Grinstead to write a major piece for the Chronicle on the remarkable work that is going on in the hospital there. But the enemy’s new aerial blitzkrieg on London has changed my plans. I still hope to go soon and write a story that needs to be written. The aircraftmen are needed more than ever to protect the people of this city from the indiscriminate bombs of outrageous fortune and those who are burned and injured defending their country deserve the best treatment there is. I also feel that the work of the doctors and nurses needs to be celebrated and is no less courageous than that of the fighting men.

Since the RAF Benevolent Fund launched an appeal on August 30 I gather that money has been pouring in. This is a good thing. Many of the pilots I saw at East Grinstead will need help in the future. Therefore, the RAFBF needs to be well-financed so that it can help to look after them and give them the independence that they deserve.

I got a letter from Mary Lawrence, the nurse that I met at East Grinstead. She asked me for a recommendation for a play to go and see at the theatre in London. I don’t have the time to go to the theatre, but I’m sure I can find out what’s good and what’s not, though I’m not sure it’s wise to come to London right now. I will write back to her. She seemed like a lovely lady but I think I’m rather too wedded to my writing and my bachelor lifestyle to consider a romantic attachment.

After all, now I’ve finished my novel, I need to work hard on getting it published. If this war ever finishes and someone asks me what I did in it, I’m not quite sure whether I could tell the truth. ‘I wrote a comic novel’, sounds more than inappropriate; it sounds obscene. But I hope that if I can make people laugh then I will have succeeded in doing something useful, for without laughter what hope is there for life?

That impression was confirmed to me when I arrived at Biggin Hill on September 4. My goodness! I could not believe the amount of devastation that the bombs have caused. The place is unrecognisable from the aerodrome which I saw at the end of July. There are almost no buildings left standing whatsoever. The runway itself is covered in holes that people – ground crews, WAAFs and local people, all filthy and covered in dust – are helping to fill in. But amazingly, despite all of this, the place somehow remains operational, or at least semi-operational: rather than the four squadrons which had previously been flying there, now there is only one.

I found George ‘Sherry’ Sheridan talking to his nervous flight engineer, Frank Edwards, next to his Hurricane. If I had been amazed at the change in Biggin Hill, I was amazed even more by the change in George. Frank was simply dirtier and a little more dishevelled than he had been; still pale, skinny, withdrawn and somehow enigmatic. George though, had lost that flush of youth I had seen in him before, the healthy and athletic sheen of a young man in his prime. It had been replaced by steeliness and grim determination. He looked shattered and his face was thinner. Yet some form of wisdom also glimmered in his eyes. He had looked death in the face every day for more than three months now and he seemed to be able to return its stare without flinching. Of course, he was still a thoroughly charming young man with all the carefree manners and insouciance that I’ve come to expect from his breed. But he had changed, was changing. How could he not?

He told me that he had been told to stand down from the front line with the rest of his squadron and go to Pembrey in Wales for a rest. But he had resisted the order and asked to stay.

‘And I told them that it had to be with Frank as well,’ he said, heartily slapping his mechanic on the back. ‘Frank’s my lucky charm you see and as long as he’s looking after my plane I’m sure that nothing will happen to me. Trouble now is that he’s as much at risk on the ground as I am in the air.’

‘How do you feel about being Mr Sheridan’s lucky charm, Frank?’ I asked him with my notebook and pencil poised to note down his answer.

‘I have no idea about superstition, Mr Rhodes’ he said a little hesitantly. ‘We don’t live in a logical world, that’s for certain. It would be very reassuring if life could work a bit more like the mechanical things we’ve invented for ourselves – like clockwork or a Merlin engine. But it doesn’t. I don’t think that there can be a god either, because I can’t imagine that a god if he did exist would allow so much violence and pain. But there might be such a thing as luck. I hope that I am lucky for Mr Sheridan because he deserves all the luck he can get.’

At this point another man had walked over to join us. He introduced himself as Squadron Leader Stephen Tudor Jones, the Intelligence Officer at Biggin Hill.

‘So you’ve been listening to our engineer-philosopher have you, Mr Rhodes,’ he said with a broad smile. ‘There’s more philosophy in salt-of-the-earth chaps like Edwards here than in all the universities in England. I should know, I was at Cambridge with Wittgenstein, and I never understood a word he said. But Leading Aircraftman Edwards here, well, he understands life which is something that Sherry here appreciates, hey George?’

‘Well, quite, Squadron Leader. I couldn’t do without him. He’s an invaluable asset to me and to Biggin Hill.’

I left feeling reassured that there was still some spirit, pluck and humour remaining at the airfield but also worried about George, his strange mechanic and the eccentric intelligence officer whose nickname is Canary (because he played one season of football for Norwich City). Are the daily bombings, the tiredness and the pressure driving them all mad?

As I drove back, puffing on my pipe and thinking hard, the roads were full of army trucks belching exhaust fumes as they headed toward the coast. It strikes me that the country is at its highest state of readiness for imminent invasion since France fell at the end of May. That, at least, is what it looks like.

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.

The German air offensive has continued to increase in its intensity, though the RAF also seems to be beating them back with great effectiveness. The ratio of our planes lost compared to theirs on some of the biggest days of the battle so far such as August 15 and 18 have been vastly in our favour and overall, at a conservative estimate, I’d say we’re downing at least two of their planes for every one of ours. As well as this though, is the fact that far more of our pilots will be able to fly again, whereas their baled-out airmen are being captured all over the country, from Dover to Newcastle.

Enemy attacks have also taken place on some of the suburbs of London and I fear that at some point soon there will be large civilian casualties in Britain’s major cities. It reminds me of what an Italian military theorist said many years before this war that in nations at war, ‘all of their citizens will become combatants, since all of them will be exposed to the aerial offensives of the enemy’. There has been considerable preparation for aerial bombardment of civilians but I fear that many thousands of people will still be killed. And people don’t yet fully believe the bombs might fall on them. We ran a story about this in the Chronicle the other day, and I’ve seen evidence of it with my own eyes. When in recent days the air raid sirens have sounded in central London, many people don’t rush to the shelters but stand and look up into the sky, waiting to see what might fly over. I want to yell to them: ‘don’t be stupid: run to the shelter’, as I’m certain that at some point very soon bombs will indeed fall here.

My fear is also a selfish one; how long is it until the bombardment turns to the centres of power in Britain, the offices of government and the military and the heart of the ‘propaganda machine’ that is us, the newspapers, which help in some way to keep this country going? After all, what would Britain be without its newspapers!

The attack was part of a concerted effort by the Germans to hit what I’ve been informed off the record is our secret weapon in this air war: the stations which detect, using radio waves, the number and position of incoming enemy planes. On the 12^th, Me 110s hit stations at Dover, Rye, Pevensey and Dunkirk, though according to the RAF, there was no long term impact on any strike.

This strike on the 12^th though, was nothing compared to what has taken place in the following days since. The Germans are now throwing hundreds of planes into the attack every day; an aerial blitzkrieg of the same type that won them Poland, France and the low countries. Perhaps a thousand German aircraft flew over Britain’s skies yesterday. They bombed the airfield at Croydon, killing 62 people and injuring 172 more. They hit Hawkinge again, and crucial Chain Home stations in the south-east.  But the indications are that they suffered a humiliating blow at the hands of the RAF fighters. Some of the papers today are reporting almost 150 planes shot down yesterday, though I suspect that the eventual total is actually somewhere closer to half that number. The RAF lost 30 planes but only 17 pilots were killed. The battle really is on now.

There’s no doubt that added to the total of 17 pilots killed, there will be many more badly injured and as the statistics rolled in I thought about the patients I had seen at the hospital in East Grinstead only a week ago. What will happen to these men once they’ve been patched up the best they can by the talented ‘Maestro’? Surely their lives will never be the same again and many of them, whether they have burnt or have amputated limbs, will require help.

I know that the RAF Benevolent Fund was created after the last war for this purpose and I imagine that they will have a very important role to play in looking after many of the RAF casualties in the following months and years.

I suggested to Ted the idea of a big feature story about the work going on at East Grinstead. He said he didn’t think that our readers would want to know about injured and disfigured airmen and that it wasn’t good for morale. But I argued that we had a responsibility to not forget these valiant men, not bury them because they make us feel uncomfortable; not to forget the costs of war as well as the spoils of victory. ‘Alright,’ he eventually grumbled, ‘I’ll speak to some of the top brass at the RAF and see what they think.’

A conversation took place and Ted summoned me to his office. ‘The RAF have agreed to you doing the story,’ he said. ‘They say they want to stand by their men. They’re all heroes as far as they’re concerned, which means that I’m happy for you to run the piece.’

I’ve been hearing a lot about pilots who’ve been terribly burned while flying, particularly Hurricane pilots, whose fuel tanks are more vulnerable to enemy fire than those of the Spitfire’s. Horrendous injuries to our boys are not the type of thing that the Chronicle likes to cover and old Ted has told journalists on the paper to steer clear of anything that differs from the official version of RAF pilots as athletic, handsome young men. But I heard that pioneering work is being done at the hospital in East Grinstead to patch-up the worst casualties from the air battle; and perhaps the innovative surgery would make a good story. I decided to see for myself (without telling Ted).

My trip on August 5 was my second outing to south-east England in the past two weeks and I was equally surprised on this occasion by the way that normal rural life seemed largely to be continuing as usual, despite it being a kind of ‘front line’. Surrey and East Sussex have not yet been desecrated by bombs and burnt out aircraft, barbed wire and landmines. Instead there was the same green and pleasant countryside that was there before the war, filled with farm animals, crops, flowers, hedgerows and birdsong, as though the war was nothing but a bad dream. The only thing that really gave it away was when I was passed on a few occasions by large convoys of lorries carrying ammunition and other supplies.

I was shown to Ward Three at the hospital at East Grinstead where a very pretty nurse with dark brown hair and perfect pale skin introduced herself as the ward charge nurse, Mary Lawrence. ‘You’re here to see the Maestro, are you?’ she asked me, and then giggled at my look of obvious bafflement. ‘Oh, I’m sorry, that’s what we call him here: the Maestro. There’s really no-one quite like him, you see.’

‘Anyhow, he’s in theatre at the moment and I expect he will be there for another half an hour or so. Would you like to wait? I’ll make you a cup of tea.’

I accepted, and while I waited for thenurse to make me tea, I looked around me for the first time at the ward. It was a long, low shack, set apart from the other hospital buildings and containing 40 beds in two rows, with a mini-grand piano, a gramophone player and a wireless, which, while I was waiting was blaring out some light orchestral music. I looked around at some of the faces in the beds and waved greetings to those who were awake, which were cheerfully returned. Yet I confess I was shocked at the devastation caused by the burns: the skin looked as though it had literally been torn from their faces.

Nurse Lawrence came back with a mug of steaming tea and we spoke for a few minutes in which time I saw that there might be some sadness in those eyes that seemed at first so sparkling. Then the Theatre Sister came into the ward and said that the Maestro was ready for me. I had a good chat with him as I followed him round the ward and he is a fascinating, serious, yet warm-hearted man, clearly doing miraculous things – the way he described grafting new eyelids onto the faces of the men was one of the most remarkable things I’ve ever heard. I came away thinking that if anyone deserved their nickname, then it was probably him.

As I left, Nurse Lawrence said goodbye to me.

‘I’ve always wanted to go to the theatre in London,’ she said, ‘but I doubt that I ever shall. I’m more of a country girl, after all. But if I wrote to you in London, would you write back and tell me what it is like to go to the theatre there? I should love to know.’

‘Of course,’ I said, hoping that she would write, ‘please send me a letter to the Chronicle on Fleet Street. Goodbye now.’

 I want to run a story on the place and do interviews not just with ‘the Maestro’ but also the patients and nurses as well – and especially Nurse Lawrence. But I’ll have to run it past Ted first.

Mrs Sheridan pointed out that the job of a bus conductor was hardly a very skilled one, the task of punching a ticket elementary, and that I should have pointed this out in the article rather than letting the conductor, with his patronising words, have the last say. It made me chuckle to read that quote back and I have to agree with Mrs Sheridan that being a bus conductor should be within grasp of most women’s abilities. She mentioned that there are many women doing far more skilful jobs at the moment, just as they did in the First World War and its immediate aftermath. Everything she writes is true and I will try to make sure that I write about women’s war effort in a better way from now on – as long as I can sneak it past Ted, that is! I have written Jane Sheridan a reply. And then, quite strangely, a couple of days later I met her husband, George Sheridan, who is a Hurricane pilot based at Biggin Hill. He had baled out of his plane and landed at a village not far from Dover, where I had gone to see the new balloon barrage on July 31. I gave him a lift back to Biggin Hill and interviewed him. After all, a journalist like me will never turn down the opportunity for good copy. He was a charming young man, and rather dashing looking, but with a hint of steel to those boyish blue eyes.

The RAF has been doing amazing work in the air to put back the invasion that still looks as though it will inevitably happen sooner rather than later. On July 29 we reported Goering as having said: ‘I only await the signal’. And in the US yesterday, Mr Henry L. Stimson, President Roosevelt’s Republican Secretary of War, warned Congress that Britain may fall within 30 days. There are many dissenting voices to this point of view in America, I gather, but there are also many who agree with Stimson.  Churchill, though, remains resolute in that gruff, bulldog manner of his and it does strike me that as long as the RAF can continue to repulse the Luftwaffe then the chance of invasion will diminish. For it is only with full air superiority that the Germans will have any chance of a successful invasion.

It is this sense of uncertainty that makes life alternately thrilling and exhausting at the moment. But I have found that the tiredness has made me think more creatively about my novel and I’ve even managed to scribble another chapter in the past week. When you’re living in a world of dreams, writing about people who don’t really exist becomes far easier.

But in the real world I expect that we shall soon know if we can continue to resist the German fingers that are stretching out from the continent towards us.

The public have donated more than two million pounds to the cause of manufacturing more aircraft and a number of public figures have also publically come forward to buy entire planes, at around £5,000 a piece. Spitfires seem to have caught the public imagination but Hurricanes are far quicker and easier to manufacture and they are the workhorse of the RAF effort. The pots and pans campaign is supposed to be turning all kinds of domestic metal into aeroplanes, though I rather doubt that this is possible. But I’m sure it has helped to improve morale across the whole country with all kinds of people feeling as though they too are making a difference. That’s very important in a war, I think: having an active, engaged population rather than a passive and fearful one.

Although manufacturing is going from strength to strength I gather that if the air war continues over a long period it is the replacement of the pilots that will become a greater problem. Training periods have already been reduced and as less qualified airmen take to the skies it’s likely that rates of success will suffer. I fear that there will be many men killed in the planes and many more terribly injured and scarred for life. I’m planning to write about a plastic surgeon who’s doing great work in Sussex to burnt pilots and I plan to visit him in the next few weeks, assuming we make it through the next few weeks that is (no longer am I able to plan my movements more than a day in advance – the war has ended all that).

Almost a week ago now I went down to Dover and watched with my own eyes a whole series of dogfights and aerial skirmishes out over the Channel. In the confusing melee, high up and criss-crossed by vapour trails and smoke, I found it impossible to make out which aircraft belonged to the RAF and which were Luftwaffe apart from the distinctive Stuka dive-bombers. I heard later that five Messerschmitts had been shot down for the loss of just two Hurricanes. I could hear very little of the battle overhead, either – the only sounds were of the British AA guns pounding away, apparently indiscriminately. I wonder how often it is that the guns hit a friendly target rather than an enemy one? This is an issue that will certainly be kept off the newspaper pages. I even heard a rumour that one Spitfire squadron decided to shoot down their own commanding officer because they felt his tactics had caused so many casualties, yet he would not change them. Further investigation of stories such as these, though, is completely pointless – no-one would want to listen in the current climate and I expect I would lose my job if I even started to ask questions.

As a Yorkshireman living in London I have long been accustomed to such prejudice, particularly from grumpy Fleet Street stalwarts like Ted, and it is by now like water off a well-oiled duck’s back. In fact my accent has become much more southern since I arrived here in 1919 as a young man who had only just missed going to France to fight in the last war. I wish these days that I visited Yorkshire more often, but the truth is that visits to my ageing parents have for a long time been far too infrequent as the one marriage in my life – to the newspaper and my profession – has become rather all-consuming.

The past week has clearly seen a major development in the air war that is taking place in the skies above us, but so far the RAF appears to be holding its own against the German raiders, though it is very difficult to get an accurate picture of how many victories have been scored against enemy planes. I fear that all newspapers, including ours, are exaggerating victories to such an extent that it is concealing the real story of what is taking place in the air. It’s actually likely that numerous fighter pilots are each claiming the same scalp in something like this manner: one Spitfire hits a German bomber and turns out of the action. The bomber, which has been hit, is still airworthy but more vulnerable and is hit by two more Spitfires, neither of whom has seen the other’s attack. Now the bomber is in real trouble with smoke billowing from its engines and the pilot injured. He desperately looks for a place to put it down but meanwhile a fourth fighter pilot sees the bomber in trouble and gives it another burst of gunfire, which finally finishes it off. All four pilots claim the same victory and before the authorities are able to check the numbers, we report a morale-boosting total.

But there has also been much other news as well, and not all of it directly connected with the war. A woman has been charged with a triple murder in the village of Matfield in Kent – a highly unusual crime in which a single pig-skin glove left at the scene of the crime looks like it will be the most incriminating piece of evidence. I gather that she was a jealous lover of a married man and that she shot his wife, daughter and maid in cold blood. It will be a sensational trial that we shall cover in the Chronicle later this summer, no doubt.

On an entirely different note I was very happy to see that the great comic novelist, and a hero of mine, P. G. Wodehouse, is safe in France after the German invasion caught him unawares at his house in Normandy. I can imagine that the Nazis will be rich pickings for Wodehouse’s humour: ‘I met an SS officer who gave the impression that in his youth he had missed an important train. It evidently still preyed on his mind’, is the kind of joke I could imagine him making.

I gather that Hitler will be addressing the Reichstag this evening to give a speech that I expect will be a final appeal to Churchill to come to terms. He is wasting his breath (and from past experience, I expect he’ll waste a lot of it!)

I ought anyway to write a piece for the Chronicle along the lines that Hitler’s invasion is already running behind schedule. Every hour that the invasion does not happen is in Britain’s favour as the organisation of defences and the production of munitions and aeroplanes seems to be improving all the time under Churchill’s premiership and Beaverbrook’s administration of aircraft production. We’ve been instructed of course, that we need to keep civilian morale high and I guess this is one of the major contributions that journalists like me can make to the war effort. And I’ve no doubt that this is the type of story that will please the old sod Massingham no end.

The article is meant to be written in the first person but it is not quite an honest reflection of my personal views (how like the journalist, indeed). I have seen some of the coastal defences and although they may be improving, at the moment most of them are in a terrible state and I get the impression that a foreign army could almost stroll in were it not for the Navy and RAF. This is not a truth any newspaper can reveal, though.

Work is so all-consuming at the moment that there is no time for my light-hearted novel; even my diary has to become my drafting board for articles. The only chance I get to write in it is in the morning before I head to the Chronicle office. Then I will spend the daylight hours researching stories before returning to Fleet Street in the evening to file my copy until late at night. Afterwards I’ll briefly stop in at the Cheshire Cheese, then walk up Farringdon Road, through Hatton Gardens, up Theobald’s Road and home to my bed, just around the corner from where Dickens used to live. I sometimes wish that my career had worked out a bit more like Dickens, who also began his professional life as a journalist. But I suppose that there aren’t too many people like Dickens around, either in his lifetime or mine.

Anyway, here’s the draft of the piece that I’ll try and file at the Chronicle later:

We have made a gain that we did not expect: a week. It may not seem like a huge victory but Hitler’s ‘Invasion of Britain’ is, as far as I’m aware, already lagging behind its original timetable.

And this week our defensive power has increased enormously in the following ways:

• by building new defence posts;
• by aircraft production;
• by army equipment and imported weapons;
• by training and organisation of local defence units.

I personally didn’t think that it was realistic for Hitler to strike at British shores as soon as last week but I was led to believe that his intention was to invade as early as possible. My own belief was that after the fall of Paris the earliest possible date for an invasion would be July 18. Since the Germans got to Paris, though, Hitler suffered a major setback when he was unable to get his hands on the majority of the French fleet. Meanwhile the Italian fleet has shown it will be of little use to Hitler.

We need to make further and even more intensive efforts to complete our defences. It is only after we have constructed a defence-in-depth that skirts the entire island that we can improve what at the moment is necessarily a highly ad hoc system of defence.

Right! Now I’m off to Fleet Street for a day’s work.