There really wasn't any alternative; we would have needed therapists for half the country - even if nothing terrible had happened to someone, there was always the chance that it could. My mother, a schoolteacher, was sometimes in far greater danger than my father, a stores officer in the RAF. My father's home, where I grew up, was in a normally quiet residential part of West London: three houses a hundred yards away were destroyed by a bomb, and a V weapon landed half a dozen streets away.

People had to keep going, so "grin and bear it" was the usual advice. Anything else could have led to a total collapse of morale.