LAURENCE REES: In a way, when the Blitz did finally come in the autumn of 1940, it must have been perhaps something of a surprise, since the war had now been going for a year without this kind of attack.

JULIET GARDINER: I think that’s certainly true in some places, in places like Glasgow and Belfast, for example, where they really thought they were out of range. Clydebank, for example, came as an enormous shock. I think in a very odd way in London there was a certain sense of relief. I wouldn’t put it too heavily, I wouldn’t say people welcomed it, but they thought it was going to come. There was the famous time when Chamberlain said just before Norway was invaded that Hitler had missed the bus and of course within a week he had invaded Norway, and then, of course, the fall of Holland and Belgium and France, and then they expected the invasion of Britain, which, thank goodness, never came. And then there was the Battle of Britain and all this sort of thing, so I don’t think most people thought they’d get away with it. I don’t think most people thought that the phoney war would just go on, as bad as it was, and I suppose other people felt there would be resolution and you’d have the Blitz, that would be the war and then it would be over. But, you know, this phoney war, this waiting, was quite a strain on people I think. And I wouldn’t want to say they welcomed it, of course not, but I think there was a degree of, well, it’s coming, bring it on, we’ve got to have it so let’s have it now.

LAURENCE REES: And, of course, when the Blitz did happen there was a sense to begin with that it wasn’t happening to everybody, it was happening disproportionately to different socio-economic groups.

JULIET GARDINER: That’s true. It wasn’t obviously a piece of social engineering on the part of the Nazis, of Hitler, but the initial start of the Blitz was not aimed at the civilian population, it was aimed at putting the war production out, basically destroying war industries, shipping, transport, all this sort of thing. But of course near docks and the river and the factories tend to live the poorer, the workers, and they also tend to live in less good housing. I think there’s a very telling example on the 10th of May which was effectively the last night of the Blitz; you have to be careful because of course there was bombing before and after the Blitz, but the Blitz was the intense bombing which lasted from September ’40 right through to the 10th of May 1941. And that night, which was very, very heavy bombing, was bombing on the river and the East End was hit and Chelsea was particularly badly hit.

Now, this is not to denigrate Chelsea, but the casualties there were much less than they were in the East End and that was for two reasons. One was of course far more people were able to evacuate themselves - they were able to go to the country, but also the houses were much better built, and they were much more able to withstand the bombs. So I think that that is absolutely true, and there was a certain degree of bitterness that the East End had to take it, or Liverpool had to take it. In Liverpool it was the same and in Glasgow it was the same. I don’t obviously think middle class and upper middle class people didn’t get killed, I’m not saying that, but don’t let’s forget that in the war, in the Thirties, over 70 percent of the population was what we would classify as working class, so in a sense statistically that was sort of bound to happen. And there were very substandard houses still at the start of the war that were like a house of cards, and collapsed when a bomb fell.

LAURENCE REES: And in your book you quote Harold Nicolson’s concern -that this was becoming a problem of perception. The upper classes weren't being seen to suffer like the working class.

JULIET GARDINER: Yes, you can never forget that this was a total war and the government are always aware that the war could be won or lost on the home front every bit as much as it could on the battlefield. I mean, if you actually had a population who were in revolt, or who downed tools, or walked out of the war munitions factories or whatever, then Britain would have lost the war, every bit as much as they would have lost it in the Western Desert or anywhere else. So morale was always a key element of what you were thinking about, and that was part of the reason, as Harold Nicolson said. It was quite a relief when Buckingham Palace was bombed, the Savoy got hit and the Houses of Parliament got hit. It just made things seem a bit more equal. And also of course not only London, you know, it’s a horrible thing to say but once Coventry and Liverpool and Glasgow were bombed it just brought the nation together a little bit more, partly of course, because everybody who wasn’t in London tended to think that Londoners were making an enormous fuss about things, and that it was all centred on the capital, and that’s always the British feeling.