"September 9th. Guns going all night. Slept through most of it. The shelter is getting more popular -- about 15 people now. Mrs T. says she hasn't slept properly since it started. The warden came round today and told us we shouldn't hang washing out as it shows up in moonlight. Everyone is talking about it but no one seems really frightened, more sort of excited. The baker's on the corner got it last night. Old Andrews who runs it was in the last war and says this is nothing to the Somme."

Mass Observation diary, kept by a civilian respondent in south-east London, September 1940. Mass Observation was a social research organisation founded in 1937 that recruited volunteer diarists to record everyday life.