As cartoonist Osbert Lancaster recalled in his autobiography, fear was central to the civilian experience of London during the Second World War. As the term “The People's War” suggested, the British war effort depended not only on conscripted and directed labor and the rationing of consumer goods but also on the fortitude of civilians, particularly those in urban areas, who were constant potential targets for German bombing raids. This article examines three narratives of civilian experience in wartime London—private diaries, psychologists’ notes, and fiction—to reveal the hidden landscapes of fear in a city at war. During the Second World War, London was the primary and most dramatic stage where both personal and communal fears were played out. Londoners feared death, loss of property, injury, bereavement, and, on a broader scale, the loss of the war and the end of Britain. The 1940s thus saw the elaboration of older Victorian fears of London as a potential canker in the heart of Imperial Britain. British civilization was once again vulnerable to being weakened by the “enemy within,” and symptoms of the dreaded degeneracy were sought in expressions of moral and physical cowardice among those who remained in London during the war, in particular among the working classes, Jews, and children.

Historians have traditionally focused on public documents when writing about the blitz. Yet civilian diaries written in London during the war years, particularly during periods of intense German bombardment, reveal descriptions of fears, and these were echoed and amplified in literary descriptions of London during the war, for example, in Graham Greene's ^{The Ministry of Fear} (1943) and Elizabeth Bowen's short story “The Demon Lover” (1941). In these literary documents, wartime London is represented as a landscape of fear in which the changed physical fabric of the city became imbued with the fears of violence and death under enemy bombs. Writers described London during the blitz as a surreal landscape in which repressed fears and dark emotions erupted through the fissures in everyday life, disrupting stable identities and the social order and creating a dreamlike world of uncanny landscapes and phantoms. Private diaries, psychologists’ notes, and the fiction of Bowen and Greene reveal the strategies their writers used to express the fears haunting wartime civilian experiences. This portrait of a darker and more sinister London presents, like the recent work of Stephen Brooke and Sonya Rose, an illustration of the “counternarrative” to the positive and patriotic images of the People's War.Footnote ²

Fear is an emotion that is easily understood intuitively but that is difficult to define historically. Fear is both an individual and a cultural response to danger; at a basic level it is a subjective feeling, yet its expression reveals the wider emotional climate of a society. Expressions of fear differ according to culture and context and have been historically manifested in collective responses such as witchcraft trials, riots, fears of invasion, and conspiracy theories.Footnote ³ Researching fear as an aspect of the history of the Second World War, whose totalitarian regimes, destructive weapons, and genocides are well documented, seems to offer the historian a rich trove in which to find expressions of both individual and collective fears. However, the first difficulty in examining wartime fears lies in the nature of the available sources. The demands of war required that governments of combatant nations suppress fears in the military and among the civilian population in the interests of preserving good morale. The popular media had no interest in, and no mechanisms to represent, public views, let alone fears. And, though more difficult to trace historically, twentieth-century British culture emphasized stoicism, emotional repression, and the “stiff upper lip.”

William Reddy has recently proposed a useful theory of “emotional regimes,” historically and politically specific cultures that determine how freely people may express and navigate their emotions.Footnote ⁴ London's wartime emotional regime was one that emphasized civilian bravery as the road to national survival; it was one in which fears and anxieties could not be overtly expressed. The British public regime of stoicism created a wartime urban culture of psychological tension as civilians sought to minimize or repress their fears except in moments of intense terror. The shock of intense bombing raids in the first weeks of the 1940–41 blitz, as well as the 1944–45 V-1 and V-2 raids, cracked the facade of civilian bravery and allowed momentary expressions of fear to leak out in civilian writings. At other times, writers only dared to suggest the effects of fear and the strains of maintaining a stoic demeanor, doing so, for example, by referring to fear's physical effects on the body or by inscribing fears onto descriptions of the landscape of bomb-scarred London. As these sources reveal, fear was the ghost haunting wartime London—it was always present, just out of sight, and rarely acknowledged.

With the development of aerial weapons in the early twentieth century, civilian fortitude became essential to the waging of war, and the military objective of maintaining good “morale” was transferred to the general population. During the First World War, despite zeppelin raids on London, discussions of civilian morale were mostly confined to the potentially disheartening effects of mounting military casualties. The Second World War, with its increasing reliance on, and direction of, civilians in the war effort, required a much higher standard of morale. Morale, best described by psychologist Edward Glover as the “expression of the will-to-war,” was a term frequently invoked by the government and in the press, but it was never consistently or even clearly defined.Footnote ⁵ A vague description only added to the difficulties of measuring civilian morale during the war, that is, in correlating what people thought, what they claimed to think, and how they acted.

The British Government relied on evidence from social survey groups to provide indications of civilian morale. The Ministry of Information's statistical survey group, the Wartime Social Survey, provided weekly reports to Home Intelligence, and the privately run sociological observation group Mass Observation collected and provided data to Home Intelligence as well.Footnote ⁶ All these sources reported that, throughout the war, civilian morale in London never reached dangerously low levels and remained consistently quite high. But evaluations of this evidence founder on inconsistent definitions of morale and on conflicting methods and data. Was it showing good morale to hide in tube shelters during raids, or was that a worrying expression of fear? Was staying in one's bed a better indication of morale, or was that a dangerous and foolhardy practice to be discouraged? The difficulty lay in attributing inner thoughts to outward actions. And, as Osbert Lancaster noted, civilian fears were not irrational in wartime London; rather, they were a realistic reaction to potential dangers. The potential threat to the war effort was that such “reasonable” civilian fears would become pathological, incapacitating the individual and potentially spreading to others.

Officials and experts in Britain had worried since the 1930s that civilians under bombardment would suffer breakdowns as had soldiers on the Western Front in the First World War. The casual prewar assumption was that the conditions of civilians under bombardment would differ little from conditions at the Western Front, though in fact this was rarely, if ever, the case. As psychologist Edward Glover wrote in 1946, “Before this war began, exaggerated apprehensions on the part of psychiatrists as to the effects of air-bombing on civilians were as plentiful as rumors, from which in principle they differed very little. It was anticipated, for example, that psychological casualties in London alone would run into the thousands for every day of attack.”Footnote ⁷ Londoners did not suffer from similar symptoms because the experiences of shell-shocked First World War soldiers and Second World War civilians were not comparable. The London bombing differed in severity and duration from the First World War shelling, and civilians were not trained or expected to kill or to conform to military discipline.

The concern with expressions of morale also points to older narratives of controlling the dangerous elements, or “mob potential,” of cities. Social survey groups observed behavior in the bombed cities, particularly in shelters and on the streets, to see whether specific groups thought to be prone to fearfulness, such as Jews and the working classes, were inflaming others with expressions of fear. George Orwell was one of many observers looking for examples of Jews betraying symptoms of a contagious cowardice during raids: “The other night I examined the crowds sheltering in Chancery Lane, Oxford Circus and Baker Street Stations. ^Not all Jews, but, I think, a higher proportion of Jews than one would normally see in a crowd of this size. What is bad about Jews is that they are not only conspicuous, but go out of the way to make themselves so. A fearful Jewish woman, a regular comic-paper cartoon of a Jewess, fought her way off the train at Oxford Circus, landing blows on anyone who stood in her way.”Footnote ⁸ His use of the word “fearful” indicates both the woman's fears and the danger of such weakness to the general public: fear was to be feared. The belief that the working-class inhabitants of London would succumb to their fears during raids and refuse to carry on with their work underlay the government's refusal to sanction the use of tube stations as shelters in the early weeks of the blitz in 1940. For instance, when journalist and propagandist Sefton Delmer heard the courage of Londoners praised, he “thought with shame of those able-bodied proletarians absenting themselves from their workshops while they lay on their mattresses in the Underground, publicly copulating on the platforms and blocking up the stations for those who had to go to work.”Footnote ⁹ Concerns over wartime morale and productivity were superimposed onto older nineteenth-century desires to control the dangerous and potentially weakening elements in the metropolis.Footnote ¹⁰

London, the great imperial capital of the nineteenth century, was transformed into a military target in the new theatre of aerial warfare, as well as into a powerful ideological symbol of civilian endurance. Britain had been shown to be militarily vulnerable in the zeppelin raids of the First World War, which killed 557 people and injured over twice that number. The interwar period had seen even greater advances in aeronautics, as was demonstrated in the devastation of Spanish cities from the air. Therefore, on the outbreak of war in September 1939, London's vital importance as the hub of military and government planning and operations for the empire and of the Allied war effort only added to fears of its vulnerability to German planes. If they could do so privately, many civilians left. On 1 September 1939, two days before the declaration of war, the London County Council began its well-rehearsed evacuation of schoolchildren, mothers, and young children from the capital in expectation of mass bombing raids with the declaration of war. The fact that the expected aerial attacks did not occur immediately did nothing to lessen the fears of the populace, who believed that such raids must inevitably come. The expectations of imminent bombing and invasion made the year of the Phoney War, September 1939 to April 1940, a time of combined tension and boredom as wartime restrictions were not alleviated by any release of excitement.

The physical landscape of London began to change in the early weeks of war to reflect London's military importance as the nerve center of an Allied war effort, as well as its vulnerability. The city was transformed by air raid shelters, the removal of street signs, and the imposition of darkness under a blackout order. London's streets were reenvisioned according to strategic and military aims, and representations of London—in detailed maps or photographs—were restricted or forbidden during wartime. The landscape of wartime London, stripped of familiar landmarks and after 1940 damaged by bombs and studded with surface and subterranean shelters, became imbued with fears of imminent individual and collective destruction.

After the fall of France in June 1940, London's military and symbolic importance grew. Now London—and the United Kingdom—was the only barrier between the Nazi forces and the rest of the democratic world. It was the last remaining Allied country, sheltering the governments and resistance fighters of overthrown nations. An invasion was expected at any time, and concerns grew over who had access to information that might help the enemy. These fears are apparent in the Control of Map Orders under the War Measures Act, 4 July 1940, which decreed: “No person to acquire a map of any part of the UK or Isle of Man drawn to a scale exceeding one mile to one inch except under authority of a license granted by S[ecretary] of S[tate] or a chief officer of police. … No alien shall have in his possession after July 10, 1940, any map of UK or Isle of Man drawn to a scale exceeding 12 miles to one inch or any guide book to such a part without a license.”Footnote ¹¹ With their intimate details of the United Kingdom's geography, maps themselves became powerful and dangerous objects to be restricted during wartime.

Not only was knowledge of the geography of the capital dangerous, but living in it was dangerous as well. Londoners expected an imminent invasion from 1939 until the opening of a second front in the USSR in 1941. The German aerial raids on Britain in 1940 were rightly seen as the beginning of the as yet undefeated blitzkrieg invasion strategy. These German military forays in the summer of 1940 were at first pitched battles between German and British planes; these were named the Battle of Britain. By early September 1940, the Germans' aerial tactics had shifted to mass nocturnal bombing of cities. From 7 September onward, with one night's respite on 2 November, London endured seventy-six consecutive nights of bombing. The military aim of these air raids was to disrupt the manufacturing, transportation, and administrative systems in London and to demoralize the civilian population and encourage it to sue for peace.

Although the air raids on Britain continued almost nightly in November and December 1940, only six out of a hundred or more raids were directed against London. While bombing raids on smaller British cities, such as Coventry, Manchester, and Hull, were more structurally devastating, attention still focused on London as the example of British civilian resistance. Of the 19,000 tons of high explosives dropped on London during the blitz, 14,000 had been dropped by 14 November.Footnote ¹² Although the later raids were less frequent, they caused more damage. The air raid on the City on the night of 29 December 1940 caused massive property destruction, as there were few people in residence to put out fires, the Thames was at a tidal ebb, and the planes dropped incendiary bombs, which led to massive fires in the empty buildings. Another heavy raid occurred on 11 January 1941, in which a bomb hit the Bank Underground Station, blowing shelterers in front of a train and blasting a hole in the roadway in front of the Royal Exchange so wide that the royal engineers had to build a bridge across it. A lull followed until March, when the raids resumed at weekly intervals. Two major raids on 16 April and 19 April, known as “The Wednesday” and “The Saturday,” were heavier than any previous raids. Each dropped over a thousand tons of high-explosive and incendiary bombs, and the combined death toll was 2,380 people, more than a tenth of all Londoners killed in the blitz. The last raid of the blitz occurred on 10 May 1941. It lasted seven hours; it killed 1,436 and injured 1,800. Londoners feared even more extensive attacks, but, as the Germans turned their offensive east, London was spared further major attacks until 1944. From 7 September 1940 to 11 May 1941, 15,775 Londoners were killed and 1,400,000, or one in six, were rendered homeless.

Their awareness of London as a military target, both potential and actual, meant that civilians remaining in London during the war years were conscious of their importance to the waging and outcome of the war. The war created a culture of diary writing as people saw themselves as both historical witnesses and historical actors, playing their part in the theater of war that London had become. For instance, Vere Hodgson kept a detailed diary during the war years, intending to circulate it among her family all over the world to show how she, and England, were bearing up. In her 1976 foreword to the published diary, ^{Few Eggs and No Oranges: A Diary Showing How Unimportant People in London and Birmingham Lived through the War Years, 1940–1945}, she wrote: “Later I was able to type it, and it records fairly accurately the hopes and fears and daily drudgery of an ordinary person during many weary springs, summers, autumns and winters.”Footnote ¹³ Although he would never have described himself as an ordinary person, Henry “Chips” Channon felt that his diaries were so vital that he buried them in the garden in a tin box in case of invasion.Footnote ¹⁴ Hundreds of such private diaries were kept during the war years, many of which have since been donated to the Imperial War Museum and various London local history collections. While some of these diarists were likely writing before the war, many of the archived and published diaries made clear that this form of personal writing was a project for the duration, as both a record of, and a distraction from, the demands of war. In addition, the sociological survey group Mass Observation solicited monthly war diaries from its respondents, and these are now archived on microfilm at the University of Sussex Mass Observation Archive. The diarists in these archives sought to represent what they felt and saw, to map the new physical and psychological landscapes of wartime London. They kept records not only to remind themselves and their families what they had endured but also as a marker of their belief in continued national survival.Footnote ¹⁵

Civilians who were writing in their diaries and memoirs during the intense bombing raids in 1940–41 rarely expressed their fears of defeat and death openly. Whether because these diaries were considered by their writers to be historical documents for posterity or because the writers could not even admit such fears to themselves, these civilians focused on descriptions of their physical symptoms in the first weeks of the blitz as a way to record the effect of their fears. The body was a terrain difficult to control, and gut-level reactions, quite literally, were strongest in the earliest days of periods of bombing and after prolonged sleeplessness or stress. To counter these confessions of perceived weakness, many diarists also wrote about the importance of their personal efforts to persevere in the war effort. As Britain prided itself on facing the Nazi threat alone from June 1940 until December 1941, the collective effort of standing firm, “with their backs against the wall,” provided some comfort for the terror of the raids.

The attacks on London that began in August 1940 had been long anticipated, and yet they drove home to many civilians their potential dangers. Olivia Cockett wrote on 3 August 1940: “Walked down the corridor just now with a tray of tea and suddenly all the walls melted away and realized I may be killed tonight.”Footnote ¹⁶ The list of physical symptoms of stress was long, and advertisers were quick to promote their products as cures for these discomforts. An advertisement for a combination laxative/diuretic asked the readership of the Daily Express on 9 September 1940: “(1) Do you jump when a bus backfires? (2) Does worry bring sleepless nights? (3) Are you spotty? (4) Are the whites of your eyes muddy? (5) Are you puffed out after running upstairs?”Footnote ¹⁷

This “laundry list” of physical symptoms echoed diarists who mapped the effects of fear on their private physical landscapes. Olivia Cockett wrote again, on 29 August 1940: “Because of my fear, sweat is extra stinking, needs much more cleaning up.”Footnote ¹⁸ Even when the emotion of fear or anxiety subsided, the physical symptoms could continue or worsen. A young civil servant noted in her Mass Observation diary in November 1940 that, although she was no longer as afraid, her hair was beginning to fall out: “We started talking about hair—I told her about my bald patch and she said immediately ‘That's nerves.’ I am very much inclined to agree with her. I know I have often felt very strained and tired, and at one time traveling in those tubes was just a hideous nightmare to me. I should say the traveling and sitting at home with people who, at their best, bore me, are the two things which have got me down most.”Footnote ¹⁹ Beyond everyday anxieties, loud sounds like the air raid siren, bombs falling, and explosions often triggered strong symptoms of fear. Diarists described their reactions as usually centered in the stomach—hence, the many wartime advertisements for laxatives, digestives, and diuretics. As Miss Viola Bawtree wrote on 10 November 1940, “I’ve not heard a warning for weeks, but today I heard almost every one and each time it gave me that horrible heave inside. I don’t know how to describe it, like you might get if you heard a sudden wail of someone in distress, or a shriek of pain.”Footnote ²⁰ Marie Lawrence also suffered from terrible stomachaches: “26 August 1940. 1 a.m. Still Jerries were over. The air was alive with them. It was just like having a bad stomach ache. Slowly the pain would come on, get worse and then die down. You would be so relieved and then a nasty feeling and another would come over. This is just how it felt and when the bombs dropped I was in a terrific state.”Footnote ²¹

Unsurprisingly, one of the main documented physical symptoms of civilians under wartime bombardment was an increase in peptic ulcers.Footnote ²² These physical reactions to sirens, raids, and bombs falling and exploding persisted throughout the war. Wartime diarists described the effects of fear on their bodies as a strategy to illustrate the profound effects of their emotions without seeming weak or cowardly. Diarists portrayed their bodies as microcosms of the larger city, shaken but firm. Their strategy was brilliantly representative of the culture of British stoicism, for it acknowledged fear, albeit only on a physical level, yet emphasized the courage of a people who carried on nonetheless and whose physical survival was testament to the larger survival of Britain in the war effort.

Such civilian steadfastness was seen as a uniquely British trait. M. Mogridge doubtless echoed the feelings of many when he wrote in his 1942 memoir: “A people who can remain steadfast under bombardment from dusk to dawn for weeks on end deserve to win, and Fate, in the end, gives the prize to the deserving. The victory of London was not won with weapons, it was won in the human heart, and hearts of such caliber can do many things.”Footnote ²³ Civilian resolution in the face of fear was tied both privately and publicly to the war effort as a whole, as an assurance of eventual British victory. This view is still evident in many postwar histories, notwithstanding the evidence of a similar civilian courage under much worse conditions in German and Japanese cities firebombed in the later years of the war.

Civilians also used descriptions of the material destruction of London's streets and buildings as a metaphor for their fears for themselves and their nation. As the war wore on, London's darkened streets were increasingly pocked by craters and marked by ruins and houses missing from rows like knocked-out teeth. Londoners virtually abandoned damaged areas and moved underground from inadequate surface shelters to basement and underground shelters, including tube stations. A new subterranean life sprang up, which included underground restaurants, hotel suites, and even the secret subterranean Cabinet War Rooms in Whitehall. Wartime London was often represented in civilian writings as a surreal landscape, with its eerie and uncanny bombed-out landscapes and the juxtaposition of the terror and beauty of the nighttime raids with continued everyday existence. The landscape itself became imbued with a sense of the fears lurking in the shadows of its crumbling streets.

Diarists portrayed London in 1940 and 1941 as a ghost town, haunted by the possibility of ultimate failure and destruction. Joyce Weiner recorded her impressions of a journey in London on 24 November 1940: “The face of London changed. [Blasted] houses like stage sets faced a gaping world. Unimaginable dust and chaos marked the spot where houses once had been. … London is deserted, cold, with the winds whistling through its empty screens of damaged stone.”Footnote ²⁴ Weiner's description of the physical destruction of London suggests the fearful implications of such damage with metaphors suggesting abandonment, emptiness, and death. London's ruined landscape was a symbol of her fears of the national and imperial destruction implicit in her allusion to classical ruins.

By the end of 1941, the entry of the United States into the war assuaged fears of the end of British civilization, and eventual Allied victory seemed secure. The months of standing alone against the Nazi threat were over, and the nationalist narratives that had characterized many diaries during the blitz became much less frequent. But, for civilians in London, there followed long monotonous years of work and privation without the glamour and excitement of the heady years of the blitz. Shorter and milder air raids befell the capital in 1942 and again in early 1944. In June 1944, the Allied landings in Normandy were greeted with relief as the beginning of the end of the war. But more terrors were yet to come for Londoners.

On 13 June 1944, the first German V-1 “flying bomb” attack was directed against London.Footnote ²⁵ The V-1 was a relatively cheap, pilotless aircraft, like an “aerial torpedo,” capable of carrying one ton of explosives but comparatively easy to destroy. Its pulse-jet engine, which made a distinct buzzing sound, was steered by an automatic pilot system. When the engine died, the bomb fell to earth, allowing those monitoring its passage below a twelve-second gap to dive for cover.Footnote ²⁶ Casualties from this first attack were small, with only six deaths, but soon the number of attacks and deaths had increased exponentially. By 22 July 1944, 5,000 rockets had fallen on London. Even as the Allied armies advanced, the Germans camouflaged the small and movable launching sites of the V-1s, which made them nearly invisible from the air. The V-1 attacks continued all winter, with the last bomb falling on 27 March 1945. In total, 5,864 people were killed in V-1 attacks, with 17,197 seriously injured; 23,174 slightly injured; 24,491 buildings destroyed; and 52,293 buildings rendered uninhabitable.Footnote ²⁷

The fall of 1944 saw the advent of a new civilian terror: the German “secret weapon” known as the V-2. The V-2 rocket was a much more sophisticated and expensive weapon than the V-1 and had been in development since 1936. It was an internally guided ballistic missile, and its supersonic speed made it invulnerable to antiaircraft guns and fighter planes. Only two countermeasures were possible: to attack their points of origin, which was difficult as the small firing tables the missiles needed to launch were invisible from the air, and to spread disinformation via the media and the corrupted German spy network that the missiles were landing in the wrong place, effectively encouraging the Germans to aim the missiles north of London to less populated areas.Footnote ²⁸

On 8 September 1944, the first V-2 missile fell on London. Eyewitnesses heard loud explosions, but they had no idea what this new weapon was. The government immediately imposed a publication ban on the reportage of any mention or description of the explosions, which lasted until 8 November 1944.Footnote ²⁹ Demands for secrecy could reach absurd levels, as S. M. S. Woodcock recorded in his warden's diary on 2 November 1944: “The caretaker at Gwen's office said that someone he knows went to the local authorities to make claim for damage to her house by a ‘rocket shell.’ She was told that any mention of ‘rocket shell’ was a punishable offence and that the damage should be described as ‘by explosion.'”Footnote ³⁰

The V-2 rockets were considered by many to be the most fearful weapons of the war. The total number of V-2 rockets launched was 1,403, of which 288 went astray, 61 landed offshore, and 1,074 landed on the mainland—537 in London and 537 in other counties. The death toll was 2,754 people, with 6,523 seriously injured and a great deal of property damaged.Footnote ³¹ Like the V-1s, the V-2s could and did come at any time of day or night. They traveled from their launching pads in Holland in four minutes, faster than the speed of sound. With no radar signal and no aural clues, by the time Londoners heard the V-2s explode, they were either dead or it had missed them. The constant fear created a feeling of helplessness in civilians, all the more so since the V-1s and the V-2s were designed as weapons of harassment and revenge, having no conventional military purpose.

By 1944, Allied victory was certain and seemed imminent. The V-1 and V-2 bombing raids thus took place in an atmosphere in which fortitude in the face of such raids could have no redeeming military or ideological value. During the blitz, civilians could believe that their courage and their sacrifices during the bombings were part of Britain's war effort against the Germans. The 1944–45 attacks could have no such consolatory meaning, and coming after five years of civilian stress, anxiety, and privations, they led many people close to the breaking point. As Norman Longmate wrote in 1985, their greatest success was as an attack against morale: “The low ebb to which spirits in southern England sunk during that last and, as it seemed, unnecessary winter of the war is evident again and again in the reminiscences of the time.”Footnote ³² While the V-1 and V-2 raids appear in personal records, they are not part of the popular memorialization of war the way that the blitz was and is. Their absence suggests the difficulty in reconciling these weapons with the images of civilian togetherness and steadfastness, which were the hallmarks of popular views of the blitz.

Civilian fears inspired by V-1s were heightened because of the novelty of the weapons. No one in London knew what they were when they began to fall, though air raids wardens, such as S. M. S. Woodcock, had been told to expect a new kind of weapon. In his diary entry for 15 June 1944, he wrote: “They [Pilotless Aircraft] had been expected by wardens since the 4th May when a confidential description was issued of Pilotless Air Craft; a small jet-propelled monoplane of 20 ft. wingspan and 18 ft. overall length, the forward end consisting of a bomb of 1 ton weight of blast type.”Footnote ³³ Diaries and memoirs reveal Londoners struggling to find a fitting nickname for this new threat, to help make sense of it, and to lessen its fearful nature. Woodcock noted that the official name of the V-1 changed from Pilotless Aircraft, or P.A.C., to Flying Bomb on 21 June. Miss R. E. Uttin described them as “Robot bombs” on 14 July.Footnote ³⁴ Writer and part-time A.R.P. (Air Raid Precautions) warden, Caryl Brahms, in a 4 July diary entry, refers to the raids as the “Whizz-bang Blitz: The whiz-bangs churn through the air like teams of high-powered motor bikes tearing through a million miles of calico. Then suddenly a silence. Then the bang. Between the whiz and the bang you can generally count the seconds—time to think, which is bad.”Footnote ³⁵ The most belittling nickname for the V-1 bombs was also the one that has remained the most popular: “the doodlebugs.”

Despite its comic names, the V-1 weapon was extremely frightening to a civilian populace on which the years of fear and privation had taken their toll. G. Inward remembered the doodlebugs as “the biggest fear of the war. … The sound of one of these still makes my stomach turn over.”Footnote ³⁶ The sound of the engine, wrote John Sweetland, brought back the “stomach churning of the blitz, and to some extent, the disturbed sleep.”Footnote ³⁷ In his unpublished memoir, D. Lord wrote of the “aerial scourges” of the V-1s and V-2s: “Coming upon us as they did after five years of hard-pressed endurance, and they inflicted considerable damage, both materially and mentally.”Footnote ³⁸ The effects of these new types of bombs can be seen in the forms of the diaries themselves. The diary of Florence Speed gives potent evidence for the physical effects of this strain in its increasingly erratic handwriting and in lapses in grammar, spelling, and punctuation.Footnote ³⁹

The unpredictable timing of the V-1 and V-2 bombs and the sound of the engine made the raids a constant assault on the senses. Vivienne Hall, in her diary dated 19–23 June 1944, described herself and those around her in a constant state of nervous tension:

And so it goes on—day and night these flying bombs come [illegible] droning across the skies, sometimes hourly, sometimes at 10 minute intervals, sometimes several at once, in fact there is no knowing which of the systems is being used so you just have to listen and hope for the best! That's all we do, we are just one large frightened ear—each sound of traffic, each purr of an engine stops conversation whilst we sort out the sounds and decide whether to take cover or not. … It is purely and simply a frightful onslaught upon the civilian to see how long the nerves will stand the sleepless vigil.Footnote ⁴⁰

The metaphor of the civilian reduced to a “frightened ear” reveals the passivity and defenselessness that Hall felt in the face of raids and that she also ascribed to those around her. What kept her fear under wraps was the fear of public censure, as an entry dated 27 June 1944 reveals: “True, when you are with other people, you keep a grip on your nerves, and carry on at least with a pleasant face. But when you are alone, you are full of fear. You want to cry, but you dare not least [^sic] someone should catch you.”Footnote ⁴¹ As in the blitz, diarists described the effects of fear and anxiety on their bodies as a way of acknowledging their fear as an involuntary reaction while repressing urges to express their emotions in shameful ways, such as crying or screaming. Londoners could thus acknowledge the daily presence of fears in their wartime lives, especially under periods of intense bombardment, and still present a brave, if haggard, face to the world.

The diary kept by Nurse G. Thomas described the daily stress of the V-1 raids. Constant warnings made sleep impossible, adding to which she had to cope with the care of patients in raids. Thomas acknowledged that the cumulative effects of the raids made her and other nursing staff “edgy,” and she noted that not only the noise of raids but also sirens and trams past her window filled her with anxiety and fear. On 23 June 1944, she wrote: “Everyone is tired, my eyes are heavy for want of sleep. I feel if only I could scream, but that would be fatal. I dread this night again.”Footnote ⁴² On 29 July 1944, her ward was hit by a flying bomb, and she and other staff had to evacuate 200 patients. One visitor was burned to death in the waiting room, and one nurse was killed. The traumatic effects of this attack on her were apparent to her matron, who forced her to take a day off work. On her way to visit friends in the country, Thomas saw the aftermath of a direct hit on the Marks and Spencer department store in Lewisham: “Marks and Spencer's was ablaze, people trapped, screaming, dead, lying in the roadway, girls with hair and clothes alight could be seen running wildly in the blazing building, a girl with half her scalp off, an old lady lying naked in the roadway, people running everywhere, shouting screaming, dying, burning.” The juxtaposition of the mundane scene of a department store with the horrible sight of wounded, burning, and dying victims was an example of the most terrifying landscape of wartime London. The painful effects of such a sight were compounded with Thomas's earlier raid experience, and she broke down upon reaching her friend's house: “Eventually I reached the station; never have I had a bigger fight to keep from screaming, so at last I reached my friends, and there I broke down. I suppose I knew there was no need to fight anymore. … I collapsed and screamed and Hilda gave me brandy.”Footnote ⁴³ Thomas managed to maintain her self-control long enough to reach some privacy. As both she and Hall indicate, outward demonstrations of fear were shameful and in themselves to be feared, demonstrating the perceived necessity of maintaining a stoic demeanor.Footnote ⁴⁴ Such reticence offers one explanation for the lack of descriptions of civilian fears in wartime records.

Even notes of professional psychiatrists reveal few examples of civilian fears in wartime. While the science of psychology and psychoanalysis were well established by the outbreak of World War Two, assessing the overall psychological impact of raids on the civilian population is impossible.Footnote ⁴⁵ No central records of psychological disturbances were kept, and most of the data gathered were anecdotal. Edward Glover, for example, sought to study civilian reactions to the outbreak of the Munich Crisis. He sent out a questionnaire to members of the British Psycho-analytical Society, of whom twenty responded on a hundred cases. Already a study of neurotic cases, observers were asked to record only changes they could definitely attribute to the mental impact of the crisis: “There was no alternative but to study the cases of mental disorder coming for examination and to isolate for special examination patients whose breakdown appeared to have been precipitated by war conditions. Following the records of the London Clinic of Psychoanalysis, it soon became obvious that only a comparatively small portion of the total examined qualified for this further investigation. … The incidence of different disorders did not differ much from those of peace years. Such differences as were detected had no obvious war correlation.”Footnote ⁴⁶ By the time bombing raids began in earnest in 1940, many psychiatrists had joined the services, and professional bodies were fragmented.Footnote ⁴⁷ Small psychoanalytic clinics continued to practice in London, but they were divided by bureaucratic and, in many cases, theoretical divides. The London Clinic of Psychoanalysis was set up at 96 Gloucester Place in 1939 and was used by Edward Glover as a wartime observation center, though Glover concluded that it treated few neuroses caused by war.Footnote ⁴⁸ The Tavistock Clinic, an out-patient clinic that provided psychotherapy for patients who could not afford private fees, relocated to Hampstead. Most of its doctors joined the army's psychiatric services as specialists, while a rump staff stayed with the aim of seeing “`ordinary' non-war traumatic cases.”Footnote ⁴⁹ Public psychiatric facilities were not much better. The Ministry of Health's Emergency Medical Service's plan for dealing with “neurotic casualties” was to treat them at first-aid posts and casualty hospitals, from which they would be returned to their homes. Only those who, “in the opinion of an expert,” required more treatment were sent down the line to specialized hospitals staffed by neurologists and psychiatrists.Footnote ⁵⁰ These hospitals also had a mobile unit that could be sent to the raided area to supplement the neurologist and psychiatrists attached to those areas. Yet in practice no psychiatric staff were available to casualty stations in London, and the four London-area War Neurosis Centers (Stanboroughs in Watford, Mill Hill in North London, Belmont in Sutton, Surrey, and Maidstone in Kent) had, in the first year of war, so few patients that many of their staff were released to work elsewhere.Footnote ⁵¹ Since most other London psychoanalytic clinics were by application only and the patients self-selected, the data from these clinics cannot be seen as representative of the larger civilian population.

Once the bombing raids began in 1940, applications to psychoanalytic clinics increased, but there were not enough spaces for the rise in demand. There were few or no trained mental health personnel at hospitals or at first aid and shelter posts, and any psychological casualties soon drifted unobserved back into the general population. For clinical purposes, beyond the data from individual case notes, the effects of wartime fears on Londoners went unobserved by professional psychologists.

The exception to this clinical silence is the evidence provided by orphaned and unsettled children, who made excellent case studies for the psychological effects of war. Public interest in the fate of these children was considerable, as concerns over civilian fears were displaced onto them as the future citizens of Britain. The work of Anna Freud and Dorothy Burlingham in the Hampstead Nurseries for Children demonstrates the profound effects of fear on children and the coping mechanisms they developed.Footnote ⁵² The school in Birmingham set up in 1942 by a Canadian professor of child psychology, William E. Blatz, for children whose lives had been disrupted by war also provides some valuable data.Footnote ⁵³ Such work added to the prewar work of John Bowlby, Melanie Klein, and other child psychologists and analysts. The creation of wartime nurseries and other institutions made the clinical study of children much easier as they were available for daily monitoring in a way that adults were not. Nonspecialist observers, such as social workers, child guidance personnel, and teachers, also detailed the worrying symptoms of the effects of fear and displacement on children, including an epidemic of bed-wetting among evacuated children and a rise in juvenile delinquency during and following the war years.

The evidence for an overall lack of psychological trauma in civilians during the war is largely founded on the absence of sources. The belief in a gradual emotional adaptation to raids was based mainly on the writings of foreign correspondents in Britain and from individual psychiatrists’ notes. For example, Irving L. Janis, in ^{Air War and Emotional Stress}, based his conclusions about Britain on the patient notes of one psychiatrist: A. G. Woltmann. Even material collected as psychological data, such as the Hull-Birmingham Survey commissioned in 1942, was not professionally analyzed.Footnote ⁵⁴ The absence of recorded cases of mass hysteria and shell shock led to a “No-Neurosis myth,” according to Glover in his 1941 “Notes on the Psychological Effects of War Conditions on the Civilian Population.”Footnote ⁵⁵ Various theories have been propounded to explain this lack of civilian neurosis, such as the unifying “Myth of the Blitz,” which allowed people to weather the war with comradeship and good humor, or the suggestion that the blitz, in psychoanalytic terms, freed people to satisfy sadistic and masochistic desires to “perform gratifying desires and forbidden instincts.”Footnote ⁵⁶

Civilian fears, whether pathological or not, did not get into the national story, nor do they appear in statistics.Footnote ⁵⁷ Yet even professional psychologists acknowledged that, by the time of the 1944–45 V-weapons raids, civilians were on a psychological knife edge. H. V. Dicks, of the Tavistock Clinic in London, wrote of the final year of war: “1944 saw a very considerable aggravation of air attacks on London with flying bombs. Many children were again evacuated, and life in the capital, despite the apparent winning of the war, was at a low ebb. Whereas we had seen unprecedented numbers of new patients in 1943, now the figures fell greatly. Epidemiologically, this patient population contained a large number of demoralized housewives discouraged by the renewed bombing that seemed to belie the news from France; also some extremely disturbed and rudderless children; and thirdly, the earliest referrals of neurotic ex-Servicemen by the Ministry of Pensions.”Footnote ⁵⁸ Those particularly at risk, according to Dick, were those who would be central in rebuilding London and Britain after the war and who would form the basis of reunited postwar families. Yet, after the wartime planning of the late 1930s, psychological trauma was ignored, except in debates over juvenile delinquency. By 1944, policy making focused on rebuilding and political debates on what shape the postwar future would take. The legacy of wartime fears was neutralized. Once civilian fears no longer threatened the war effort, their public acknowledgment became an embarrassment, especially in the postwar narrative of inevitable British victory.

One potential threat of a frightened and disaffected civilian population was its vulnerability to being exploited by the enemy into acts of sabotage and treason. The specter of shadowy agents provocateurs, or “Fifth Column,” who sought to undermine Britain from within symbolize the contradictions Londoners had to face: fears had to be controlled and subdued, yet potential and invisible enemies were everywhere. The resultant wartime psychological tension is beautifully captured in Graham Greene's metaphor of the wartime Ministry of Fear as the “the enemy within.”

Literature was free of official control of public descriptions of London and Londoners and private self-censorship and could probe into the darker sides of London's wartime landscape. Graham Greene's ^{The Ministry of Fear} (London, 1943) and Elizabeth Bowen's “The Demon Lover” (London, 1941) were literary explorations of the psychological atmosphere of wartime London.Footnote ⁵⁹ These works of fiction reveal London as the scene of bomb-opened houses, ravaged squares, and streets of rubble. Their plots hinge on strange coincidences and foreboding messages, often to the point of melodrama. Bowen and Greene represent wartime London as the point at which prewar boundaries collapse: between childhood and adulthood, the real and the surreal, the domestic and the public, the past and the present. Whether in Greene's nightmarish and subterranean London or Bowen's abandoned and eerie London house, the metaphors describing the city reveal civilian fears of the end of civilization and the threat of death from above, as well as personal fears that take advantage of the dislocations of war to emerge. These narratives also reveal unusual civilian perspectives: the narrators are a middle-aged man and a mother with young children, two groups of people rarely represented in wartime diaries or psychiatric case studies.

Both Greene and Bowen were in London during the blitz, Greene as a literary editor for ^{The Spectator} and Bowen working for the Ministry of Information reporting on Irish opinion. Both writers also worked as A.R.P. wardens and were fascinated by the heightened tension and excitement of the capital at war.Footnote ⁶⁰ In these two texts, the wider national trauma of war “came home” to Londoners in their public and inner lives. In The Ministry of Fear, as in later works, Greene was interested in the morally ambiguous elements of war. He presented war as a time and space of dislocation and fragmentation, of interrupted lives, loneliness, and terror, through metaphors of the uncanny landscapes of wartime London. Bowen, in “The Demon Lover,” as in the story “Mysterious Kor” (also set in wartime London), explored the psychological tensions of war as a moment suspended, stretching out its uncertainties over years of unbearable tension. Bowen's and Greene's literary renderings of London, while fictional, nevertheless express aspects of civilian wartime life that were otherwise absent from the public sphere. They also represent fear as the default state of the human heart: for Greene, fear of being lost, and for Bowen, fear of being found.

^{The Ministry of Fear}, one of Greene's “Entertainments,” is an unsettling black comedic thriller.Footnote ⁶¹ The London landscapes in which the action takes place are surreal, beginning with a seemingly innocent fête to raise money for the Mothers of Free Nations, with its shabby stalls and raffles, which conceal a sinister threat in the form of a cake raffle. The main character, Arthur Rowe, drawn into the fête by childhood memories, wins the cake, to the displeasure of the suspect fête organizers. The next day, a dark and mysterious stranger arrives at Arthur's lodgings and asks to listen to the news on his wireless. The stranger carefully crumbles each slice of the cake he is given, making remarks so suspicious as to be farcical, such as, “If you want democracy—I don’t say you do but if you want it—you must go to Germany for it.”Footnote ⁶² As Arthur's doubts about the stranger grow, a bomb falls on them, and the walls of the room collapse. Arthur wakes in a world in which nothing makes sense, in which the familiar pictures and objects are rearranged in uncanny juxtaposition:

Rowe's head was singing; he felt as though he had been walking in his sleep; he was lying in a strange position, in a strange place. He got up and saw an enormous quantity of saucepans all over the floor: something like the twisted engine of an old car turned out to be a refrigerator. He looked up and saw Charles’ Wain heeling over an arm-chair which was poised thirty feet above his head: he looked down and saw the Bay of Naples intact at his feet. He felt as though he were in a strange country without any maps to help him, trying to get his position by the stars.Footnote ⁶³

Nothing in Arthur's world makes sense any more: not the lodging house in which he had lived quietly for years, not his own quiet life in which he tried to forget his past and his guilt. The war has disrupted all his miserable certainties. In this, the first part of the novel, entitled “The Unhappy Man,” it emerges that Arthur has refused to leave London during the raids, though not for reasons of high morale. Arthur stays in London because he is trapped in mourning for his wife, from which he sees the blitz as a potential release. His sorrow and guilt are represented by London landmarks, and he hopes all the places he remembers as part of his married life will be destroyed by bombs: “After a raid he sallied out and noted with a kind of hope that this restaurant or that shop existed no longer—it was like the loosening of the prison bars of a cell one by one.”Footnote ⁶⁴ Arthur also lives in Guilford Street, which symbolically intersects with Dickens's house on Doughty Street, which he has loved since childhood. He cannot leave the London symbolizing his childhood innocence any more than he can walk by the fête, which also seems to promise an escape from his guilt-ridden adult life.

In the second part of the book, “The Happy Man,” Arthur is freed from this mnemonic trap by a bomb set to kill him and his lover Anna in a hotel room, which erases his memory. He awakes in a convalescent hospital, scarred, bearded, and knowing himself as Richard Digby. He has no memory of himself past childhood, and pathetically he imagines his early dreams of being an explorer may have come true. He has regained his childhood sense of innocence and lost that deadly feeling of pity that had led him to kill his wife and had led him into the hotel room carrying a suitcase with a bomb. As the plot continues to unfold, with the hospital doctor revealed as part of the mysterious forces against him, Arthur's search for the villains is full of energy and exaltation. The chase of the mysterious “They” who had first appeared to him at the fête intensifies, and Arthur feels a new excitement as he and a detective ride through a bombed-out London:

It was a long and gloomy ride, but all the time Rowe repressed for the sake of his companion a sense of exhilaration: he was happily drunk with danger and action. This was more like the life he had imagined years ago. He was helping in a great struggle. … The ruins from which they emerged were only a heroic back-cloth to his personal adventure; they had no more reality than the photographs in a propaganda album: the remains of an iron bedstead on the third floor of a smashed tenement only said, ‘They shall not pass,' not ‘We shall never sleep in this room, in this home, again.’ He didn’t understand suffering because he had forgotten he had ever suffered.Footnote ⁶⁵

London ceases to be a city in which people live and is reduced to the illustrations of newspaper headlines trumpeting London's morale. Greene represents war as an escape and distraction from the real human condition: fear. The anguish behind the headlines means nothing to Digby because he has forgotten how to be afraid.

In both incarnations, Rowe/Digby tries to find his way through uncharted and unmapped territory, surreal landscapes, and torturous plots. In the final section of the novel, “The Whole Man,” Arthur is restored to his adult self when his murder of his wife is revealed to him, the knowledge of which he must forever keep secret from his lover Anna, who prefers the innocent Digby. The final terrain Arthur surveys is an interior one, an enormous and perpetual Ministry of Fear for those who love and seek to protect the ones they love: “They sat for a long while without moving and without speaking; they were on the edge of their ordeal, like two explorers who see at last from the summit of the range the enormous dangerous plain. They had to tread carefully for a lifetime, never speak without thinking twice; they must watch each other like enemies because they loved each other so much.”Footnote ⁶⁶ Arthur rediscovers his fear when he once more recognizes a dangerous potential: losing Anna. In the course of the novel, the war is represented as an escape from the failures of ordinary life and a chance to pursue boyhood dreams of heroism and adventure. The real fear against which Arthur resolves to discipline himself, in the same way that diarists sought to discipline themselves during the bombing raids, is from an enemy within. This fear will not end with the cessation of hostilities. Arthur ends by acknowledging that he will have to build a false facade, a strict emotional regime, which must be carefully maintained once the outlet of war is over.

In this novel, London embodies the contrast between the childhood world of Dickens, fêtes, and Edwardian idyll and the adult world of failure, experience, pity, cruelty, and betrayal. Ordinary adult existence is shown to be insubstantial, as represented by Arthur's working-class landlady, who disappears after the bombing, and his prewar friend Henry Wilcox, who loses his identity in war. The other strand of adulthood is that of criminality, murder, treachery, “They,” the Fifth Column, and the Ministry of Fear, which underlie all elements of The Ministry of Fear's complex plot. London is the space in which these conflicting strands intersect; the shabby fête is also the landscape of menacing strangers. London therefore is the scene of transformation, where the comforting known world becomes strange, ambiguous, and threatening.

The transformative aspects of war are depicted throughout the novel through the urban landscape. The strangeness of the city appears in descriptions of the “dim, lurid” subterranean half-life in shelters, seen by Arthur as he flees danger and literally “goes underground,” and in metaphors of a devastated and abandoned city, “the strange torn landscape where London shops were reduced to a stone ground-plan like those of Pompeii.”Footnote ⁶⁷ London is a world of crazy juxtaposition where nothing makes sense: “It was an empty London with only occasional bursts of noise and activity. An umbrella shop was burning on the corner of Oxford Street; in Wardour Street he walked through a cloud of grit; a man with a dusty gray face leant against a wall and laughed and a warden said sharply, ‘That's enough now. It's nothing to laugh about.’”Footnote ⁶⁸ War eerily transforms people and places: “War is like a very bad dream in which familiar people appear in terrible and unlikely disguises.”Footnote ⁶⁹ Arthur struggles to make sense of the world in which he finds himself, both in the first part of the novel, in which he “felt, directed, moulded, controlled, by an agency with a surreal imagination,” and in the second part, as he comments, “It's as if one had been sent on a journey with the wrong map.”Footnote ⁷⁰ Even the police detective who is interested in Arthur/Digby's story is described as the “surrealist around here.”Footnote ⁷¹ War has turned the familiar into the menacing, and with no escape or resolution at the end of the novel, the Ministry of Fear threatens to remain in control forever.

One of the British Home Front's many ironies was the fact that detective novels and stories regained so much popularity during the war. As one Mass Observation diarist put it: “It is an awful thing to say but I feel that in Britain many people prefer to read of murders, etc. in preference to War News—even though it is War, really, but only singly!”Footnote ⁷² The genre of detective novel or thriller was appealing because it was an established and familiar genre, it seemed to correspond to the dangers and uncertainties of life in wartime, and yet it offered a comforting resolution at the end. As Arthur Rowe says to his mother in a dream: “The thrillers are like life—more like life than you are, this lawn, your sandwiches, that pine.”Footnote ⁷³ Yet the conventions of the thriller are not met in The Ministry of Fear. Within the novel Arthur complains that the police are not interested in investigating individual murder anymore in an atmosphere of mass death.Footnote ⁷⁴ And the novel itself, although it uses complex detective novel devices and plots, defies the genre. Arthur Rowe and his lover Anna Hilfe remain ambiguous characters whose motivations and desires are never clear. The ending is not a psychological resolution but leaves many loose ends and an even greater problem looming: the lifetime of fear that Anna and Arthur must endure in order to protect each other from the truth.

Elizabeth Bowen's most anthologized short story, “The Demon Lover,” also explores London as the site of collapsing categories of past and present, real and surreal, and war and peace. Like Greene, Bowen represents wartime London as an eerie and foreboding landscape in which social dislocation and physical destruction allows fear to seep through the cracks. Written during the blitz, the story was first published in The Listener in November 1941 and subsequently republished in The Demon Lover and Other Stories, edited by Jonathan Cape in 1945. In a preface to the 1945 edition, Bowen described the dislocative and transformative effects of living through the war in London:

I felt one with, and just like, everyone else. Sometimes I hardly knew where I stopped and somebody else began. The violent destruction of solid things, the explosion of the illusion that prestige, power and permanence attach to bulk and weight, left all of us, equally, heady and disembodied. Walls went down; and we felt, if not knew, each other. … People whose homes had been blown up went to infinite lengths to assemble bits of themselves—broken ornaments, odd shoes, torn scraps of the curtains that had hung in a room—from the wreckage. In the same way, they assembled and checked themselves from stories and poems, from their memories, from one another's talk.Footnote ⁷⁵

The destruction of London's walls was a literal and a metaphorical description of the disintegration of boundaries occasioned by the war. The violence of such damage was liberating and yet fearful as people struggled to find consolatory meanings and a return to a cohesive identity in the scraps left behind. Londoners feared material and psychological annihilation in the wreckage of war.

“The Demon Lover” begins with an evocation of just such a damaged landscape. Respectable wife and mother Mrs. Drover arrives in a deserted London street from the country to fetch some items for her family from their shut-up house. From the beginning, the setting has menacing and uncanny undertones: “In her once familiar street, as in any unused channel, an unfamiliar queerness had silted up; a cat wove itself in and out of the railings, but no human eye watched Mrs. Dover's return.”Footnote ⁷⁶ The deserted streets of London stand in for the fears of the larger social destruction caused by war. Damage and neglect have transformed this small piece of London into a space in which the familiar and human seem threatened.

As Mrs. Drover enters the front door, she sees on the dusty hall table a letter addressed to her, with no stamp. She is perturbed, as the caretaker is away and no one knew she was coming to London today. Moving upstairs toward the storage chests in her bedroom, she opens the letter, which is dated that day, and reads, “Dear Kathleen: You will not have forgotten that today is our anniversary, and the day we said. The years have gone by at once both slowly and fast. In view of the fact that nothing has changed, I shall rely on you to keep your promise. I was sorry to see you leave London, but was satisfied that you would be back in time. You may expect me, therefore, at the hour arranged. Until then … K.”Footnote ⁷⁷ She is overcome by fear, remembering the letter's writer as her soldier lover in the previous war. On the final night of his leave in 1916, they had stood in the garden. She could not see his face, so she put out a hand, “which each time he pressed, without much kindness, and painfully, on to one of the breast buttons of his uniform. That cut of the button on the palm of her hand was, principally, what she was to carry away. … Being not kissed, being drawn away from and looked at, intimidated Kathleen until she imagined spectral glitters in the place of his eyes.”Footnote ⁷⁸ By the end of their conversation, he had extracted an “unnatural promise” and “sinister troth” from her, the details of which are never specified, but which presumably involved meeting again. Her lover was reported missing a few months later, while Kathleen suffered, not grief but “a complete dislocation from everything.”Footnote ⁷⁹ Eventually she was courted, married, and had children, creating a life of conventional and respectable married existence.

The ghostly letter she discovers makes her everyday life seem unreal. It collapses the gap between present and past, between the two wars, and between her former and current selves: “The desuetude of her former bedroom, her married London home's air of being a cracked cup from which memory, with its reassuring power, had either evaporated or leaked away, made a crisis—and at just this crisis the letter writer had, knowledgeably, struck.”Footnote ⁸⁰ Mrs. Drover places the letter aside and tries to focus on finishing her errand, but as time passes her fear increases. She does not know what the appointed hour is, or remember her lover's face, “So wherever he may be waiting, I shall not know him. You have no time to run from a face you do not expect.”Footnote ⁸¹ His shadowy face is a central pivot to the story, the empty and sinister gap around which all the other categories of past and present, natural and supernatural, swirl.

Mrs. Drover can stand her fear no longer, and she leaves the house and hurries away from the deserted street, back to an inhabited area where she can find a taxi to take her to the station. She sees one at a taxi rank and climbs into it as the clock strikes seven. But the taxi turns before she has given directions. She leans forward to talk to the cab driver, and as a sudden jolt flings her forward, she comes face-to-face with the driver through the aperture between the seats: “Mrs. Drover's mouth hung open for some seconds before she could issue her first scream. After that she continued to scream freely and to beat with her gloved hands on the glass all round as the taxi, accelerating without mercy, made off with her into the hinterland of deserted streets.”Footnote ⁸² The story is left open-ended, with the unnatural promise, the demon lover's face, and Mrs. Drover's fate left obscured from the reader.

While the story has given rise to widely varying critical interpretations, its wartime setting and themes point to more specific and sinister meanings than a simple ghost story. Robert L. Calder, for instance, has interpreted the demon lover as war itself and his return “a symbol of a war that will not go away.”Footnote ⁸³ Like The Ministry of Fear, “The Demon Lover” represents war as a destructive element whose chaos reveals potential peril everywhere. While the familiarity of the continued bustle of London and its taxis seems to indicate safety for Mrs. Drover, it acts as a trap into which she falls. She is spirited away back into the eerie landscape of deserted London streets in which unknown horror lurks. Like diarists’ anxieties, the danger is of something unspecified, and fear lurks in the blanks that imaginations fill over and over again. Fear is the human condition in these stories, and the authors point to war's role in letting fears seep through the cracks of disrupted civilian lives.

Greene's and Bowen's fiction, as well as civilian wartime diaries, reveals the atmosphere of fear in wartime London. Civilians sought to stifle their fears, according to Britain's strict emotional regime in which expressions of fear were bad for morale and a social embarrassment. Yet the repressed emotion of fear returned in public concerns with the steadfastness of workers and Jews in the metropolis and in literary narrative strategies displacing fear onto the individual physical body or on London itself. The London landscape, with its gaps and ruins, was the perfect metaphor for war's potential destruction of the individual psyche. Bowen's Demon Lover is not war but something darker, deeper, and more private that war draws out. His unseen face is the perfect metaphor for Londoners’ wartime fears. It represents something unacknowledged, unknown, lurking like a fog in everyday landscapes turned strange by war.