Miriam’s Family Blitz

Book excerpt: On the 7 September 1940, the London Blitz began in ernest. This was when the Nazi Luftwaffe machine switched from daylight raids on military targets to heavy bomber raids at night focusing on large cities. Miriam's Family Blitz, already broadly conceived in, Miriam's War by the same author, places her family's first fifteen days of the London Blitz under a magnifying glass. A period in which the mundane lives of her close family and friends in the East End found themselves experiencing front-line warfare for the first time, undergoing the inconvenient blackout, general restrictions and rationing. From the family's once relatively quiet life, and with Miriam, released from Holloway prison only one year previously, the intense and very real fear of invasion, gassing, destruction and death occupies almost their every thought.