Mrs Robert Henrey. London Under Fire 1940-45. London: J. M. Dent & Sons, 1969.

Included in the official canon, glossed ‘(with her baby under the bombs)’.

Eighth item in ‘Mrs Robert Henrey’s autobiographical sequence in chronological order’.

Incorporates rewritten sections of A Farm in Normandy; incorporating, The Return to the Farm (Dent 1952) and A Village in Piccadilly (Dent 1952).

No reviews.

London Under Fire 1940–45 ran to 255 pp. Demy 8vo (c. 82K words), price 30s. (glossed also as new-style £1.50), bound in black cloth boards with gilt spine titling and identical red end-papers showing the three-dimensional street map of Piccadilly, Shepherd Market and ‘Our Flat’ that had been used for the front end paper of the wartime editions. The jacket front bore the ‘Dawn after the Raid’ photograph from A Village in Piccadilly (a tin-hatted fire-watcher clambering over a heap of rubble), partly overprinted with a fiery red rectangle punning on the title, which appeared at the top in white reserve with the author’s name in black Garamond caps. The white jacket back carried the standard ‘Critics all over the world...’ puff. There were twenty-six half-tones (not twenty-four as announced on the front flap) selected from the total of fifty photographic plates in the original editions (eleven from A Village in Piccadilly, eight from The Incredible City , seven from The Siege of London). These illustrations were irregularly tipped in throughout the book in recto-verso pairs. The volume was divided into five sections by year. The edited versions of the three originals were spread over this section structure, each announced within the structure by its title in centred caps at the top of a recto with a blank verso. Titles and years were repeated in the running heads.