Watching the watchful faces discreetly scrutinising each new passenger stepping on to the Tube in London this summer it is easy to get a sense of how everyday surroundings can suddenly become imbued with undertones of stark danger, writes Dermot Bolger
But the London underground stations and the streets above them have a long history of ordinary people carrying on with their lives amid the dangers of bombs. It happened in the 1970s when the IRA employed the tactic of random murder and it happened on a far greater scale during the London Blitz when more than one in 10 Londoners killed by falling bombs were children.
Back during the Blitz, however, the Underground stations were viewed as places of sanctuary from bombs, as a crowded shelter where the people who gathered in discomfort could at least feel safe from explosion. But safety could never be guaranteed down in those depths, as was shown in 1940 when Balham tube station received a direct hit and 64 people were drowned in a flood caused by shattered sewerage pipes.
Although the Blitz has been well documented, it is rarely portrayed through the eyes of a child - which is why, if one disembarks from the Bakerloo Line at Lambert North, the current exhibition entitled "The Children's War" at the Imperial War Museum in Lambert is worth visiting. Two things are striking. First, of course, is the exhibition itself, with its array of gas masks, ration books, children's comics and extracts from their letters home after being evacuated to the country. Second - and far more important - is the reaction of elderly Londoners who visit the exhibition and find themselves confronted by their own childhoods as they stand again in an exact replica of a wartime home and see the steel cage under the table in which children who could not reach a proper bomb shelter in time were expected to crouch.
In a city as huge as London strangers rarely speak to each other. But, confronted by Anderson shelters and clothes and toys from the period, the older visitors present on the day when I was there seemed almost desperate to share memories of their parents and siblings and to talk about a time which they had never been able to make real for their grandchildren until now. Nicholas Stargardt has recently produced a startlingly vivid account of children's lives under the Nazis in Witnesses of War. The exhibition in the Imperial War Museum obviously lacks the same depth in exploring what life was like for their counterparts in Britain, but with its banks of photographs, posters and interactive screens it conjures a vivid sense of how the war years were seen through the bewildered eyes of a child.
The most effective items are often simple extracts from letters. "They have a thing down here called spring, it happens every year," one child wrote to his mother in London from a farm in 1940. By 1945 children had grown so accustomed to being raised by their mothers alone that one child greeted the return of his father with the words: "There is a soldier coming up the path and I think he might be your husband."
These were years of terror when 7,500 thousand children perished in the London bombings (the youngest a mere 11 hours old) and evacuated children regularly watched dogfights in the skies over the farms where they were housed. Farmers were often deeply shocked at the lack of hygiene of some city children, while children were sometimes equally shocked to find themselves in rural outposts without running water nor electricity. By the end of the war 70 per cent of girls and 80 per cent of boys between the ages of 14 and 17 were in full-time employment, with many of the boys who were conscripted seeing only the dark depths of coalmines as "Bevin Boys".
Michelle Marorian's children's novel Good Night, Mister Tom has made the life of evacuated children vivid for a new generation of readers and, like it, "The Children's War" is not just about the terrors of that time.
It is also about how children - who only have one childhood and quickly adapt to circumstances - played together and quarrelled and invented new games amid the bomb craters and mayhem going on around them.
The exhibition runs until 2008. If you go there, with luck it will be on a day when some old person is quietly standing in one of the rooms, just dying to talk to a stranger and make the full-sized replica of a wartime house come to life in their minds again.