Betty Baker was six years old, living in quiet, suburban Mitcham when World War II broke out. She spent the next six years cowering from air raids in various shelters, under the dining room table, or escaping them completely in the countryside village where her father was stationed at a secret propaganda printing press. Aside from describing the terror, rationing, and bewildering uncertainties of war, this memoir, written in 1990 and now edited for publication, gives a firsthand account of what it was like to be a kid in the 1940s, when avoiding a teacher's wrath came second only to avoiding...