the Second World War, were sufficiently disturbing in their time. Rackham’s undated letters to her describe the ‘bomb-craters on Parliament Hill’, the clatter of the anti-aircraft guns and the dangers of falling shrapnel: ‘I went to Wandsworth [where his mother and two sisters lived] yesterday. And right through town from here the road is full of groups of kneeling children with all manner of tools gouging & digging out the shrapnel from the wood pavement. Our guns keep going like hell.’ Inspecting the row of craters at the foot of Parliament Hill, near Gospel Oak, he talked to a man who had been in the Duke of St Albans’ public house when the bombs fell: ‘He says that it was all over before you knew. Bang! the glass in! Silence. The broken gas main flared up outside – but nothing much, he says. No time to be frightened. He didn’t appear to have minded in the least. A man of 55 or so.’ (Thus Cockney sang-froid, anticipating the ‘blitz’ of 1940.) A letter to his daughter of 1917 shows Rackham as a grass widower indeed, trying to cut the neglected lawn and prune the overgrown trees in his garden.