She was 12, and she has just started a diary, probably her first. “To this diary I will entrust both my joys and my sorrows,” she writes, with shy excitement. A month later it is the sorrows she confides: “Today I have been away from home exactly eight months and one day. I am missing Mummy and Daddy desperately.”

But there are joys too: “Today a letter arrived from Mummy, in which she announced her first great victory over Daddy in table tennis. I was glad about that, and Mummy is so proud.” She is agog when Uncle Herbert and Aunt Erika take her to the deer park. “The deer and roebucks, including a pure white one, were eating out of my hand!”

The diary conveys a young girl’s sweet balance of slight formality with sudden rushes of childish feeling. “My [school] report is as follows: Arithmetic 4; Geography 4; Gym-apparatus-work 4 (about which I am very disappointed); English 4; Handwriting 3 . . .”; “It was so lovely [in the mountains]. We found many mushrooms . . . Such dark fir trees! Lovely!”

Her name is Hilke and she is staying — an enforced stay — with a grumpy uncle and aunt, and missing home very much. “Aunt Erika is very busy and we are not allowed to go into the Christmas room. So I am very aware that Christmas at home with my parents is much more lovely than here.” Her older brother, Carl, is hoping to join the armed forces.

She finds three baby hares. “The mother was gone and a hawk was circling over the nest. We took [them] home. One died on the way, and I put it under a fir tree. The two others we took back . . . As they could not drink by themselves, we had to take a straw and pour milk down their throats. After three weeks the second one died. The third one we called Heidi. Now Heidi is big enough to drink on her own.”

One day there is an outing to the zoo. Hilke is so disappointed not to be able to go too, but, as she explains in her diary entry for September 28, 1941: “I was on duty with the Hitler Youth Group.”

Like most girl’s diaries, Hilke’s has never been published, but it was shown to my brother in Warwick recently by his (originally German) neighbour, Hilke’s sister, who has translated it. The diary runs from July 27, 1940 to August 4, 1945.

March 21, 1941: “I arrived back at Hamburg. At last, after a year and a half, back home again! I am very happy . . . Carl gives Mummy a lot of trouble nowadays because he is always contradicting her.

July 2, 1941: “On June 22 the war with Russia began. The English air raids were pretty bad. . . . In the harbour area whole streets have collapsed . . . the city was in chaos.

September 28, 1941: “The other day we had another air raid. Carl and I were alone with the home help as Mummy and Daddy had gone to Meisenheim to fetch Charlotte and Irene [her little sisters]. There were 74 dead. In my school . . . all the windows are broken . . . I am now learning Spanish as a second foreign language.

And so the diary goes on. “Today we learnt at school about coping with incendiary bombs . . . I wonder whether we will have to practise extinguishing such a bomb by ourselves?” November 10, 1941: “At the moment I don’t seem to get on with Charlotte . . . I had been so looking forward to seeing her again. Instead she had become silly and naughty . . . [she] is only concerned with annoying me . . . Mummy always takes her side.

Hilke is now 13. To her excitement, she learns that her mother is expecting a fifth child. My brother and I (we have four more brothers and sisters) have been reading Hilke’s diary with exactly the same confused feelings. You cannot but enter this child’s world. Filled with all the usual joys and anxieties of childhood, and a self-possessed determination to behave in a practical and helpful way, it is a world in which the people and events figuring in what we would call “history” are fairly mysterious to her.

They are facts, facts she never really questions.

August 7, 1942. “127 dead in Dösseldorf and 189,000 homeless . . . Aunt Erika has a brother there. She and I went to the (for me) unknown city . . . the famous Königsallee . . . now looked very sad. No windows anywhere! Lots of broken roofs! . . . House after house destroyed. To think people got out of there alive! Dr Goebbels spoke yesterday to the population of Dösseldorf.”

One begins to hope against hope that Hilke is spared the fate of her friends. Then the bombs hit Hamburg again. “Luckily none of us were there. The letter from Mummy says: ‘Dear Children! Now I am going to tell you about the dreadful air raid on July 26 . . . Whole streets were burning . . . the Pohl’s house on the other side [of the street] was burning, as well as the Gossler’s house . . . Dr Hahn’s house and the Dölles’ are completely burnt out . . . Mummy’s old school was on fire . . . I looked on to the streets and saw a sea of flames . . . 1,000 greetings, Your Mummy’.”

“Was it God’s hand,” Hilke asks her diary, “that spared us? I thank Him that He has protected my parents.”

Her new baby sister is born, and christened Sabine. Not long after, Hilke records, with nervous excitement, her first menstrual period. “Today I have become a teenager! ‘Vierzehn Jahre, sieben Wochen, is der Backfisch ausgekrochen’ (fourteen years and seven weeks the teenager has hatched!)”

Drawn deeper into Hilke’s world, sharing her hopes and fears, I remind myself that most of the men in my mother’s family were in the Royal Air Force.

End of July 1943: “. . . whole areas of the city [Hamburg] had collapsed, burying people underneath. Along the streets were crying women and unconscious children suffering from terrible burns. The lorry went over a bump. What was that? I saw a charred corpse in the street. Only the bones . . . Carl had to go back to the Luftwaffe . . .”

Hilke develops a teenage crush on an older girl: “Is that how love for a fiancé feels? . . . One day, when I read these lines again, will I understand myself, or will I smile and say: ‘Puppy love?’ ” April 25, 1945: “. . . All the pictures of Hitler are being buried, the flags torn to bits . . . Today we had to dry our dishes with a swastika flag. I couldn’t stand that so I walked out.”

Ascension Day: “Goebbels has poisoned himself. The Föhrer is dead.”

Hilke escaped the bombers. Later, she married an Englishman and came to Britain. She was killed in a car crash.

I went yesterday to a memorial service for one of my great predecessor sketchwriters on this paper, Frank Johnson, at St Clement Danes Church in the Strand: the Air Force Church, restored after German bombs reduced it to ruin. Outside is a bronze statue of Sir Arthur “Bomber” Harris. Inside we sang: “I vow to thee my country”. Hilke’s diary was in my briefcase.

I’m not suggesting an answer. I don’t even know the question. But is there a better way?

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