When the air raids began 80 years ago, no spiritual writer better caught the terror, loneliness, grief and overwhelming feeling of helplessness ordinary Londoners experienced than a frail, single, cash-strapped woman with a fondness for gossip

During the summer of 1940, the writer and visual artist, Caryll Houselander, was going on 39. Her writing and drawings appeared anonymously in the Jesuit-run Messenger of the Sacred Heart, The Children’s Messenger and The Grail Magazine. She lived in a house in Milborne Grove, Chelsea, owned by her friend, Iris Wyndham, with Iris and Iris’ 18-year-old daughter, Joan, who was taking art classes and falling in love with one man after another.

Over the anxious weeks of that uneasy ­summer there were gin parties with the neighbours and talk of a coming German invasion. There was training at the First Aid post and toy-making and tea parties with the children of refugees who had fled from Nazi-occupied Belgium. Caryll had spent much of the previous year helping to get the First Aid post in order, feeling perpetually exhausted and unequal to the nursing task ahead of her. Increasingly, she regarded the wartime afflictions as participation in the Passion of Christ. When war had been declared the previous September, she had written to a friend: “I do feel we’ve just got to shut our eyes and dive into this sea of Christ, dive with the trust of people who can’t swim and yet go straight into the dark water.”

Shortly afterwards, some of Caryll’s meditative writing appeared in The Grail Magazine under the heading, “This War is the Passion”. “Because he has made us ‘other Christs’,” she wrote, “because his life continues in each one of us, there is nothing that any one of us can suffer which is not the Passion he suffered.” Other meditations followed in further issues of The Grail: “Love” (“the first and last vocation of every Christian ...”); “The Kingdom Within” (“we return to the primitive Christianity of the Apostles, and having, as Christ had, only ourselves, we require no more…”); “The Flowering of Christ” (“A girl of eleven, asked to teach a child of four to ‘make a sacrifice’, taught him to make the Sign of the Cross. Asked why this should be a sacrifice, she answered, with supreme wisdom, ‘Because for a little minute he gives all of himself to God.’”)