I was brought up in the War. I was an adolescent in the Second World War. And I did witness in London a great deal of the Blitz.

Pinter is locating his artistic and political sensibility in lived wartime experience. By stressing that he “was brought up in the War” and “witness[ed]…the Blitz,” he frames violence and state power not as abstractions but as formative realities of childhood and adolescence. The remark helps explain recurring features of his work: an acute awareness of menace, the fragility of ordinary domestic life, and a suspicion of official narratives that sanitize coercion. It also functions rhetorically as a claim to authority—he speaks about war and its aftermath as someone shaped by it firsthand, not merely as an observer at a distance.