大象传媒

THE LAINDON V2

I was born about a year after the end of the Second World War, so in this account I am largely passing on what I was told. Nevertheless, the story is sufficiently unusual to deserve to be recorded.

My parents both grew up in Laindon, Essex. My father鈥檚 family, the Joys, lived down an unmade road, running parallel to the Southend Arterial Road (the A127). My mother鈥檚 family, the Reeves, lived about a quarter of a mile away, where they had a shop on the Arterial. As a child, I used to stay with my grandparents, usually with the Joys, since the Reeves moved to Southend.

I think it must have been about 1950 that a Joy aunt and uncle took me further down the unmade road where they lived, and into a garden where there was no house. There had been a house, but all there was to see of it was the base, a concrete floor, as I recall. In the garden, there was a circular hole, full of water. It is difficult for me to judge the diameter of the hole, since I viewed it as a small child, but I think it may have been about five feet across.

My aunt and uncle then told me the story of the house and the hole.

The house belonged to two sisters. One day, probably in 1944, one of them went out shopping, and the other did the washing. When she started to hang the washing on the washing line, a V2 rocket bomb landed right beside her and exploded. The house was razed, but the woman was not injured. She was forced to the ground by the pressure of the blast, and there her sister found her, when she returned from the shop. Unfortunately, she refused to go to hospital, and died a few days later from pneumonia, presumably induced by the shock.

The story has a twist; why was the sister at the shop? In my teens, I mentioned this story to my Granddad Reeve, who had the shop on the Arterial Road. He recalled the incident immediately, and told me more.

The sisters had bought a bottle of sauce from his shop some time before. When they tried to open the bottle, they could not; so on the morning of the V2, one of them went to do the shopping and took the bottle back with her. She explained the difficulty, and my grandfather agreed to replace the bottle. He took it from her, and placed it on the shelf. When he had provided everything else she wanted, he gave her a replacement bottle of sauce.

When she got home, the woman found he had accidentally given her the same bottle! I imagine she was rather annoyed by this, for she at once went back to the shop, where my grandfather immediately gave her a replacement, and she went back home. It was while she was away that the V2 fell. If it had not been for my grandfather鈥檚 momentary carelessness, she would have been killed.

John Joy
8.8.2004.

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