大象传媒

When I was 13 in 1944, I was sitting in a biology class at school, and suddenly there was an enormous explosion, which shook the windows of the classroom. We realised it was a German V2 rocket that had landed not far away. The lesson carried on because we were used to the rockets by then. I don鈥檛 even remember being scared. Our school was Grocers, which was situated on one side of Hackney Downs. The other three sides were surrounded either by blocks of flats or rows of houses. When we came out of school, we could see a column of smoke rising from the middle of the Downs. All the boys went towards the site where the rocket had landed, picking up bits of metal from the rocket, but dropping them straight away because they were still hot. The crater where the rocket had landed was about 30 feet wide and almost as deep. We thought how fortunate it was that the rocket had missed all the residential surrounding buildings and only damaged open space. I realised how lucky we were, because a whole family of my cousins had been killed in another rocket attack.

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