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During the war years both my mother and father were working to enable them to continue to maintain their house mortgage re-payments which they had taken out in 1934 on a house in Queens Drive in Waltham Newtown (now known as Holdbrook). My mother worked as the company accountant and secretary for Hazelmere Motor Company which was located next to the very sharply humped bridge over the river that enabled ammunition barges to enter and leave the gunpowder factory.

The bridge no longer exists, it was removed quite some years ago. My father was the local water board Turncock and because of his knowledge of all the underground district pipe work, he was refused permission to enter the armed forces but instead kept back to continue what was considered to be very important work requiring his knowledge and expertise at that time.

In those days it was considered quite safe for young children to walk alone to and from school, my school was in Waltham Cross. Usually shortly after I had arrived home my mother would also arrive home to prepare tea for us.

The day the V2 rocket fell I had arrived home and decided to look out of the front room window of our house to see if my mother was walking up the road towards our home. To enable myself to gain the necessary vision to look down our road I had to press my face against the window pane, just as I did so I saw very bright brief flash of light from the direction of Waltham Abbey followed by the sound of an explosion and as I looked I saw debris, some of which looked like large planks of wood whirling high into the air above and well beyond the line of houses opposite ours.

Even as a young schoolboy I knew the approximate position of where my mother worked and I feared for her safety, not only that I was very curious to know what had happened, I ran from the house towards the site of the explosion, which did not take me very long to arrive, it was only just down the adjacent main road.

Devastation met my eyes, a huge crater was where the road had been with what might have been the skeletal remains of a lorry on one edge just on the Waltham Cross side of the crater, all the Alms cottages on one side had been reduced to rubble and just a very little smoke rose thinly from the crater. A policeman asked me where I lived, being a rather naughty little boy, not appreciating the full seriousness of the situation I replied 'Over there' and the policeman allowed me to walk around the crater to the far side.

Road traffice was struggling to drive around one side including the red single deck local bus that operated in that area.

Some men were holding a badly injured woman covered in blood upright whilst another man was washing her down with a watering can of water, possibly in order to enable them to see her wounds. Close by some more men were jacking up a large section of rubble that had fallen across a woman's leg. As they drew the woman out from underneath I could see that her leg had been completely crushed, held together simply by her blood soaked stocking.

Another policeman allowed me to walk back again and this time I went into the office where my mother worked, part of the ceiling had fallen down but my mother and everyone in there were safe, they had been very fortunate, the humped bridge had deflected most of the blast force of the explosion up and away from them.

When the rocket struck my father was riding his heavy water board bicycle laden with the heavy keys for controlling various water control valves of all the local underground water pipes set well down in the local roads and as he was turning right out from Lea Road, the blast from the rocket blew him off his bicycle, unhurt he remounted it and pedalled to the scene. He managed to close down a fractured water main but managed to still ensure there was a water supply as necessary.

Later I overheard him telling my mother that apparently someone had found the hands of the driver of the lorry upon which the rocket had fallen, his hands were found in an adjacent field.

About thirty years later with a wife and child of my own, on a summers day we were all outside chatting about those events during the war with some neighbours and I recounted this tale to them. The neighbour who lived opposite to us said 'That was my mother, she lost her leg, it was amputated, but she survived.'

I was amazed, at just how small at times that this world can be.

Despite that happening all those years ago I will never forget the event, somehow it has become imprinted into my memory, upon seeing the exhibits displayed in Waltham Abbey Library plus the account and picture in the local newspaper some months earlier the details emerged within my mind, that picture was exactly how I remembered it along with all the other details.

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