his bell to clear a path. People looked over their shoulders, moved aside onto the pavement, pulled others out of the way then stepped back into the road again.
Finally the ambulance was swallowed from her view. The sound of the clanging bell faded. Even so, she did not move. Her mind seemed to be working at half speed. She could only make sense of one thing at a time.
Better not. Had he really meant that? Should she have insisted on going with him?
Midway over the North Sea, the missile was functioning perfectly, the twin gyroscopes – one controlling pitch, the other roll – turning at 30,000 revolutions per minute, holding the V2 steady on its flight path.
She realised she was cold, shivering in her dress without a coat. She looked about her for the first time, saw that virtually every shop window on Chancery Lane had been blown in – along with most of the glass in the higher storeys, and in the windows of the cars that were strewn at odd angles and abandoned in the road. The wide street, though packed, was oddly static, like the West End at night when the shows were ending and people stood around waiting for their friends to come out, discussing what they had just seen or what they should do next. There was a lot of blood – on faces, on clothes, in little patches on the pavement. An elderly couple were sitting on the kerb holding hands, their feet in the gutter. A small boy was clinging to an empty pram, crying. Shards of glass were everywhere, and bricks and lumps of masonry. She noticed an odd piece of thin flat metal at her feet and picked it up. It was still warm. She guessed it was a piece of the rocket, part of the fuselage casing perhaps, or a tail fin. She replaced it carefully. Someone said something to her, but by the time she managed to focus her attention, they had gone.
After a while, she began to walk in the same direction as the ambulance.
Barts Hospital was in the City of London – she knew that much. If she couldn’t see Mike, she might at least stand outside on the pavement. She hadn’t really thought it through.
A little over four miles to the south-east, in New Cross Road in Deptford, the Woolworths department store had received a consignment of saucepans – a scarce item in wartime Britain. Word had spread and a long queue of housewives had formed. This particular branch of Woolworths occupied a large building of four storeys. Saturday was its busiest day, lunchtime its busiest hour. A lot of the women had brought their children; many were at the confectionery counter. One young mother, with a two-month-old baby in her left arm, walking up New Cross Road on her way to the fabled saucepan bonanza, recalled forty years later ‘a sudden airless quiet, which seemed to stop one’s breath’.
When an object breaks the sound barrier and continues to travel at a velocity in excess of Mach 1 – 767 miles per hour – it carries the noise of its sonic boom with it, the way a speedboat pushes out waves from its prow in a constant wash. At 12.25 p.m. – she only knew the exact time because she saw it in the official report afterwards – Kay heard what sounded like a particularly noisy firework exploding in the sky, followed a few seconds later by a loud but distant bang, as if a heavy door had slammed. Then came the rush of the rocket. Everyone around her stopped and looked up.
The V2 hit Woolworths dead centre and ploughed through every floor before detonating to form a crater thirty feet deep. Most of the victims died instantly, either in Woolworths itself, or in the Co-operative store next door, or in the draper’s across the street, or on the number 53 bus, where the corpses remained upright in their seats, their internal organs traumatised by the blast wave. One hundred and sixty people were killed.
Banfill, Brian John, aged 3; Banfill, Florence Ethel, 42 …
Brown, Ivy, 31; Brown, Joyce, 18 months; Brown, Sylvia Rosina, 12 …
Glover, Julia Elizabeth, 28; Glover, Michael Thomas, 1 month; Glover, Sheila, 7 …
In front of Kay, a thin smudgy column of brown smoke began to rise above the roofs.
There was a debate both during and after the war about which was the more frightening: the V1, the pilotless drone bomb, which you