V2 A Novel of World War II - Robert Harris Page 0,22

the tents in the woods for technical checks. Their dream had come true, he thought, if not exactly as they had envisaged it. They had indeed created a Rocket Aerodrome.

He started to feel cold. That damned salt water again! It conducted the cold as effectively as it conducted electricity. He turned up the collar of his coat and moved towards the train.

6

AT 5.34 A.M., THE REGIMENT fired its first V2 of the day. Its orange flame rose like a sun in the wintry forest, setting light to the tops of some of the surrounding fir trees as it lifted into the darkness. The roar split the Sunday-morning silence over The Hague, bringing hundreds to their bedroom windows to see what was happening. The clouds over the sea glowed red for an instant then went black again.

Five minutes later, the missile struck Longbridge Road, a modern residential street in Ilford, Greater London, demolishing three houses. In the central house, number 411, which suffered a direct hit, Maud Branton and her daughter Iris, aged nineteen, were killed instantly; her husband Sidney was pulled out of the rubble but died later the same day in Barking Emergency Hospital. Next door, in number 413, Frederick and Ellen Brind were also killed outright; their twenty-month-old grandson, Victor, was taken to hospital but was pronounced dead on arrival. Also killed was one of the Brantons’ neighbours on the other side, Charles Berman, aged thirty-nine. In all, eight died and another eight were seriously injured.

The second rocket, launched two and a half hours later at 8.02 a.m., veered almost a hundred miles off course and plunged harmlessly into the North Sea, close to the shingle strand of Orford Ness in Suffolk, where the explosion was observed by some startled early-morning fishermen casting their lines from the beach for mackerel.

What happened to the third missile remains a mystery. It took off perfectly at 10.26 a.m., but there is no record of an impact anywhere on the British mainland. Presumably it must have exploded in mid-air, perhaps during re-entry.

Twenty minutes later, at 10.46, the fourth missile was fired. It hit Orion Cottages in Rainham, Greater London, close to the River Thames. Two people were killed: Albert Bull, a thirty-nine-year-old fireman, who died in the blast, and his five-year-old son, Brian, who succumbed to his injuries later the same day at Oldchurch County Hospital. Thirty people were seriously hurt.

The day’s fifth launch, at 11.20 a.m., landed on a modern detached house in Manor Road, Chigwell, killing Stanley Dearlove, aged forty. Six others were seriously injured.

The sixth rocket, fired at 12.50 p.m., struck 41 Gordon Avenue in Walthamstow, killing fifty-five-year-old Lilian Cornwell and seriously injuring another seventeen people.

Less than an hour later, missile number seven, launched at 1.39 p.m., scored a direct hit on All Saints’ Church in East India Dock Road – remarkably, only two hundred yards from McCullum Road, Poplar, where a V2 had struck on Friday night, killing fourteen. It brought down the church’s Georgian roof and the eastern side of the nave. Luckily, the main Sunday service was over. Even so, it killed four adults and one eleven-year-old boy, Aubrey Hing. Nineteen people were seriously injured.

Eleven minutes after that, an eighth missile plunged down on to Billericay in Essex, hitting some trees and exploding prematurely, seriously injuring two people.

Thirty-five miles away, in Danesfield House, Kay was at her desk beside the window on the first floor, her head bent over her stereoscopic magnifier. The two great skills of photographic interpretation were, first, the concentration to study the same area for months or even years, until one knew it is as well as one’s own back garden; and second, the memory to spot the minute change that indicated enemy activity. If a lot of people walked across a field, for example, the trampled grass would show up lighter than the surrounding area. To what were their tracks leading? Was that odd shape a tank? A gun? The arrival of camouflage was a sure giveaway that something was going on. And it was surprisingly easy to spot, camouflage on the ground being mostly a matter of blending in colours, whereas in a monochrome image taken from an altitude of more than 20,000 feet it showed up as a difference in tone. But trees were an infallible camouflage – unchanging, impenetrable, a uniform dark grey blanket, even in winter, even if they were deciduous. There was simply nothing to see in the woods around The Hague. They mocked her hours