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This story was submitted to the People’s War Site by Sabrina Parkar, for Three Counties Action, on behalf of Rita Fraser, and has been added to the site with her permission. The author fully understands the site’s terms and conditions.

Memories of the Second World War. I was just 15 and had started my first job in the accounts office of Commer Cards. I had three brothers in the Army and away, and one was on leave for a few days. I remember it being November 1944, a beautiful sunny morning as I was a junior, I did lots of odd jobs as well as learning to do accounts. Anyway, I had been delivering some correspondence to ‘Kents’ next to Commers and had come back to my office. The slight breeze from one of the windows had blown a paper under my desk and as I bent down to get it there was an almighty explosion the like I had never experienced before, and standing back up the whole office was like a war zone. My hair was covered in glass, and my foot was bleeding, after the initial shock everywhere was a bit chaotic and now like a dream. The ARP men came in and told us to collect our bags and get out, we were told that there had been a gas explosion, of course we knew afterward it was the V11 rocket, a new missile launched from Germany. Had it landed the other side of our canteen I would not be here to tell you this story. One lady in the office had been seriously hurt, a fragment of glass entering her neck near the jugular vein. When I got home my mother said they heard the explosion and seen the smoke, she said to my brother my God that’s Commer Cars, he said “no its not” trying not to alarm her bit of course it was. So many people were killed that day along Biscot Road, and I wonder how many young people who live their now will know what happened that fateful day.

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