V2 Rocket Attack St Bartholomews Road.

A Memory of East Ham.

My father Leonard Duffield was brought up in the family home at 52 St Bartholomews Road. His father and uncle owned and ran a wholesale and retail bakery business H & GS Duffield which had a shop in High Street South along with delivering to bakers shops across London. In late 1944 whist my dad was away in the army a V2 rocket destroyed the family home. Luckily the family were not at home and all survived the blast however my dad's boyhood friend George Cootes mother later died from her injuries. When home on leave my father sifted through the rubble and retrieved his collection of all volumes of the Just William books although some being bomb damaged he kept them for the rest of his life. My mother still has them to this day. After being bombed out the family moved to Polegate, a village in Sussex where Harry Duffield, my grandfather started a new business H Duffield, Newsagent, Tobacconist, Wine and Spirit merchant. The family was not complete however as my uncle Ronald was killed fighting the Japanese in Burma. My father was demobbed from the Somerset Light Infantry in 1946 stepping off the train at a village he had never even heard of previously where he met our mother and the rest is history.

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