Francis Spufford

Thank you for having me.

It's based on a real event, the single largest loss of life from a German V2 rocket, which fell on a branch of Woolworths on a busy Saturday lunchtime, just when they'd had their first delivery of new saucepans for years.

So the place was crammed with people.

And in particular, it was crammed with mothers with less than school-aged children who'd come in to try and get their hands on a pan.

And 168 people died there.

of whom a shocking number were kind of under 11.

It has haunted me.

It happened right next to the college where I teach one day a week in London.

So I've been going past the little plaque to this horror over and over again.

And what has haunted me has been a kind of mixture of just how fast they went.

About a ten thousandth of a second, far too short a time for any human consciousness to register the fact that a

An enormous rocket full of high explosive was coming through the ceiling.

And that the consequences in terms of what they missed lasted for decades and decades and decades.

So it's a catastrophe with very fast time in it and lots and lots and lots of very slow lost time in it too.

And I wanted to do something which had both of those in it.

I should say, yeah, I should say that they aren't the literal dead of this literal V2.

I invented another V2 falling on a

on a more fictional London, London borough somewhere nearby because the real dead were real people.

And there are still, there are still real families mourning these losses in some cases.

So, so I made up Joe and Val and Alec and Ben and Vern, but what I've done is I've first, I first I've killed them.