At a roadworks near you As I pass by I involuntarily adopt the posture of Munch's well-known scream victim. I say well-known, but, even though the only version of The Scream still at loose in the wild has just been bought for several billion pounds, a BBC arts reporter was still saying yesterday that it depicted someone screaming. It doesn't. Munch clearly noted the inspiration for the picture in his diary: "I stood there trembling with anxiety - and I sensed an infinite scream passing through nature." It's nature's scream that is meant to be making the figure cover his ears. It just shows what a failure Expressionism is at actually expressing things. On Tuesday March 27 1945 at the Embassy cinema in Petts Wood, Kent, a girl in the audience saw a message on the screen to meet her father at Orpington station. They went together to see what had happened to the street where they lived. A V2 rocket had hit a bungalow, and the blast demolished 15 surrounding houses. Father and daughter looked at their own battered house by moonlight, "glass shattered, all the fish in the garden pond dead and a neighbour's pyjama trousers flying from a chimney." These are the poignant minutiae of war. It was the last rocket to fall on London as the Germans retreated on the other side of the North Sea. Nine thousand civilians had been killed by the V-weapons in seven months. I have been reading the fascinating account of those weeks in Christy Campbell's Target London (Little, Brown, £20). The strangest thing is that today at Peenemünd on the Baltic, where V2s were launched, they sell in the museum shop teddy bears with little black T-shirts that read: "I š Peenemünd." Now that greengrocers use computerised tills, and even betting shops have midget ballpoints, one can go through life rarely catching sight of a pencil - until polling day. At the deserted primary school, with the jocular polling clerks and the outdoor smell of an indoor floor being trampled by wet footwear, we find, waiting in the pegboard booth, the unsung friend of democracy, the short fat pencil tied to a bit of string (plastic, though perhaps in traditional parts - Alnwick, say, or Stretton Sugwas - sisal may survive). Do the graphite grinding-sheds of Keswick rely on this perilously seasonal trade?