Helen Kitchen, Deputy Business Editor
Rocket Science, Secrets And Reconciliation: A Daughter’s Cold War Odyssey
.png)
The premise alone is extraordinary: Amanda’s estranged father, Neville ‘Cocky’ Cox, a British engineer with specialised knowledge, found himself entangled in a classified operation on Gorodomlya Island, a crucial site in the post-WWII technological race. The Soviets, desperate to match American advances in rocketry, transported dozens of German engineers and their families to this isolated compound. It’s a chapter of Cold War history that remained largely hidden until recently.
Persuaded by her brother to join lockdown video calls with her long absent father, Amanda reluctantly began to interrogate him about his life in an attempt to understand the man who she remembered only vaguely as “always doing something with black boxes, wires, dials, circuit boards and screwdrivers, when he wasn’t up to his elbows in a car engine”.
"What surprised me most was that his most unlikely assertions turned out to be true," Amanda told me in an interview. "Such as the large-scale abduction of German rocket scientists and workers from Bleicherode near Nordhausen, piled onto 90 trains by the Soviets at dawn after a boozy party. One detail that didn’t make it into the book, because I found it out later, in Irmgard Groettrup’s diary, is that one passenger was a cow. It was taken onto the train by Irmgard who wanted a supply of milk for the children."
“He had internalised the Official Secrets Act to such an extent that he had great difficulty allowing himself to tell me anything at all,” she said. “He would start to unpack something, then decide against it, then return to it on another call.
“He had an infuriating habit of being half-way through an anecdote, when he would start chuckling, and say, ‘remember to ask me about the Goon Show broadcasts!’ then veer off, unable to stop himself telling me about the broadcasts, without ever finishing the original anecdote.
“Lots of times I felt entangled in a web of half-remembered facts, events, places, and names, that didn’t seem remotely coherent and the sheer effort of making sense of them felt overwhelming, and at times, pointless. If it wasn’t for the boredom of covid lockdown I would never have become so obsessive about assembling it all into a narrative that made sense.” The book balances moments of humour, technical intrigue, and familial reckoning with extraordinary skill.
“I would send them a written list of technical points that came from my father’s still-sharp memory, but which I had expressed hopelessly badly. They would return to me in fully explained and well-expressed science, which we made sure didn’t go beyond the state of knowledge in the 1950s. Even a casual reader of my book will come away knowing some rocket science!”
But it’s the emotional territory that lingers. There’s a startling honesty to Amanda’s reflections on her childhood and the anger she had to work through to even begin talking to her father again. That honesty becomes the quiet engine of the story, powering the gradual shift from estrangement to empathy.
“I had to get through a long-standing anger barrier to talk with him at all.”
Reading The Gorodomlya Island Project is a little like watching Amanda rediscover her father in real time. The narrative unfolds like a real-time discovery, with vivid details; soldiers relieving themselves in hedges after a long journey in convoy, a daring escape with a Finnish quartet, makeshift radio transmitters hidden in wardrobes. Amanda's writing is economical and clear, trusting readers to form their own emotional connections without overstatement.
One of the most affecting parts of our conversation was when Amanda spoke about how writing the book and learning about her father’s fractured early life changed her own outlook on family.
“Writing the book made me realise that in my own life I have prioritised the stability of my own family. When I met my husband, we agreed never to move house once we had our children, to make sure they had roots and a strong sense of belonging somewhere. I married a loving man who is a great father, and in short, I’ve taken the opposite road to my own father’s example, without really being aware of the basis of those choices.
She adds: "Now, I think that there is nothing more important than family and proper connection, though it’s certainly never easy to overcome hurt.” There’s something universal in that. Most of us have parts of our parents’ stories we’ve never heard. Few of us would expect to uncover a legacy bound up with Cold War secrecy, and deliberate sabotage of Soviet ambitions. And yet, The Gorodomlya Island Project isn’t just about the Soviets or the missiles or the secrets, it’s about memory, misunderstanding, and the fragile process of rebuilding trust.
When I asked Amanda whether her father saw the book as a kind of legacy, she paused.
“At the time it felt transactional, like two business acquaintances running a project. But I think now that he did see it as a form of legacy.”
Even in his last years, Neville was characteristically contradictory. He insisted the book was full of exaggeration – then told her it was ‘all correct, just more exciting than it really was.’
"An example of this was the material about the Finnish cellist Kaarina. He wasn’t happy about my perceptiveness on this topic, and he certainly didn’t tell me in words that he was in love with her. But she had lived intact in his memory for decades, and the way he spoke about her, I was sure I was right, and in the end he had to concede that he must have been.”
Amanda also reflected on one of her most intentional storytelling decisions: shining a light on the women whose stories are so often side-lined in Cold War histories.
“I wanted to include female participants as the strong women they were. So I brought them out of the shadows. Women in Cold War histories are few and far between, but in mine we meet Marianna Ackermann, Elise, Irmgard Groettrup, Kaarina, Heather Jenner, and of course my own mother, all of them real people and fully realised characters.”
There’s a joy in Amanda’s voice when she talks about telling her father that the book would be published. A moment of vindication for a project born out of lockdown boredom that became something rich, important, and lasting.
“Past a certain point, the book took on a life of its own that seemed to be pulling me along. Maybe too, when I read an excerpt to a group of other writers and they said how original and compelling the story was, I started to feel sure that the world would enjoy my story and I wanted to find a publisher. And, finding a publisher quite quickly was hugely motivating. It was great fun to tell my father that news.”
In a literary landscape crowded with World War II accounts, The Gorodomlya Island Project fills a gap in our understanding of early Cold War technological competition, but it is about more than secrets and science. It reminds us that behind the geopolitical chess moves were real people with complex lives and relationships.
As Amanda shows us, it’s never too late to ask difficult questions. And sometimes, if you’re lucky, it’s not too late to hear the answers that can help heal decades of silence.