Things lost in a throw-out

My grandmother and my father moved to 26 or 28 Stamford Hill and they stayed there until sometime during WW1. Dad recalled climbing up the stairs, which the council had built to provide a fire escape between buildings, up onto the roof, where he watched the Zeppelins bombing London. He saw some burst into flame and descend burning at Cuffley, Potters Bar and Ongar.
The Zeppelin at Cuffley was shot down by Captain William Leefe Robinson who earned a VC in 1916 when he became the first pilot to shoot down a Zeppelin on English soil. The German air force was so shaken by his exploits that it had to modify its tactics. There is a pub named after him at Harrow Weald.
Robinson shot down the Zeppelin in the early hours of September 3 1916. He was in a BE2C single seater biplane and took on a SL11, leader of a force of 16 Zeppelins. The only way he could attack with his swivelling Lewis gun was to fire sideways and upwards and he racked the 600 foot long airship with incendiary bullets. Finally, when he was almost out of ammunition, the airship exploded and came down in a field at the village of Cuffley, Herts.
A week later he was awarded the VC. In 1918 he crashed in France and captured by the Germans and tortured. Broken by his prison camp experiences he fell victim to a flu epidemic and died at 23. (Sunday Telegraph 9 July 1995)
Dad went out to Cuffley and saw the burnt Zeppelin.
In about 1998 I was going through one of my filing cabinets sorting things and amongst them was a small piece of painted material. It seemed to be part of a painting. I knew it was important but somehow it got thrown away by mistake with a pile of papers.
Only later did I realise it was probably part of the Zeppelin which Leefe Robinson shot down. I expect collectors would have liked it! Ah, well, its on a landsite fill in Cornwall now.