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This story was submitted to the People’s War site by Morwenna Nadar of CSV/´óÏó´«Ã½ LONDON on behalf of Robert Pearce and has been added to the site with his permission. The author fully understands the site’s terms and conditions.

In 1942 I was working in Croydon which suffered quite badly from the war-time bombing. 141 doodlebugs fell around the area where I was working. Incendiary bombs also fell and one day my workplace had a visit from one!

One of our drivers found an unexploded incendiary bomb outside the nearby pub and brought it in. He asked for a hammer and chisel so that he could try and break it open as he wanted to see what it looked like inside and how it was made. We all watched while he attacked it with the tools we had given him, but he didn’t manage to get it open before he was called away to do a driving job. Our local air-raid warden, who actually came from the pub, used to make regular rounds of his area to check that everything was as it should be and no war-time regulations were being broken. Shortly after our driver had left, the warden called in and when he saw the bomb, he was horrified and a bit of a panic ensued. We had assumed the bomb was a dud as it hadn’t started any fires but it seemed we could have been making a big mistake. The earlier incendiaries stared fires which could be extinguished with sand but the later ones exploded on impact. Ours was one of the later ones and it was possible that, although it hadn’t exploded, it could still have been alive! It was rapidly collected by the bomb disposal squad.

Looking back, I realise that we were very lucky in that the old saying ‘Curiosity kills the cat’ did not come true, and that we all went safely home that night.

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