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This story was submitted to the People’s War site by a London CSV volunteer on behalf of May Lilian Glover and has been added to the site with her permission. The author fully understands the site's terms and conditions.

I am not going to write about my war, or even that of my late husband. We have our medals and our own particular reward from the comradeship we made at that time, lasting for me up to the present time.

I want to tell of two incidents in my late father’s war. He was Robert Frederick Pearce and had served in the Royal Engineers on Gallipoli and Palestine and Egypt in the First World War. In 1939 he was aged 50 and as a coachbuilder on the Southern Railway he had to help maintain the coaches for the troop trains and goods trains, a very essential job. He travelled all over the region to various depots and sidings.

In 1940 along with so many others, he firewatched at night — when did we ever sleep during those years? I have a letter from the Curate of the Old Parish Church in Bermondsey Street, thanking him for all he did to save the Old Church, and saying that he did more than was asked of him, and enclosing twelve shillings which was a small ‘thank you’ from the parishioners.

Later in the war, on leaving the CME Depot at New Cross Gate at noon on Saturday 25 November 1944 (when I was on leave and had come up to Clifton Rise to meet him at the Rose Inn opposite Woolworth’s), he became involved in the terrible V2 incident in New Cross Road. As a railway trained St John’s first aider he instantly volunteered to help care for the injured that were being taken to the Rose Inn. After dressing wounds, mother and I waited anxiously with no news of him and he did not return home until well after midnight.

His name does not appear in Jess Steel’s book, ‘Remembering Woolworth’s’ but I told her about it later when we met at St James Hatcham, when a plaque to commemorate this event was placed on a wall on the spot where Woolworth’s once stood. So many people were like this — doing what had to be done with complete disregard for their own safety and comfort. I like to think this was our finest hour. Such selflessness displayed. I am now 82, and at that time our home was in Rotherhithe New Road, SE16 (railway-owned flats).

Incidentally, Bermondsey is on record in print (see ‘Riverside Story’) as having received the heaviest tonnage of bombs in the Blitz. The East End is only mentioned on television and radio. A special word for all those wives and mothers who queued endlessly for a modicum of food, women who received no medals and must have ended the war absolutely worn out.

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