Enduring in South East London

This story was submitted to the People’s War site by Pennie Hedge, a volunteer from BBC London, on behalf of Joyce Lee, and has been added to the site with her permission. Mrs Lee fully understands the site’s terms and conditions.

My memories are pretty sad ones. I worked in a manufacturing company in Deptford, already in itself a target. Our offices were under the London Railway in the arches, and we had to work one Saturday in five, so you had four at home and one working. And this particular Saturday, it was about twenty past twelve and there was the most horrendous explosion and I thought, “Oh no, they’ve got the railway, after all these years, they’ve got the railway.” I was with another couple of girls and we walked out onto the tow path, out onto the road, and the police stopped us and they said, ‘you won’t get home this way.’

It was the bomb that everyone seems to have heard about, it fell on Woolworths in the New Cross Road, on the 25 November 1944. It was a V2. The amazing thing was that we were all ready to leave the office, but as we went towards the windows, they came in and went back. It was suction. We were a good half hours walk from where the bomb fell. All those poor people, only a month from Christmas.

My husband had a good war, an interesting war, he saw places and met people. But I just plodded on. But it didn’t ever occur to me that we would lose, I was so solid about that. We couldn’t possibly have people like that controlling our world. And when it finished, everybody went mad. We saw pictures of the celebrations on the TV a few weeks ago. And I was at home with my mother, my father and my mother’s friend and we didn’t want to do any of that. We just walked, we went out and we walked the whole perimeter of the estate just to feel peace. We could do it, the lights were on and we could do it. We were exhausted, I’m sure we were.

And I just couldn’t believe all the boys that we had known. Some would come back but many wouldn’t. Near my husband’s ambulance station there was an army recruitment office, and there was a whole batch of boys from their school joined up together. But my husband had already gone into the Medical Corps, rather than be, as he put it, ‘cannon fodder.’ But almost all of these boys were killed, or, not so much killed. They were captured in Singapore and died of starvation. Every now and then he would ring me and say ‘Have you heard that so-and-so’s been killed?’ And then his brother would die in the next few days, and there would be several boys lost in one family.

I was married in January 1942, I knew my husband before the war. But he was posted abroad in August 1942 . So I had the whole of the second half of the war on my own. But I worked at this manufacturing company. I was in the office as a junior typist, and I had an extremely kind lady director, and she loved the theatre. She would say, “If I book seats, any of you want to come?” And we used to see the Ivor Novello shows and things like that. Yes, we had a good war in a way.

I was so sure we wouldn’t lose that I didn’t really worry about my husband. He wrote almost every day. And the letters came. That’s what’s so amazing. If I didn’t get a letter one day, I’d get two the next. Not waiting for weeks and weeks. The sad thing is that I did the same, and he kept mine and brought them home, and we put them with his letters to me in a tin, in my mother’s garage, and they’ve disappeared. We’ve just moved to our present home and we thought they’ve got to come to light in the move, but they’ve gone and we find that very sad. All we’ve got now is what we can remember.

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