大象传媒

Each searchlight site had nine females and each female had their own specific job on the searchlight. There are four of us together today; this young lady here, Alma, was the Lister operator - where the juice came through, the generator. I was number five and I sat up on the side and switched the searchlight on and off when I was told to. Then there was a radar operator and I think she was number four. That was when we first hand radar. So each one of us had different jobs. Because we were in the middle of a field (which was in Chalfont Saint Peter) we had to have water delivered and this was one of the few men in the regiment who used to bring a tankful of water that would last as a week - something like that. Now on occasions the man with a water couldn't get out, so usually he would come with very little water and I've known it for us nine girls to all wash in one bucket of water! The water was stuck on a stove in the middle of the hut and we would all take a turn washing our face or what have you in this one bucket of water because we couldn't do anything else because there wasn't the water around until the man came out again with a new tank. There was one hut for the kitchen, which was at the end, and next to the kitchen was where we sat and ate and chatted, and then the next hut along was the latrines and then the next hut along, which was the longest of all of them, was where we were sleeping. We all had bunk beds on each side and I remember one time we all took it into our heads that we would like to sleep outside, so we took all our bunk beds outside and sat in the middle of the field and woke to find all the cows all around as chewing at our bedclothes. We only did that once! The camaraderie was fantastic; we were all like sisters and we've all kept in touch and mean friends and 63 years. We were together from 1942 until World War II finished in 1945. When they didn't need searchlights any more we had to be given different jobs. We were taken to Hythe and from there we re-mustered again and at that time I became a staff driver. I went to the Royal Army Service Corps in Cambridge and I got there just as the Queen was doing her training; she graduated the week I got there - it was really wonderful. And then two weeks later she came to inspect the troops, naturally; she went through exactly the same training we went through and then came back to inspect the troops. I think she was about 19 at the time. The pictures really don't do her justice - when she came back to inspect us I noticed her cheeks were like peaches and cream. I remember being stuck in the middle of a field in the middle of nowhere and stuck out in the night. I managed to find a house with its lights on and went and said do you think you could let me use your phone so I can call my headquarters. I sat there - I guess it was the middle of winter because it got dark early - and I could hear this truck looking for me; I couldn't tell where I was because by now it was dark and I can hear this truck going all around the area looking for me! Eventually they found me about one o'clock in the morning - it was really wonderful to see them! When we heard that the Germans were firing down the beams of the searchlight that made us a little bit nervous but eventually because we were accurate getting the plane in the beam and then letting the next searchlight pick it up and take it out to the ocean where they shot them down. The Germans then started dropping pieces of silver foil strips to knock out the radar and all we could see in the fields the next day after they had been over was all the strips of foil where they had tried to knock us out. It was a wonderful life, if you could say such a thing, because we were such great friends and we all supported each other. Because we didn't have any men to help as we had to do all the tough jobs from cleaning out in the latrines to digging a pit to put the waste in and we also had to bury the cable from the Lister to the searchlight so, believe it or not, we were using pickaxes to dig up the whole of this grass sod to lay the cable and then fill it in; it was tough - we were tough cookies! It made us very self-sufficient and independent as a lot of people still tell me today that I'm too independent really; I never got married because I felt I could do everything myself; it made me very much more resourceful. Although it was a sad time, it was one of the best times in my life and all the girls would say that.

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