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Mrs Heath has already published a story about her time during and after the war. She was living in Chippenham at the start of the war and remembers just the one bomb actually dropping on the town. She joined the services and was in the WAAF. She was stationed in Gloucester and then went to the Middle East for two years in 1945. She was a general duties clerk in the British Mandated Territory around Cairo. While she was there, she managed a trip to Cyprus, where there was just one hotel in Famagusta, and also a trip to Jerusalem. Her trip out to the Middle East was on the Cunard white star liner, ‘Georgic’ which had been converted to a troop ship. When they started out they did not know where exactly they were going. During the voyage they were briefed on their destination by an RAF man who called the Egyptians ‘Wily Oriental Gentlemen’. It took them 10 days to sail there, in convoy, arriving at Port Said. Then they went by train to Cairo. It was just after the cessation of hostilities and things were ‘very different’ in those days. They were paid once a fortnight so they were always flush the first week and then broke the second. Mrs Heath remembers buying lots of shoes and going out for dinners. Although she was due to demob, she agreed to stay on out there for a second year and was able to visit parts of the country that most people would not have known about. She remembers the Cairo museum and how it was only open in the mornings because it got too hot in the afternoons — she never had time to do more than the ground floor — there was just too much to see and not enough time! She went round the pyramids on a donkey and she saw the Sphynx with sandbags under its chin! She remembers the riots when the universities re-opened and how lots of the local people had lost their jobs to the Brits. A lot of people had to resort to begging in the streets and she remembers tripping over a man with the lower part of his face missing. There was a lot of suffering there at that time. At the end of her tour of duty she came home on a much smaller boat — the ‘Circassa’. Her number is etched into her memory and tripped off her tongue — 471538 — even after all these years.

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