大象传媒

We had to go down to our shelter every night when the alarm sounded. It was horrible, cold, damp and very smelly.
My parents heard there was a ground floor flat soon to be available, so we took it for a month, we could stay in bed at night what luxury.
While we were there an oil bomb landed on the roof of the shelter. It was destroyed.
A lot of our possessions were damaged, but luckily we had taken extra clothes with us to the shelter.

I was training to teach ballroom dancing at that time, and when I had completed my training I went as an assistant to a dance school in Stratford On Avon, I was there for two years.
My age group came up and I had to join something.

I had heard of the Special Operations Executive and the FANY's.
I went for an interview and was accepted as a wireless operator, after initial training, which lasted about three months I was posted to Aylesbury, and worked as a radio link to the Resistance in France, Norway and Holland.

We weren鈥檛 allowed to say we were Radio Operators, we had to tell people we were drivers. I found this very difficult, when we had free time, and visited pubs and dances we couldn't tell our friends and families just what we were doing. I know they used to wonder what we were doing, and why we weren't helping with the war effort. I don't think we could even tell that was hardest of all.
We worked on shifts taking and sending Morse code.

I can still remember the Morse code, which we used all the time.
We had to transcribe and send it so fast there was little time for mistakes.
Eventually we found it as easy as speaking. Morse is a very clever system, a way of sending messages around the world, speech could not transmit as easily, or as accurately, or as far.
After a while they used a paper tape with holes in it. That could be transmitted at a much faster rate and with even greater accuracy.
I found that boring, at night particularly, eight-hour shifts were as much as we could stand.

Quite often the agents in France, or wherever, would not come up at the arranged time, so we had to hang on and wait until the signal arrived. We always hoped that the connection would eventually come through. If it didn't we would usually suspect the worst.

I remember there was strong competition between us, the people taking the messages, and the coders who created the codes.
The coders had to be good at crosswords and word puzzles, I'm glad I wasn't a coder, I'm useless at crosswords! Luckily I was not given the choice.
They always thought themselves far superior.
We had to have a lot longer training, but it only took a few days to be trained to be a coder.

We were superior!
As it happened I had no idea who the coders were, we only knew the transmission people that worked on our shift. It was so secret

Once you were off duty you were either asleep, or went out to find food.
I remember being always hungry, even though we probably had more rations than the local civilians.
We lived in huts close to where the receivers were, and did four or five days on each shift, there being three shifts each day.

Sometimes one of our operators would break off, this meant the sender had probably been discovered by the enemy, they'd either been captured or maybe had to stop for all sorts of reasons. That could be very worrying we had to have so much patience.
We didn't understand the messages as they were all in code, made up of four letter groups.
The codes were changed almost daily.
Although we didn't understand them we had to send very accurate groups of words, sometimes making very little sense. The receivers wrote down the message, it was then given to the de-coders but we had no way of guessing whether the codes were accurate or made any sense.
It was quite nerve racking as we didn't know how long the transmitter, or the receiver would remain on air, Remembering all the time there was a connection the agent was in danger.
Quite often the Germans would try to interfere with the signal, either attempting to change the sequence of letters or just attempting to overpower the transmission with radio static noise.

You had to make a decision whether or not to ask for repeats, or hope what you heard was accurate, and what was intended. We never knew.
Unfortunately in Holland, the Germans captured a lot of the agents and carried on the transmissions. That was very unfortunate, often we didn't know whether we were connecting to a friend or an enemy.
Our receivers were not far from Bletchley Park, where they were creating and breaking the codes.
We were just receiving and transmitting the finalised codes.

I remember vividly that just before D-Day it was extremely busy.
We had an enormous board with the names of the cities that would be involved in D-Day transmissions. The only way we had to keep track of the thousands of incoming messages.

The FANY's were founded in 1907 in Australia.
Of course there wasn't a war at the time, but there were field dressing stations, and no way of getting the wounded medical help.

FANY stands for 'First Aid Nursing Yeomanry', they were all volunteers, but preferred women who were used to riding and those that owned their own horses.
They trained to go out onto the battlefield, scoop up the wounded and take them back as fast as possible to the field hospitals.

They're are still in existence to this day. There's a list of people who are still prepared to help, and be contacted very quickly in a national emergency
Members helped during the fire at Kings Cross station, and the London bombing in 2005.
Of course horses are not used now, but the FANY's are still there, helping to run the communication systems.

At the end of the European war I was demobilised, and went back to teaching dance.
Quite a change to my life.

I'll never forget the part I had to play in World War Two.

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