大象传媒

I was at boarding school at Wycombe Abbey in 1939. Summer term ended in July and the war started on September 3rd. I was 17 and leaving school that year. I was looking forward to studying piano and cello at the Royal College of Music in London. I had been brought up in the village of Wylam, near Newcastle, where my father became Chairman and Managing Director of C.A. Parsons & Co, a big electrical engineering company.

My parents decided they didn鈥檛 want me to go to London, because nobody knew what was going to happen, and London was too far away. So after school I came home, along with two of my younger sisters, and there I stayed. I did voluntary work and taught myself to type for the Hexham Group Hospital Supply Depot.

One day I heard there was going to be a talk in Hexham about the WAAF (Women鈥檚 Auxiliary Air Force). I knew little about the RAF, as several generations of my father鈥檚 family had served in the Royal Navy. I went to the talk and was so impressed with the appeal by a smartly-uniformed WAAF officer for desperately-needed recruits, that I decided to volunteer.

I was now 18, and signed up there and then, and went home to tell my parents. I realise now what a shock it must have been to them, after all it wasn鈥檛 too long since the end of the First World War. They took it very well but I noticed that my mother was pretty upset. Her youngest brother had been killed in the First World War.

Then I began to wonder what I鈥檇 done, having committed myself, but a few weeks later a brown envelope arrived and I was instructed to report to the WAAF training camp at Innsworth, Gloucestershire. I travelled alone, feeling more apprehensive as the long wartime train journey passed.

The camp was a dreary desert of long, low huts. It was evening when I arrived and I was sent to Hut 13. All the bunks were already occupied, and the only place left for me was a straw pallias in the middle of the hut. I found I was surrounded by people of all different backgrounds. Even though I had already survived the rigours of boarding school it was quite frightening.

For the first few days, the inhabitants of Hut 13 were marched about under the loud-voiced orders of NCO鈥檚, both male and female. We were fitted up with all the necessary items of uniform and equipment, with a large white kitbag and gas protection kit. Most of our civilian clothes were parcelled up and sent home. We had health checks, including FFI (鈥渇ree from infection鈥�, in the hair!), and inoculations, and tried to get used to all the bewildering new vocabulary as we queued up with our 鈥渋rons鈥� (knife, fork and spoon, tin plate and mug) outside the steamy cabbage-smelling cookhouse for the next meal.

I soon found I had lost my identity, and was simply small, insignificant ACW2 Bedford (Aircraftswoman 2nd Class) No. 2091405, ready for life in the ranks for the next two and a half years. In 1944 I was commissioned as an officer. I was finally demobbed in 1946. Later I went to London to work as a secretary, but I never had a chance to take up the study of music again.

Many years later I found myself living in Gloucestershire. It is a beautiful county, but whenever I saw the name Innsworth it sent a shiver down my spine.

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