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(This story was submitted to the People's War site by a volunteer from ´óÏó´«Ã½ Radio Suffolk on behalf of Nancy Colchester and has been added to the site with her permission. Mrs Colchester fully understands the site's terms and conditions).

We learnt to shoot rifles on the range. We learnt to drill. I never knew my left hand from my right hand so frequently I was facing my neighbour! We trained in Lady Sydney Farra’s farm at 8000 feet at Mau Summit in the highlands of Kenya.

Lady Sydney knew the war was coming long before the war broke out. She toured the schools and said she was setting up a training camp like the one she attended for WW1 with the FANYs. (First Aid Nursing Yeomanry).

She came to our school recruiting and my best friend and I, and one or two others, thought it would be great fun to go camping on her farm which was very beautiful. We were seventeen. We were young and enthusiastic! We had a camp every year where we learnt to drive trucks and do first aid. We had a bugler from the King’s Africa Rifles who came up from the hot part of the country to our camp. On the first morning he was supposed to play ‘Reveille’ he was so cold in the mountains that his lips wouldn’t form to blow the bugle. So he used to warm up in the kitchen beforehand after that. He said call me ‘Simba’ which means lion.

Eventually when war broke out a few years later they wanted the FANYs to go abroad as drivers, nurses and doctors. They wanted a contingent to go to India to work with the British Army. A whole lot went to Cairo too. I couldn’t volunteer to go as I’d become a mother in 1940. So I was discharged honourably. But some of my friends who went to India were torpedoed on the journey and were drowned.

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