大象传媒

As my family was very much naval I went into the WRENS. I rather wanted to be a motor transport driver because I enjoyed driving but at that time radar was a new thing and as I had matriculation mathematics they were recruiting people with my education and telling me that there was no future for me, there was no promotion, but I would be very useful. So naturally I agreed to do this. I joined the recruiting depot at Mill Hill where we spent a fortnight cleaning out, doing housework, as it was said rather nicely by an extremely nice WREN officer, and polishing miles of brown linoleum floor from 6 o鈥檆lock in the morning.

The mix of people there were kinds I had never really come very much into contact with before. But I did find one soul mate, a sweet person called Valerie Henstock. She was going to what was then called Station X which we all now know as Bletchley Park and I was going into radar. The other girls were nice enough but, well had perhaps a different sort of education. We survived that fortnight and off I went then to the North East of England and I was in a WRENS quarters just outside Newcastle on Tyne and I worked with the plotters in the plotting room.

It was extremely pleasant, they were a delightful lot of people and I had a lovely time. After about a week or two, maybe two, I went down to my first place at what was called Kinley Hill, which was just on a cliff above Seaham harbour, which is a mining town, close to the mining town of Easington, known as Eas鈥檔ton by the locals and where I was quartered in the back of an old vicarage. Pretty disused, amongst people such as the WAF and whether my mother liked it or not, there I was. The living was pretty rough. The standards of hygiene of the house in general were not what it was in the WRENS at all.

There were 4 of us WREN radar operators on a 4 watch system which was 5 hours and then an overnight of, I think it was 6pm through to 8am the following day, on 6pm that night off at 11pm and then off for 36 hours and then 8am to 1pm and so on. So we never actually saw very much of each other because we were always relieving each other.

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