大象传媒

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I volunteered to join the WRENS when I was 19 years old. However, my mother wouldn鈥檛 give her permission for me to enlist so I had to obtain consent from my father. At the time I was in a reserved occupation working for local government, but I really wanted to do something important in the war effort. My father had volunteered for the forces during the First World War, so he finally agreed.

I lived in Hunstanton and went to Norwich for an interview, was accepted and called up to Mill Hill for 6 weeks training. I can only remember marching before being sent to Portsmouth, to the holding depot. I remember in 1943 when we were marching through Portsmouth, there were no houses, it was just rubble. The bombing must have been horrendous. We were stationed in an old school that had been evacuated until the Navy took it over.

I wanted to do my own job - shorthand and typing. When I was doing the typing test, the petty officer stood so closely behind me that I couldn鈥檛 cope with it, she put me off and I ended up becoming a messenger. I was then drafted to what had been a Rothschild home - HMS Masterdon at Exbury House in the new Forest. I took messages here, there and everywhere. We lived in huts at the Rothschild house, our address was HMS Masterdon, care of GPO London. My father asked me to tell him where I was when I went home on leave, but we鈥檇 signed the Secrets Act so I didn鈥檛 tell him and he got cross.

Then I was sent to Lepe House about 2 miles away on the coast, overlooking the Isle of Wight. I was sitting in an area where the officers came through, looking through a book my mother had sent me about transcribing Pitman鈥檚 shorthand. An officer leaned over my shoulder and said to me, 鈥淐an you do shorthand?鈥� 鈥淵es.鈥� I said. He replied, 鈥淲hy are you sitting here then? Why aren鈥檛 you in the secretariat?鈥� I told him what had happened and within 2 weeks I was typing all about D Day and the pipeline under the ocean.

Officers often went to the coast of France, coming back in the middle of the night. Sometimes they got me up at night to dictate their information. I took down what they鈥檇 done in shorthand and then they鈥檇 say, 鈥淒on鈥檛 bother to type it now, do it in the morning.鈥� I was the only shorthand typist in Lepe house and I used to issue orders to the men. It was an interesting job; our captain was called Cap GJ1.

We used to go into Southampton. We sat on loose wobbly seats on the truck to Hythe and then got the ferry. We went to the pictures and I made lots of friends. We had quite a few raids when we were in the New Forest but we got used to them. We used to hear the crunching noises of the bombs in Southampton. We had a weeks leave every so many months and travelled home on trains from Southampton to Waterloo.

The New Forest before D Day was chock-a-block with soldiers and vehicles under camouflage so that the Germans couldn鈥檛 see them. We knew what was happening of course. When I went in 1943 to Lepe House it had definitely been set up to plan D-Day.

I was sent to Lymington hospital to have an abscess removed from my neck. I was then sent to the sick bay at Exbury House to visit the doctor for a check-up. There had been an air raid earlier in the morning and we鈥檇 heard the sirens go. As I walked in to the sick bay which was a building built specially in the gardens, I saw a German airman sitting on the floor. I looked at him and I thought, he could be my brother, he鈥檚 probably got brothers and sisters, a mother or a wife, and I thought how futile war is. I thought he looked so ill. I never knew until a re-union in 1992 that he鈥檇 died. He was buried in Fawley churchyard, but was then taken to the German cemetery at Cannock. 鈥楾he Exbury Junkers鈥� a book written by John Stanley, A World War II Mystery, tells the whole story.

The book synopsis states. 鈥淥n a fine spring morning in 鈥�44, 7 days before D Day, a lone German bomber emerged from the clouds over the Isle of Wight. He circled low over the northern part of the island and somehow managed to withstand a barrage of anti-aircraft fire, before flying across the Solent to the Hampshire coast, where he fell victim to an attack by 2 RAF Typhoons and further anti-aircraft fire. The bomber crash-landed in a field near to Exbury House which at this time was the home of HMS Masterdon, the Naval Headquarters closely involved in the Normandy landings. None of the men in the Junkers survived and in the aftermath of the crash a number of questions began to arise.

Why had the Junkers flown alone in broad daylight directly to an area of the south coast of England where preparations for D-Day were reaching a crescendo? Why had it loitered suspiciously over the Isle of Wight?
Why when it was under attack had the Junkers taken little defensive action? Why had it fired flares? Why had 7 bodies been found in the wreckage at Exbury when the Junkers 188, should only have carried 4? The questions gave birth to a mystery which has never been completely solved, not to this day.鈥�

Nobody ever mentioned the incident and I鈥檝e never told anybody, but I鈥檝e thought about it all of my life. I am mentioned in this book. 鈥淲hen Kathleen Hearn was a secretary typist in the secretariat at nearby Lepe House, that morning she had occasion to attend the sick bay at Masterdon, and walking into the Nissen hut she was astonished to see a young German airman there. He looked very ill. I often thought I may very well be the last person he saw鈥︹�︹�︹�︹��

In my opinion, the men on the Junkers were from another country that was involved with the Germans and they were trying to land and escape. It says here that there was a white thing hanging out of the window and nobody took any notice of it, and they could well have wanted to surrender

Nevil Chute鈥檚 book 鈥淩equiem for a W.R.E.N鈥� is about Lepe House. He was in the Navy and was so amazed about what happened he wrote this book. He describes Lepe House in his book as a timbered mansion overlooking the entrance to the (Beaulieu) river.

When D Day was over, our job was finished and we were sent back to the holding camp at Portsmouth. I went to Shoreham and then to Brighton on defensively equipped merchant shipping, which was boring and then I applied to be stationed nearer to home and was sent to Lowestoft. It took me 5 minutes longer to get home from Lowestoft to Hunstanton than it did from London.

We never went short of food but one day at Lowestoft we had fried bread and jam 鈥� jam sandwiches made into fritters. That wasn鈥檛 too good, but on the whole it was OK. I was secretary to the surgeon captain there when Don (my husband) came into one of the other offices. He was in charge of the medical history sheet department there; that鈥檚 where we met.

My brother joined the Fleet Air Arm and was training as a pilot in Trinidad and Tobago when the war ended, so he never got to fly in the war. My Dad was in the army, he used to watch for planes. They had a place on the end of the cliffs at Hunstanton. He was a builder and architect but there weren鈥檛 many opportunities to do that kind of work during the war so he used to check the stately homes in our area as the soldiers marched in and out. Opposite our house in Hunstanton was a battery with ack-ack guns, it was almost in our front garden. The worst raids happened when they bombed Skegness and the noise ricocheted across the water.

Don Maskell

The training at HMS Glendower was so intense. You started at 6.30am and were there for 12 hours, either in the lecture rooms or studying. They had to train us very quickly. I was lucky to be on a hospital ship because you tended to get more experienced people with you. If you were on a frigate, you probably didn鈥檛 have a doctor.

When we were in training we had every other weekend off from Chatham Hospital. A short weekend was Saturday morning to Sunday night; a long weekend was Friday night to Monday morning.

We had 6 weeks basic training at HMS Glendower in Wales, 6 months medical training, then onto the wards. After 10 days I had a posting to a hospital ship, which I eventually picked up in Bombay, having travelled all round Africa and the Indian Ocean to get there because you couldn鈥檛 go through the Suez Canal. We commissioned the ship in 1943 and I was on there until 1945. I was then posted to the patrol central depot in Lowestoft. That鈥檚 where I met Kathleen.

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