大象传媒

This story was submitted to the People鈥檚 War site by a volunteer from CSVBerkshire on behalf of Pauline Daniels and has been added to the site with her permission. Pauline fully understands the site鈥檚 terms and conditions.

Quiet Excitement - after Noisy Bristol!

Neville Chamberlain鈥檚 declaration on the outbreak of war in 1939 is very clear. I was fourteen years old. The room, the atmosphere and my mother in tears. My mother never cried. Then came months of curious normality except gas masks in cardboard boxes slung over our shoulders as we cycled to school or practised cartwheels and handstands in our unsophisticated long gone age. The sirens began to scream their nightly fear in the pit of our stomachs as we got out of bed to hide in the cupboard under the stairs, under the table and then underneath the beds. Subsequently out into the bedlam of the night - bright, noise, search lights, ack-ack, droning planes, to sit in a neighbours corrugated Nissen Hut on the garden lawn. At the time it seemed a somewhat unsafe place to be!

It was August l943 that I enlisted to the ATS and, after initial training at Wrexham in North Wales, was selected for further training on the Isle of Man in receiving Morse code signals sent by wireless transmissions.

On completion I was assigned to the Royal Signals Corp and went to Harrogate in Yorkshire for the next two years. Although we were billeted in a requisitioned girls school outside the town we worked up on the Yorkshire Moors in a highly secret location.

Organised into tight shifts round the clock we were taken by lorry to our destination. Four days on and two days off. The object of our work was to pick up a certain signal on a particular wave length and record the coded Morse messages being sent by enemy troops on the continent.

We each had our little patch to search for our messages and learnt to pick up the tone and manner of our call signs. Sometimes it was quiet and we sat with nothing doing. Then the extreme excitement of fast letters pouring through and pages taken as soon as filled up. Taken to be decoded somewhere else.

No one knew what was being sent but as the war drew to a close it was quite exciting!

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