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In August 1938, as a senior High School girl, I helped to issue gas masks to the public at the local Town Hall. I left my school the following Easter and worked in the offices at Cadburys at Bourneville — wages £1 per week and to staff the milk tray chocolates only 5p per pound, all was well.

In 1940, when the daylight air raids started our office was moved from the third floor down to the basement so that we could go on working, no need to go to the shelters. Each night I slept in the shelter under our house. Five bombs landed nearby and up the road a landmine — a bomb attached to a parachute exploded on touching a church tower, there was no crater but destruction to the whole frontage of the houses opposite. On our way to work the next day I was told that Mr Fisher had risked his life rescuing a man from an upstairs room in one of those houses. It was then that I realised I loved Charles Fisher. I was seventeen and he was nineteen. We were married three years later on embarkation leave, on 13th November, 61 years ago.

In 1941, as soon as I was nineteen, I was afraid the war would be over before I was called up or conscripted at twenty. So on 1st January I went to the RAF recruiting office and volunteered for the WAAF hoping to be a map clerk or work in the operations room, but because of my examination results at school in maths and science my trade was to be a meteorological assistant in the Met Office.

After drill and PT at Morecambe and then six weeks Met office instruction in London — service pay 10 shillings per week, I was posted to bomber stations at RAF Lichfield and Abingdon. Later as an NCO I went to Stanton Harcourt, a satellite station, near to Oxford. The Met Office was in the control tower, a forecaster was on duty from 8am to 6pm and a Met WAAF was on duty 24hours.

My work was as follows; an observation every hour, temperature, pressure, the wind direction and speed, cloud types, height and quantity, the visibility and weather condition, all this to be coded and sent by teleprinter to Met HQ at Bracknell. A chart, as you see now on the television, had to be produced every three hours. Mid-afternoon I had to go to the aircrew briefing room, display a chart and prepare for the duty forecaster to give the details of the weather conditions at take-off, over the target and on their return back to base. While I was at RAF Lichfield in 1942 the first RAF 1000 bomber, raid to Cologne in Germany took place and so many of our aircraft did not return.

I was alone on night duty on D Day 1944, I had a bomber crew in at 6am that morning, they had been diverted, unable to get back to their base owing to fog, after bombing the Calais area in northern France.

I recall when I was going on leave cycling to near Oxford, leaving my bicycle at nearby pub and hitch-hiking to Birmingham, using all kinds of vehicles! The kindness shown to us as members of the forces, the services canteen run by local Baptist Church, the Sally Ann (Salvation Army) wagon for a cup of tea and a wad (bun), the NAAFI, when open, for chocolate, sweets, cigarettes and refreshments. The YWCA in Oxford for a hot bath — if the Italian prisoners of war did not light the boilers on our WAAF site there was no hot water only very cold. I shall never forget an RAF Chaplain, the Roman Catholic Padre, who visited me when I was the only patient in the station sick bay at Christmas 1944. I was back at RAF Abingdon on 15th August 1945, VJ Day — so much singing and celebrations the war in Europe and the far East was over. As a married woman I was leaving the service two days later and going on a demobilisation centre, peace at last, I was going home.

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