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I recently interviewed my grandmother, Elizabeth Wynne Jones, asking for her war story. She was characteristically modest, and said that she didn't have much of a story to tell, but when she got talking it became clear she'd experienced her share of highs and lows. She has given me permission to submit her account to the site. This is her story, as told me only a few days before her 83rd birthday:

'When the war broke out I was already in the ATS. We were sent to a holiday camp, used for training, in Prestatyn. My brother Carl was in the TA and was immediately called up. Our mother was in tears to see her children leave her, both in uniform.

I caught German measles in Prestatyn and managed to get out of the ATS – I didn’t like it much, I must confess. I did make a special friend there, though - Betty Lloyd Roberts, we shared a chalet.

It was about this time I met your Granddad, Iorwerth, on the golf course – just before the war. He used to play golf and there was a green that backed onto our garden [in Llandudno, N. Wales]. I used to go out and practice too, and we got talking.

We began courting, then Granddad was sent to London. He was there as part of the Assistance Board. Because all these people were bombed out, he was allocated to go and help them out. He was a civil servant, and had worked in China before the war. I visited him, staying with an Aunt. I clearly remember the bombing of the Café de Paris. We were out for the evening when the bomb dropped. We survived, but it was a close-run thing.

We married in April 1940 and went straight to live together in London. The car was packed full of wedding presents. Granddad got us a flat overlooking the park [in North London]. There was an old couple downstairs, foreigners, possibly Germans. They moved their furniture around late at night, which made me suspicious. I told Iorwerth, ‘I’m sure they’re spies.’

We moved to another flat in Wood Green and I fell pregnant. It was 1941. The war was still raging and we could see the planes having dogfights. We slept in the corridor on a mattress to avoid the bombs. Sue was born during an airraid in February 1942, and Granddad drove me to the nursing home with bombs dropping all around us. I got extra meat rations because I had a child, and there was a kind lady in the nearby shop, who gave me extra fruit.

Granddad once took me into the city after a heavy bombing. You couldn’t see your hand in front of you because of the smoke. Luckily, there weren’t many casualties because the offices were empty in the night.

My brother, Carl L Fairless, was in the Royal Artillery and was notified at the end of the war that he was to be granted the honorary rank of Lieutenant Colonel. I still have the letter from the War Office [P/34199], dated 24 September 1945. He was at Dunkirk and joined the Burma Campaign afterwards. He spent some time in India on leave. He was 13 years older than me, so I didn’t know him very well, and I didn’t hear much from him during the war. He became an architect after the war and worked for a brewery.'

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