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1939 I was born in Sutton in Surrey saw a lot of the bombing in the docks, My father had his own business he was an engineer he had a motor business in Bermondsey. The business went right down because people were not buying cars. During the war everybody helped in somewhere, my dad became a fireman, mum was a housewife and I had one brother who was 18mths younger, he eventually went in to the navy. I saw the Battle of Britain from Sutton. They were wonderful those pilots, a lot of them were Polish. The weather was beautiful with lovely blue skies and we used to watch the dogfights I was in a school in Sutton and then went to a boarding school in Sussex and we were all evacuated. I left school at 16 and did a shorthand course but I could not get on with it so I left and went to Swanleigh horticultural College. I had been there about a year and I was almost killed by a V1, it landed right by our common room where we were sitting. The girl in the window was injured and a friend who had just moved into the seat I had been sitting in was blown back and killed. I was very shocked and we did not have counselling in those days. Then college was then closed as it was slightly damaged. I got a job on a farm owned by a Greek who was a very wealthy man, a young couple ran it with the help of a farm manager but I was very lonely and still very shocked. When I was 17 I had tried to join the wrens but I was too young, and they had said to try again later. At 18/19 a friend of mothers said why doesn’t Pat try to get into the F.A.N.Y (First Aid Nursing Yeomanry. They started in the Boar War). I applied and was accepted I was drafted to Winston Churchill’s SOE. Intelligence were not keen on Churchill’s idea but he pressed on with having his secret army trained to fight resistance in Europe. I hadn’t realised that it was only a section of the FANY that had been drafted into SOE. I went to get my beret and said I was in SC61 and they hadn’t heard of them. We were stationed in Gaynes Hall, Buckton nr St Neots and Cambridge. An old hall deep in the heart of the country. This lady who owned it was Mrs Jubilee, she was an elderly lady who had her house requisitioned. We did orderly work, we had a small switchboard, there were two or three cooks there and the food was lovely, because we looked after these Bods very well. We housed and looked after the ‘BODS’ (Secret Agents). They had their training and came to us to wait for the RAF to take them in Lysander’s on their missions. Sometimes they were brought back if the conditions were not right or if they had received a signal from the ground to abort the mission. We had many different nationalities come through there, Odette went through Gaynes Hall. You weren’t taught to drive and I was unable to drive although I would have liked to. The men would be dropped by parachute and then a canister would be dropped with a parachute also. These canisters would contain allsorts, folding bicycles, dead rats or dung filled with explosives. The RAF would stay at Gaynes Hall also. We used to go out with some of the BODS but we had to go right away from where we were stationed so that we did not draw attention to it. I am sure that some people must have known that something was going on. We were not supposed to get attached to them but we did and when they went on a mission you never saw them again. I remember a man called Trondstad, he was advising the men on the building that contained the heavy water at Vermork that Hitler intended using in atom bombs. He knew this building that they were going to blow up inside out. Many years later I read that this man had been murdered after the war by Nazi followers, it made me feel very sad.
I still maintain contact with one of the FANY’s I was 19 and she was 29 and married, it was very difficult for her because she was unable to tell her husband what she was doing and he must have wondered what she was up to. They are in their nineties now and still have each other and go out to tea dances and things. I met my future sister in law at Gaynes House and after the war I met her brother and he was the man I married. He was in the Royal Army Ordnance Corps and was in Hong Kong when it became overrun by the Japanese. He was in a hospital and the nurses threw themselves over the patients and the Japanese ran the sword through the nurse and patient. He threw himself out of the hospital window and was captured and taken to a prisoner of war camp. He said the wiry men survived better than the big beefy men. They were all herded into a room and they were all crammed in and everyone wanted to get away from the door and they would reach in and take someone out and torture him. When I had accepted FANY, the poultry mistress at horticultural college wrote to me to say she had a job for me and I wrote back to say I had been accepted into the services. It is funny that if I had not been accepted I would have taken that job and had a different life. I went on for a short time to where they forged all the documents I think it was station 14 at Royden. Before I went to the boarding school I use to see bomb damage at Sutton but it never really frightened me. The V1’s were really frightening they were eerie, waiting to hear where it would go down. I had a 21st birthday party at the Dorchester in London, I still have the menu and it cost 5s per person, we had a three-course meal.

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