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"I'm a pupil from Heaton Manor comprehensive School, Newcastle Upon-Tyne, entering Nancy Worrall's story onto the website, and they fully understand the website terms and conditions of use."

At only 18, I worked as a signals person in the Bunkers. As a tele-operator in the operations room, both men and women worked there but the majority of us were women and generally the men were put in charge. I worked eight hour shifts and once you were on duty you stayed on duty, we were not allowed to have food or drink during our working day as they believed that we may damage the equipment. Because we were not eating or drinking they gave us tins of cigarettes we assumed these were to keep us occupied and hunger free.

If you were lucky you got a place in a house, but that was only if someone dropped their household place which rarely happened. There was also concrete blocks witch people were housed in but I was nearly always in a little wooden hut, all three types of accommodation had no central heating, and reminded everyone of old fashioned hospital wards as they were filled with loads of people. In side the hut there was a little coke fire which we kept going ourselves, often we would sit round and tell stories but we couldn’t tell much as everything had to be kept a big secret.

I worked in the code signal section for a long time but never worked the codes out, I wish I had because I had no clue to what was happening all I did was tore off the codes and handed them to the next person, I could have been dealing with anything. In the building I worked downstairs; in our room there were rows and rows of telephones and machines. But upstairs the plotters worked, they only had four hour shifts and generally speaking they were the richer people. So they thought of themselves as being higher. For a while I was shut up in a room with a pair of headphones on and all I could hear was someone talking and I just had to repeat what I heard into a microphone. I never knew where I was telling orders to for all I knew it could have been into the planes.
I was working in HQ group 12 which was in the middle of England,(see map) group 12 was fighter command based. Group 12 was very big; some smaller places like the highlands only had little stations. Any space available was used for a station even little caravans were used as operation stations.

Everybody had to keep their uniforms very smart even if a button fell off you were in serious trouble. So we all had little bags containing spare threads and buttons.

During the Japanese sector of the war they wanted volunteers to go abroad and work in a station in a different part of the world. We were kept in the dark for as long as possible, to keep the secrecy. They gave us a French dictionary and told us to brush up on our French. But as it turned out the dictionary was just a red herring. We were taken to Liverpool and put on a boat; we were sailing for 7-8 weeks, still not knowing where we were going. On the journey we were chased by a German submarine, at that time we had to stay completely silent; no talking or moving and even dropping a match was seen as forbidden as it could have rolled off and landed in the sea, giving a clue to where we were. We finally got told we were going to Ceylon (Sri Lanka) only because of the unbearable heat.

We got off at Colombo and taken to a dispersal unit where it was decided where you went. I was determined to stay with my two friends so when the first place name was read out me and my two friends shot our hands up in the air to ensure we stayed together.
It was only after that we were informed it was the jungle!
When I was working in Sri Lanka it was the first time I had ever felt and earth tremor.
The work we were doing in Sri Lanka was the same as we were doing in England but the building was on a smaller scale as there were only two tele-printers there as there were three of us we took it in turns to be working, we still were allowed no food or drink but the accommodation was this time a palm leaf hut and obviously the heating was better if not too hot due to the extreme heat from the sun. After work there was either a dip in the sea or a cold shower to enjoy. After a day at work we hardly ever had enough strength to do anything other than flop into bed.

The place we were working was 10 miles from the nearest town; when ever they went there they had chicken and curry.

At the end of the war I got married. It was to a young man I had been dating before I joined. I saw it as a meaning less fling but obviously he had different ideas as he sent a letter and it was redirected many times, until it reached me. Our location was so top secret we were just recognised by a number not an address. Finally he tracked me down and it went on from there.
He came over and we spent some time in the hill country (the tea country) the hills were the only naturally coo, place. He was in the Navy and was called back, but before then we were married by special contract.

I was then sent to India after we had won the Japanese war. I and my friends were stuck in Japan with no money, this was because they thought we were going back to England and our pay had been sent there. We were in India for 7 weeks; we had to use our ‘charm’ with the men, so we got enough money to survive. When I was intending on travelling back to England they wouldn’t let me on the boat as I was shaking with a tropical fever, luckily my friend was able to stay with me and we soon got the boat back to England once I was better the boat happened to be the same one as we went out on the Johann van olden Barneveld.

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