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We lived at Kilnsea, where my parents kept a pub. I was 16, and working as a nursery nurse, looking after the little girl of a bigwig who worked for the electrical company in Hull whose wife was on a lot of committees.

But when the war broke out, he sent his wife and daughter up to their holiday cottage in Scarborough, and since she didn’t do so much and they stopped going out, they had less need of me. Also, it would have been too far for me to live at home, and the wife didn’t like the idea of being responsible full time for a young girl my age.

So I decided to join the forces. All my family were in the forces: my brother was, and father was in Customs and Excise.

At the recruitment office in Hull I had an aptitude test and in the talk afterwards they said they were starting a new department, that they called radar. I had no idea what it was, but I said yes. So I was in the ATS [Auxiliary Territorial Services, the women’s branch of the army], detecting planes.

It was like a big shed on a turntable, with four of us inside. We had a pair of handcranks like pedals to turn it: we called it ‘being on the paddles’. It had two big things like ladders going sideways on the top, that turned to find the elevation. One of us controlled the orientation, one the elevation, and one the range, and the fourth relayed the details to the guns. There was a little seat outside the shed with a telescope, and you could look with that if the planes were near enough.

We went all over, but mostly we were down at Dover, Ramsgate, and Margate. There was an exclusion zone set up around that part of the coast. They wouldn’t let anybody out to ensure secrecy over what was happening there with the build-up to D-Day. So you had to spend your leave on camp, because they wouldn’t let you out, but they wouldn’t let you build up entitlement to leave either.

We called it Hellfire Corner and Doodlebug Alley, because it was so near to France that the Germans fired shells over. It was a bit noisy at times!

(Transcribed by Joachim Noreiko)

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