wartime things

During WW2 I served in the Womens Royal Naval Service and, as I lived in Edinburgh, was first appointed to work at the Commander-in-Chief's office at Rosyth. We were lectured by our intelligence officers that we must at all times be vigilant as there was a possibility that enemy spies might be parachuted into Britain to infiltrate our population. The story went round that they might be dressed as nuns with their uniform on underneath and so if you saw a nun with army boots showing under her habit you should report it right away! One day when in the officers' club I noticed a very young, fair-haired lieutenant sporting a row of medal ribbons, mainly consisting of squares of blue and white and not anything I recognized. This seemed so odd that I hastened to inform the intelligence officer who was also having a drink in the club at the time and he said "Oh! Don't worry about him - that's Philip". An explanation followed that this was Louis Mountbatten's nephew and that the medals were Greek - hence the colours. I have often wondered what Prince Philip would think if he knew that he had at an early point in his naval career been suspected of being a spy!.
After various postings, including a spell at the Royal Naval College at Greenwich, I ended up in London at the Admiralty in the office of the Director WRNS.
My husband, who was an airborne army doctor with an Airlanding Field Ambulance flew in a glider to France early on D-Day, landing near Pegasus Bridge and I was lucky enough to get news of him after a day or two through a naval signals officer over there which I'm sure was highly illegal.
The night before our wedding, due to an air raid, I had spent hours in a corridor in the block of flats in Chelsea where I lived and in the course of desultory conversation of the kind that occurred in such situations was asked "Are you married yet ?" to which I replied "No, but I will be by twelve o'clock today".
A land mine exploded one night in the next street and the curtains of my kitchen were sucked out and never seen again. A carton of soap powder exploded and got into everything so that I had to throw out a precious packet of tea. I was again in the corridor when this happened.
London was later hit by Doodlebugs and from the window of my flat on the fifth floor I could see them speeding across the sky and hear the crump when they landed. I remember on one occasion diving down underneath a very small pedestal table (to this day known as "the air raid shelter")and hearing a bug go off very close - I thought "if they put one teaspoonful less petrol in the next one it could land on me" but fortunately none did. My luck even held out as I was not on duty when our offices next to the Guards' Chapel on Green Park were damaged, though a fellow officer lost an eye from a shard of glass as the windows fell in.
Of such relatively insignificant but intensely personal incidents was our war made up but we never forgot our main objective which was to rid the world of the menace posed by the fascist regimes aginst which we were fighting.

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