There were many times I came very close to death
Lucy Lewis was the first woman in the British Army to qualify as a bomb disposal operative. She tells us about her trailblazing career
Lucy Lewis shivered as she stepped out of the armoured tank, partly from the cold February air, but also from a mixture of fear and excitement.
She was here to defuse a Second World War pipe bomb filled with enough explosives to decimate everything in a quarter-mile radius.
Everyone else was sheltering in bomb-proof vehicles. But not Lucy. As the most senior bomb disposal operative on duty, it was her job to inspect the lethal device.
“My nose was inches from the explosives,” she says. “I knew if it went off I would be killed instantly.”
The journey from the tank to the explosive device is known as “the long walk”. “There’s nothing to do but keep walking,” she says.
The bomb was found near the runway at Southampton Airport, originally placed as a defence against invasion during the war.
“We used remote control diggers to find the pipe bombs. Then it was my job to climb down into the trench. We were digging at night and all I had was a torch. I had to put my face close to see if the explosives were intact. If the bomb had gone off, I’d have died.”
As Lucy, now 57, examined it, she realised it was live, but she didn’t feel afraid.
“All I felt was excitement. I was the first person to look at the bomb since it had been buried in 1942.”
It was only later that Lucy realised the enormity of what she’d done.
“The day could so easily have gone wrong,” she says.
Thankfully, the airport bombs were safely defused. When Lucy qualified as a bomb disposal operative in 1989, aged 25, it was a huge step forward for all women in the Army, as she was the first female in that role.
“I was told that men don’t like women on the battlefield because they try to protect us. But when I left the tank that night, there were three male operatives with me and all they said was: ‘Off you go, boss’.”
Lucy started her career as a security officer at Stansted Airport, before joining the Territorial Army. At the time, women trained separately from men, and could join only one regiment – the Women’s Royal Army Corps – to do clerical work. But while Lucy was training at Sandhurst, the rules changed to allow women to perform more roles.
Lucy, who lives in Cambridge, worked with the Royal Engineers for two years, on loan from the WRAC. “The regiment welcomed me with open arms. I was lucky though, as a lot of my friends coming out of Sandhurst were dismissed immediately as ‘bimbo women’.”
During her stint with the Royal Engineers, she risked her life countless times. On one occasion she was given the wrong type of bomb during a training exercise, and lost her eardrums when it exploded. “We were practising defusing and there should have been a little puff of smoke. I set up the device and retreated, watching for the smoke. But there was none. Then the next minute there was a huge mushroom cloud and it detonated.
“It took my eardrums, but any closer and it would have ended my life.”
But it didn’t deter her. “Even though I’ve come very close to death, I somehow never thought it would happen to me,” she says.
Another time, she went to inspect a bomb in the garden of a new house in Kent – only to find the entire housing estate littered with them.
“My heart sank and I thought: ‘How on earth did this bomb end up here?’ It was a huge job but thankfully no one got hurt.”
And even on her days off, Lucy, who has two grown-up children, ended up defusing bombs.
“Part of my job was to give lectures to youth groups. Once, I went to a pub function room, and while doing the talk I noticed that above the bar was a 1kg German incendiary bomb. “The landlady’s grandfather had found it in the attic. I realised it was probably live and convinced her to let me take it. I wrapped it in blankets and put it in my car, then took it to work the next day to dispose of it in our blast bunker. Had there been a fire, or it had fallen, it would have brought the pub down.”
When Lucy’s regiment was called up to serve in the Gulf War, she was told she couldn’t go because she was a woman, and was posted elsewhere. And after two years, her secondment finished, and she was told she couldn’t join the Royal Engineers full time. “Women’s progress is always done in baby steps,” she says.
She went on to work in the Military Police and served in Northern Ireland during the Troubles for eight years.
“In Northern Ireland, I saw what explosives can do, and had regular flashbacks afterwards. Even today I won’t open a parcel sitting down as it saves getting your legs blown off, or over a flat surface, as this directs the blast into your face.” Lucy now works as the first ever female University Marshal at Cambridge University, commanding 26 university police officers. She feels that her experience in the Army changed her for ever. “When people say they’ve had a disastrous day at work, I think: ‘No you haven’t. A disastrous day is when you lose people.’ I don’t panic over the small stuff.”
■ Lighting the Fuse, a memoir by Lucy Lewis (£18.99, Trapeze), is out now
When people say they’ve had a bad day I think, ‘No you haven’t’