‘Being in the forces was the most wonderful, worthwhile and exciting time’
The war touched millions of people in Britain, not only those involved in direct fighting. In the penultimate article of a week-long series, Alan Thompson speaks to a 93-year-old Loughborough woman for whom, as a teenager, the conflict opened up a whole new world of adventure and opportunity
AS a teenager living in wartime London, Sylvia Heath was determined to do all she could to help the war effort. Sylvia was a Girl Guide and ranger who went on to apply the skills she learned in the movement towards the war effort.
Prior to joining up, there was plenty of other activity to keep her busy, including making meals for Home Guard soldiers and helping prepare night centres for displaced families.
Sylvia, 93, of Loughborough, said: “I was only 17 or 18 at the time. My job was to open the doors at the night centre until someone more senior came along.
“I also helped in the nurses’ dining hall in the local hospital, and I was taught to fire a .303 rifle by the Home Guard after I said ‘come on, let’s have a go!’”
She added: “We lived just outside the main area (of London) being bombed, but still had planes coming over, there was regularly broken window glass on beds.
“Going to work early in the morning, the pavements were covered in shrapnel, but it was just part of normal, everyday life.
“I lived at home until I was 19, when I was conscripted into the Auxilliary Territorial Service (ATS),” she said.
After joining the ATS, the women’s branch of the Army, at 19, she was offered signals intelligence work.
Her Girl Guides’ training in signalling saw her recruited as a trainee intercept radio operator in German and Japanese coded traffic – a vital part of the Bletchley Park codecracking network.
Thousands of wireless operators, from the ATS, Women’s Auxilliary Air Force (WAAF), Women’s Royal Naval Service (Wrens) and civilians tracked the enemy radio nets up and down the dial, carefully logging every letter or figure.
The messages were then sent back to Bletchley Park to be deciphered, translated and fitted together like a gigantic jigsaw puzzle to produce as complete a picture as possible of what the enemy was doing.
But her newly-learned skills were never put to the test in wartime, as first the conflicts in Europe ended in May 1945, followed by the Far East three months later.
The widowed great-grandmother, who had initially been trained to intercept German messages, was retrained for the Far Eastern theatre of war, but history again intervened.
“We did complete our training and were waiting to go to Bangalore to intercept Japanese messages when the atom bombs were dropped, which finished the war,” Sylvia said.
The end of the war saw Sylvia transferred to the Royal Army Education Corps.
“When the war was finished there was no need for such a vast intercept system, so I had to do something else,” she said.
“I finished up as an education sergeant posted to Egypt in the desert, half-way down Suez Canal, then to Palestine.
“There was trouble there at the time and you weren’t allowed out of the base in Jerusalem unless accompanied by two vehicles with armed men in. But we were young, we wanted to see what it was like out there.”
She said: “The educational courses in Jerusalem were for military personnel who were waiting to be demobbed.
“The courses were designed to ease the return to civilian life,” she said. “I ran courses for people who were still out there, instead of doing drills and training for battle as they once did, they were just hanging around and it was years after the war before some were demobbed.”
She added: “My abiding memory of my service was the comradeship – wherever you went, as soon as you got where you were going, you became one of that group.
“It was the most wonderful, exciting, worthwhile time, in so many new situations.”