D-Day. Frail but powerful.

This frail woman reading her book, communicating with her chatty cat, is not what she seems.

At dawn on D-Day 75 years ago, she stepped out of the heavily protected radar station on the cliffs above Portsmouth harbour which coordinated the movement of ships and planes heading for the beaches of Normandy. As an officer in The WAAF’s secret Radar unit, my mother ensured data interpreted from radar screens correctly positioned vessels on the table. Hers was a crucial role and she was billeted in Osborne House, Queen Victoria's favourite home. She told me:

”Exhausted after a long, intense night, I went outside for fresh air. Heavy engines shook the ground beneath my feet, shivered the air. The sky was a ceiling of aircraft, the sea a carpet of ships. Though I had spent months preparing for this audacious attack, its vastness struck me. How brave our ill-prepared country and colonial forces, alone for years against the immense, long prepared Nazi.”

After five years of harrowing battles across half the world, she and all Britons were glad that nine months previously the Americans had joined (in Italy) the fight in Europe against the Nazis.

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