Sitting down with Second World War veteran Pat Owtram, she offers me a glass of water, a cup of tea, or a sherry.
At 101, Pat has the kind of spirit you have come to admire in the veterans we are lucky to still have – resilience, stoicism and a healthy dose of good humour.
Pat opens up her well-worn photo album and recounts her remarkable story.
At just 18 years old, Pat, like so many young women, desperately wanted to join the war effort and ‘do their bit’.
Pat found herself heading to Liverpool for an interview to join the Women’s Royal Naval Service, known as Wrens, and was snapped up on account of her German-speaking skills.
Her family in Lancashire had taken in refugees from occupied Austria and evenings spent chatting by the fire in German and English had given her a vital skill for the British government.
“I could listen to the German naval ships talking because they tended to talk coming in and out of the Baltic into the North Sea. I heard a good deal of radio traffic from the enemy side.”
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Pat started working along the British coast at small listening stations, transcribing conversations between German submarines and, crucially, writing down secret coded messages – now known as the Enigma code, to send to Bletchley Park.
Pat found herself in Kent at Abbot’s Cliff in Dover, the listening station in a large white house perched on a hill, well within shelling range. To this day, Pat says she is amazed it was not a target.
The closest Pat came to danger was actually from an over-enthusiastic colleague.
“She came in carrying a bomb, saying ‘look what I found!’ We told her to go away!”
In between the night watches and the hours of transcribing, there were moments of calm too.
Pat and her fellow Wrens started a tap-dancing club and a library – and it was during a well-earned break reading a library book on a cliff overlooking the Channel that Pat witnessed a significant moment.
“A little file of people was coming up the path and it was Winston Churchill. He stood on our cliff looking across at Calais. It was carefully planned as he knew it would be reported back to the Germans. And, of course, the invasion was going to be way down west. It was a deliberate ruse.”
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The rest, as they say, is history, D-Day creating a path to victory for the Allies with VE Day coming 11 months later.
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Pat remembers exactly where she was on that historic but bittersweet day for her family.
“We had a half-day off and instinctively headed for the palace. Lots of people were shouting ‘We want the King!’ and they did come out on the balcony and everybody cheered, there was a great feeling of celebration.
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“VE Day meant a great deal, but VJ Day was more important to my family because my father had been taken prisoner in the Far East. We had a few more months to wait until he came home.”
Pat’s sister Jean was also a codebreaker using her language skills in Egyptian and Italian as a cipher officer with the Special Operations Executive, nicknamed ‘Churchill’s Secret Army’.
Jean sadly passed away last year and was stationed abroad on VE Day, but she wrote to her sister with the words “My double darling Patsy, isn’t this just so wonderful and overwhelming?”.
It is Jean and her family that Pat will be remembering today.
