Enid Ginger Thorpe

I was in the Royal Corps Signals, which meant we dealt with all communication and rerouting messages wherever they went. Sometimes they were coded and sometimes they were straight. We were getting the message any way you could. You had to know which code you were using. You had to do all sorts of things. I didn’t ever really listen to any of the coded things that came from just outside Bedford in England. They had a big camp of forces there. I spent a few years, you see the first of my years in the Signals was spent in London District on Curzon Street in London district. We used to go to work in Bedford through Hyde Park Corner. Of course you would get bombs coming in. You just dropped down behind whatever you could and waited until they had finished. There was nothing you could do. And then as I said, General Eisenhower was forming his corps for the attack on France. And General Eisenhower was doing a similar thing, but in a much smaller scale. And I was sent for a while, we went all over the place. We went down to Portsmouth and in the cliffs at Portsmouth there were very good defence things. We had to keep quiet about a lot of it. It was interesting and it was, I won’t say thrilling because that’s not the word, although it was, looking back on it, it was good to be a part of it. Do you know what I mean? It wasn’t a personal thing. It was just to be a part of a piece of history like that.