Chapter 8 - Partial 



	Sawston Hall was a magnificent, pre-Elizabethan building that still retained
	some of its past glory. Sadly, now, it is an institutionalized hull, its
	beautiful herb gardens edged with low lying privet, gone; its inner courtyard 
	that we would gaze down on, drawing in a sense of peace during rest periods, no 
	longer there in the form that I had known. We would walk up the broad staircase 
	allowing our imaginations to produce a cavalier in satins and ruffles or his lady 
	in glorious brocades. 
	
	Now the courtyard is overgrown, the fountain overturned and overgrown with weeds, 
	it seems a deserted, almost desecrated place. Yet the large panelled hall with 
	broad fireplace, tables, settles and deep easy chairs, are still arrayed as a 
	token to its former glory. It was here that, with panelling covered against 
	damage, a slanted, mapped table ~ and the tiers of radio equipment where officers,
	sergeants and army personnel sat behind radio equipment ~ was set up, and from 
	where continuous conversation, or orders, could be heard. At times of overload the 
	operations room fairly buzzed with the sound of voices: operators calling out 
	fresh plots; controllers giving instructions and receiving radio transmissions 
	from pilots; Ops A from her high place on the top tier shouting instructions from 
	Group; the click of rods and sound of moving metal arrows ~ the place caught up in 
	the excited movement of the moment. At other and quiet times it was almost a place 
	of stillness and quiet reflection, with silent figures sitting, sometimes reading, 
	but always the sense of awaiting the moment. 
	
	The operation ‘table’ was manned by personnel under the authority of a Sergeant of 
	Watch responsible for rostering, positioning, and functioning of about twenty five 
	women and men. He or she administered exams and regular leave. We worked under a 
	four watch system called A B C and D continuously three times daily ~ morning, 
	afternoon/evening and night duty. Later on, the latter was changed to a week’s 
	stretch with a two days leave at the end. 

	We were 12 Group and stretched to the Midlands, down to Essex and up to 
	Lincolnshire, and like all other groups with which we were connected we observed 
	instructions from Group at Watnall, London, who gathered, filtered, and expressed 
	outward aircraft plots, derived from Radio Direction Stations and sightings from 
	the Observer Corps.  
	
	Our billet was a large Georgian mansion at Hinxton. Administration, officers, 
	sergeants and some girls, shared rooms in the house but the majority lived in 
	Nissan huts within the grounds. These had semi-circular iron roofs built over 
	concrete floors. Twelve girls slept there on narrow beds in two rows with a bed and 
	locker in each narrow space. Centrally, a pot belly stove guarded against winter 
	cold. Although there was little room, we soon made our bed space our own individual 
	statement with a hung rope for civvy clothes, and pinned up photos of family and 
	boyfriends. Later exotic pictures like Varga girls ~ semi-nude calendar girls given 
	by American boyfriends ~ appeared. A toilet was positioned in the entrance, but we 
	needed to walk to an ablution block for baths. We were privileged, for we seldom 
	had inspection parades, and, when we did they were cursory.
	
	Fay and I soon parted company to make new friends. Monica, or Nicky, a Norfolk 
	girl, became my constant companion, and close friend, as she is even to this very 
	day. We decided to hitch hike to Norwich on the next sleeping out pass (SOP), visit 
	relatives and dance at the Samson and Hercules, so called because of large statues 
	of the legendary heroes placed by pillars at the entrance. It had in the past been 
	a swimming pool that I had visited with Joan when staying pre-war, but now had a 
	magnificent sprung floor stretched across the pool area to form a dance floor. 
	
	The Samson, as we learned to call it, was in the ancient area of Elm Hill,
	Tombland, and opposite the magnificent bulk of Norwich cathedral. Hitch hiking had 
	become a way of life ~ the quickest and cheapest. All service people hitch hiked.

	That particular night the dance floor was crowded mainly with newly arrived 
	American personnel, for now many Liberator bomber stations had been prepared to 
	increase daylight bombing missions from Cambridge, Norfolk and Suffolk. It was such 
	fun being initiated into jitterbugging until the contingent left, and then my time 
	was spent with an army captain who walked me back to my aunt’s house and 
	propositioned me to meet him in London where he had a flat. ‘Not on your Nellie!’ I 
	thought, but could not resist writing to tell Jose about my conquest. I relied upon 
	her confidentiality, and after all, it was just a flirtation; I was not engaged to 
	Lionel.
	
	Fun time abounded. Watch parties, local pubs, local ‘hops’, squadron dances at 
	Duxford; I was seeing an exciting new world. One day Nicky and I were invited to 
	join some radio operators in a pub in Sawston; there was an abundance of public 
	houses in that long stretch of street. We borrowed a bike, a man’s bike, and cross 
	barred one another there. On the way back owing to our merriness we found the 
	journey more difficult, and fell off frequently, until finally, we landed in a 
	ditch by the side of the road. Laying there giggling, we suddenly noticed a plane 
	flying low directly above us.
	
	‘It’s the Junkers 88 from Duxford,’ laughed Nicky. ‘They use it for exercises, you 
	know.’
	
	We waved madly, still giggling, and began the long ride back. On watch that evening 
	we were told that a German Junkers 88 had dropped a stick of bombs a few miles 
	south in Newmarket. Had they been after Ops, we wondered.

	Nicky came up with a plan for our next SOP: I had invited her home, and she 
	suggested that we visit a crystal gazer that she had heard about in Bedford. Nicky 
	was ‘into’ psychic things, and I had no objection to trying something new. Maybe I 
	would be told of a wedding?  Nicky rang up and made a fairly loose appointment, for 
	all depended upon our hitches. 

	I had always imagined fortune tellers to be rather like the gypsy woman of my 
	childhood ~ shawls and long earrings and wispy hair beneath a scarf ~ but when we 
	walked up a gravel path between scrubby garden beds to a semi-detached Victorian 
	red brick villa, and the door was opened by a very ordinary middle aged woman in 
	plain, dark clothes, I must admit I was surprised. We were led into a room, again 
	very dark; dark furniture, curtains, carpets, and antimacassars on easy chairs that 
	looked most uncomfortable. I sat on a chair by the window, and looked out into grey 
	skies through an industrial haze. Somehow this wasn’t what I had expected.

	Nicky came out, and I went into another dark area; necessarily so. The woman sat 
	down behind a crystal on a black velvet cloth, her attention closely concentrated 
	on the crystal ball before her. She told me to hold a question in my mind, and then 
	proceeded to draw a character study of myself. I had missed my vocation:

	‘You should have been a nurse. You could have been a dancer.’ Certain words that 
	she spoke seemed to have no connection to my question, and were easily forgotten, 
	for I was not here to be directed. What did fate hold for me?  Then she stopped. 
	Looking directly into my eyes she said:
	
	‘You must be careful of what you write in a letter. Your whole life will be changed 
	if you do not take care.’
	
	Feeling rather disappointed, I left, walking behind Nicky in a grayness that hung 
	around me like a cloud. Our journey home was smooth, and the time spent there 
	pleasurable, but I could not shake off that sense of something … not quite right.
	
	Nicky was posted nearer her mother’s home in Liverpool. I made new friends. One was 
	a very lovely girl called Lesley. Of Scottish and Irish descent, she had dark wavy 
	hair, and blue eyes set wide above high cheekbones. She was as nice as she was 
	beautiful.
	
	Soon I was preparing for my first long leave that I had asked for in order to 
	coincide with Lionel’s. In the meantime Operations was moved to an emergency 
	situation, for certain modifications were being applied at Sawston. We were still 
	receiving bombing raids, although those on London had abated somewhat, but we were 
	kept busy. Pilots from the resident squadrons often visited, and, one day a message 
	was sent to me from the controller that Bill had flown in, and would like to speak 
	to me. On the outside phone I spoke to him.:

	‘Dinah,’ he said, ‘I wanted to see you, but I have run out of time.’
	
	I was to learn later that he had met with Douglas Bader to organise a bombing raid 
	with fighter back-up.   







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