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This story is submitted by Helen Hughes of the People's War team in Wales on behalf of Ruth Newmarch, and is added to the site with her permission.

When the war started I was at school — then I was a student in Bedford college, and unless you taught you couldn’t stay for three years so I thought: “This is daft” so I joined the ATS. We were evacuated to Cambridge and I joined in Leicester and we were put in Ack —ack because they wanted Ack-ack in 1942 …everybody went there. We went to Blandford to train, they up to Ty Croes to firing camp when a plane did a stupid thing and hit a gun and went into the sea and the pilot was killed. Then after firing camp we then went to Manchester…various sites in Manchester with Ack-ack with 3745 whatever the guns were…we were on the height finders or predictors.. The height finders looked at the plane and said it’s so many feet up …and the speed it was going, and the predictors set that into their device and told the guns what the fuse would be to put in their shells for firing.

We did get frightened I must say. If you were up on the gun park in the freezing cold what you did…if the alarm went you dived out of bed if you were on call duty…put your slacks and your things and your pullovers ready, put them all on over your pyjamas. Out you went with your boots on and your tin hat and greatcoat up to the gun park, and we always got there before the men, well they were older than us anyway. If you were on the predicting and you had headphones on the control room was down underground and you were feeding stuff down. When we were down in Kent and the doodlebugs came….and they cut out….you know you were on headphones so you couldn’t dive down. But it was fine, we were all in the same boat and if you were up more than four hours and you came down, the cooks who were on duty …you always got cocoa with rum in it. You got cocoa normally but rum in it if you’d been up that long. I joined up just before my 18th birthday when I joined up and my father was a clergyman and the churchwardens’ wives came to see mother and they said “Fancy letting your daughter join the ATS” because it was a time when all the talk was of them being scarlets, getting pregnant and things. But my mother said “It’ll be that much better now that Ruth’s in it!”

When the Ack-ack finished and we disbanded in 45, we remustered as clerks and things and I went out to Ceylon to the headquarters …well it ended up as General Slim of course, the land forces. So we went out to Ceylon for four months in a cocoa plantation in Candi — great — and then the whole headquarters went to Singapore. First of all we went to Changee and the air force went to Tanno….well we had the airstrip so after about two weeks the whole two headquarters — about ten thousand people each — swapped. Can you imagine it! I was on the advance party going from Ceylon to Singapore and we ate in the Brigadier’s Mess and this little chinese cook used to cook for us, just the two of us getting our quarters ready….so he said come and look at this and there was the Brigadier’s Mess. There wasa table for 16 Brigadiers, there were eight Generals and 16 Brigadiers so we decided we were not going to salute anyone under a full Colonel — being just a Corporal you see. Then after a year and a half some of us went to Hong Kong…..that was great because we lived in a Geisha house. Actually the barracks we were in is where they put displaced people now. It’s rather sad.

When we were in Singapore they were all getting ready for “The big push”…Mountbatten and the land forces and sea forces they were all going to do the big push to Malaya. Then they dropped the atom bomb so they didn’t have to …so it was a question then of mopping up and bringing people back …..so quite a lot of the soldiers who’d been in Kohima and places came back to Singapore where we were. In fact we were in Singapore when those Tenko people were there, but we never saw them because they were kept to themselves. When you saw the film afterwards you thought — well I’d have liked to have gone and helped but they were kept away from use because they had to get used to civilisation really and see they were fit — not get any germs from us and that sort of thing.

Ceylon was beautiful island, the soldiers used to say the Singalese girls are beautiful, the only more beautiful ones were the Burmese.

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