I’m not meant to keep a diary. They told me that when I first arrived a couple of weeks ago. But I’ve realised that if I’m going to stay sane I’ve got to write down what I’m thinking and feeling. I keep my diary in a safe place anyway, hidden beneath the floorboards, wrapped in an old rag, and with a set mousetrap right next to it, in this cottage that I share with one other WAAF called Violet. Parachutists and what they call ‘fifth columnists’ could be here any day according to the officers and some of the newspapers. It feels quite exciting as me and Violet are both ‘under cover’ – in a way. We have to pretend to everyone else that we’re cooks at the RDF station here at Dunkirk. Not the Dunkirk in France. It’s actually a small village in Kent, somewhere between Faversham and Canterbury. But we’re not cooks; we’re RDF operators. RDF stands for Radio Direction Finding, though I’ve heard that the Americans call it ‘Radar’, which sounds a lot simpler to me. We’re one of the 20 Chain Home stations that are here to pick up incoming German air traffic. It’s called a chain, I suppose, because different stations’ radio waves link together to form an unbroken necklace of protection that circles the coastline of Britain.

Anyway, we’re not meant to tell anyone about this. Some of the top brass call it ‘our secret weapon’ so I guess they don’t want the secret to be let out of the bag. In the first week at the base one of the WAAFs who does the cooking was really sick. She couldn’t cook because she would no doubt have passed on her bug to everyone else, so the commanding officer said to me and Violet that seeing as though we had to tell everyone we were cooks, perhaps we should have a go at doing some real cooking, if we didn’t mind. I don’t think they’ll ask us again, though. One of the engineers, by the name of Freddy, who fancies himself as a bit of a wit, told us afterwards that we were obviously Hitler’s secret weapon. I was a bit cross when he said it but I soon laughed as he tried in vain to dig his spoon into his rock hard pudding.

In the receiver room we each have a screen that looks like a television set with wiggly lines going across the middle. Somewhere in the midst of the wiggly lines we have to find what’s called an echo – a little v-shaped thing which keeps popping up now and again. That’s the aircraft that we’re trying to find. We have a little wheel at the side which I turn so that the echo disappears. As soon as it does, I look at the wheel and jot down the direction from which it’s coming and the altitude. Then I call up with my headset and say, ‘We’ve got an echo at such and such a height, such and such a direction, such and such a heading,’ and they plot it on a plotting machine.

The first time I saw one of the Vs on the screen all I could think about was whether it was heading straight for George at Biggin Hill. I even did this: I looked at the V and I willed it to miss George. And I also tried to communicate with George by briefly closing my eyes and saying ‘Dear husband, there’s a bandit on the way – make sure you get him before he gets you.’ I opened my eyes again and they were a bit blurry when I looked at the screen, but I wiped them dry and concentrated again. It sounds stupid now, writing it all down, but I resolved to write down my true feelings and experiences in this diary and so I am. I wrote a long letter to George to tell him about what it’s like here – but I thought I’d better write some stories about my life as a cook as well, in case, well, in case the letter fell into the hands of a Nazi spy! I’m sure it will make him laugh.

We’ve been told to expect a lot more German planes – perhaps hundreds of them – in the coming days and weeks. I wonder when they’ll come.