An early memory of mine, in the mid, 1920s, has me standing in our big kitchen and suddenly realising, for the first time – possibly from something overheard – that being a girl, not a boy, meant I would grow up to be a woman, not a man.  My immediate silent response, with a flood of relief, was “Aren’t I lucky!  I won’t ever have to go in the trenches.”

How I knew about trench warfare I cannot say – certainly my father never spoke about the horrors of it that he had experienced in the first world war (known throughout my childhood as the Great War), which had ended less than five years before my birth.  But presumably I had heard other adults talking about it.

I was always horrified by war, and now think that international warfare can never be justified.  But when the second world war broke out, I first joined the Youth Auxiliary Service Corps and then the Women’s Royal Naval Service - in which I served from 1942 as a wireless telegraphist, mainly in Ceylon (now Sri Lanka).  However, I was never one to vilify conscientious objectors as cowards – in fact, I remember saying, despite my WRNS uniform, that they were really the brave ones.

The widely held belief that the 1939-45 war was necessary, to defeat Nazism, is totally unjustified: the regime would have collapsed eventually anyway, while the abomination of the German death camps was possible only because of the isolation of war.

It was the only war ever in which those of us serving abroad were more concerned for the safety of our families back home than they for us, and it was like surreal science fiction when we heard news about “pilotless planes” – the German rockets V1 and V2.  But then the tide of the European war began to turn.

I was the first person in Trincomalee to know when the conflict came to an end, as I took the official Morse signal that read, in plain English, “Tomorrow, Tuesday 8 May, will be VE day”.  This was followed by dit-dit-dah-dah-dit-dit, meaning “repeat”.  I whipped off my head-phones and yelled out to the rest of the wireless room, “The war in Europe is over!”.  Before the repetition of the signal finished, bottles of celebratory beer, that had been hidden away for this moment, were being opened.

Three months later, in the early morning of 15 August, I arrived punctually for the forenoon watch and learned that Japan had surrendered.  Knowing that on 11 November 1918 many men were killed because they had not heard about the armistice, I asked the leader of my watch whether the ships at sea would know about the Japanese surrender.  “They’ll know soon enough when they get into the harbour”, was the reply. “No, I don’t think that’s soon enough,” I retorted; “I want to tell them now.”  But he said I had to obtain permission from the Base Communications Officer, due to arrive at 9 a.m.

I looked out for his arrival and waylaid him with my request.  Preoccupied with the rush of urgent matters to deal with, such as release of POWs, he brushed me aside, saying “Do what you like, do what you like!” Pouncing on this as permission, I immediately tapped out on the Port Wave key, “The war against Japan is over”.  After repeating it, I thought that was it – but a few hours later I was amazed to pick up a signal from another country in south-east Asia stating “The following has been read from Trincomalee”, followed by my own little text – as though it had not just been off my own bat.  It made me aware that unimportant individuals like me could actually bat beyond their strength.

Nowadays, of course, the internet makes such widespread communications a commonplace happening, but that was decades before the information age.