The author, now 94, wrote most of this memoir shortly after the second World War, but due to a variety of secretive forces and dithering by Whitehall and Parliament, it has only now seen the light of day. Anne Glyn-Jones, with an upper-class upbringing, always craved to join the navy, notwithstanding an offer of a place at Oxford. After training, she was posted to Scarborough where she divided her working hours between scrubbing floors and trawling the airwaves for Morse code and sending it on to the code breakers at Station X (Bletchley).
Later in Gibraltar she nightly endured being attacked by a million bugs and somewhat fewer rats. Glyn-Jones had a romance of sorts with a Scotsman but both accepted that their differences in background, class and religion were too great to overcome and went their separate ways. She writes with a self-deprecating style, gentle humour and charming innocence. This is a tale of a bygone age and circumstance which makes it all the more fascinating. And yes, she did eventually go up to Oxford.
