My mother, Hazel Yarborough, nee Glen served in the WAAF during WWII. She was a Y Service Intercept Operator listening to enemy pilots and ultimately feeding information into the war effort at Bletchley Park.
She was posted to a listening station in Belgium from January to May 1945 and heard that the war was over on her day off in Brussels. “Everybody went completely mad,” she wrote home to her mother. She described the celebrations in the small town of Genval where she was stationed. Her Wireless Unit lived in a villa which had belonged to a collaborator, she described as “lately deceased”.
The joy of those post war days comes through in her vivid description of the parades, speeches and dances which followed the outbreak of peace and the subsequent wonderful, relaxing days sitting in the sunshine by the lake. She was somewhat annoyed at the immediate marching practice they had to undertake in preparation for the Grand Parade and desperate to hear news of my father who was serving in the RAF in North Africa. I found this letter with my mother’s papers after she died in 2005. She must have reclaimed them after her own mother’s passing. She did not speak to her own family of her war service until the 1980s having signed the Official Secrets Act in 1942.
