In honour of Armistice Day, and in an addition to our regularly scheduled rambling, I will recount my favourite of the stories my late paternal grandmother told me about her days in the RAF during the war.

My grandmother was a radio operator, one of the women who guided pilots back to base after missions. She was, as I suspect many of the radio operators were, young, single, and attractive, and naturally outgoing, and thus particularly popular with the pilots and male ground crew.

One night she was walking back to her barracks after her shift. It was late and, because of the black-out, no lights were allowed. Somehow she took a wrong turn in the darkness and ended up trapped, surrounded by things that bumped and tangled her, unable to find a way out.

More than a little panicked, she opted to, as she put it to me many years later, do something she knew would work: she screamed. She kept screaming until some of the ground crew came to investigate, and found her in one of the aircraft hangars, tangled in the ropes hanging around one of the planes.

She never told me what happened after that, but I suspect it took her a while to live it down!

RIP Nanny Bessie, a lady who lived and loved life, who drank and smoked as if there was no tomorrow, and ended up in hospital aged 87, with a broken hip from tripping over the ground rope of the local carnival’s beer tent while drunk.

And to everyone who served, in any capacity: thank you. We will not forget.