The Enemy is Listening by Aileen Clayton

Aileen Clayton (nee Morris) joined the WAAF in 1939. The first woman to be commissioned as an intelligence officer in the British Armed Forces, she served first at Kingsdown in Kent and later at various posts around the Mediterranean. For her devotion to the Y service, to which she contributed so much, she earned honour and recognition.

After years of planning, staffing and supervisory duties in theMediterranean, she was spared at last for a visit home. Once there, she was taken on a tour of the Y stations before being decorated at Buckingham Palace by the king.

In her memoir, Clayton recalls dancing with an officer whose unit she knew was bound for Anzio. At age 25, she bore the "intolerable responsibility" of knowing something ominous that she could neither speak of nor change.

In the chill of foreboding for the young man, (and indeed he perished in the Anzio landings), she was struck by a feeling of premature age, of having "mislaid" her youth, a dark memory that remained with her for life. A similar premonition preceded the loss of her young brother, who failed to return from operations with No. 221 Squadron in March 1945.

For all those who worked in the Y service, the relentless immediacy of hearing pilots crash and die through radio messages took an enormous toll. So, of course, did the pressure to work with great speed and accuracy, solve an endless stream of threats to the system, and of course, maintain absolute secrecy about their duties.

Clayton was over sixty when she published this remarkable eye-witness memoir in 1980, when at last, the veil of secrecy was drawn back. In the Foreword, Air Chief Marshal Sir Frederick Rosier, GCB, CBE, DSO praises the wartime work of the Y service, along with "the extraordinary resilience and adaptability of women who showed that they were supreme in what they were doing."

Brave, calm and adaptable in the face of unimaginable pressure and adversity, Clayton credits the work done by her Y service colleagues for aiding the advancement of women. In a casual tone, she comments that fortunately "both [US General and later President Dwight D.] Eisenhower and [Air Chief Marshall Sir Arthur W.] Tedder were convinced that women could safely and efficiently undertake work which had previously been looked on as strictly a male province."