The time had come to venture ‘across the water’.

On the quay for the Heysham boat, my parents assured me of their love and trust in my good sense. That made it easy to cope with a few sad moments as I watched the dark silhouette of the Cave Hill shrinking into the dusk. Betty and I were bound for the Admiralty Signals Establishment in Haslemere, Surrey.


The train journey to London next day was memorable only for our first sighting of a coalmine. Not due in Haslemere for 2 days, I remembered that the Girl Guide Association had a hostel in Buckingham Palace Road. We went there and found a warm welcome; and a brief air-raid alert in the night. I fell in love with London’s white terraces and green parks, and said as much in a letter home. Next afternoon we visited relatives of Betty’s in a western suburb, to discover that our parents had been telephoning frantically, thinking us lost. I am still ashamed that neither of us had thought to phone home, but long-distance calls were intimidating in those days.

The most mature and ambitious of our fellow students also went to Haslemere, to a group developing dielectric aerials. Son of a country schoolmaster, he was descended from the Flemish refugees who initiated the linen industry, and quickly rose to the top (facsimile copies at $52.05 of his 1953 Dielectric Aerials can now be ordered on a Rare Books website).

Betty and I did not have distinguished careers. We started in the Library, not my cup of tea so I was put onto transformer testing. Two months of that made me rebellious, and after the Christmas vacation I worked in one of the research laboratories.


Our lab was a hut on the former cricket pitch of the country house which the Admiralty had commandeered when Portsmouth became a target for enemy bombs. On the first Saturday in January, 1945, I happened to be leaving it just as a young man left a neighbouring hut. As our paths converged, he raised his cap and said "Are you going to lunch, Miss McMillan?"

Two and three-quarter years later we were married.

Happy 80th Birthday, darling!
3 March 2003