This weekend marks the 75th anniversary of VJ Day (Victory over Japan Day), when Japan surrendered and World War II effectively came to an end after six years of fighting.

Pat Davies was an interceptor for the British military during the war. Her job was to listen to radio messages sent between fleets of German ships and translate them into English.

Her work was pivotal in enabling codebreakers at Bletchley Park to break the Enigma Code and turn the tide of the war in the favour of allied forces.

Davies, who is now 97 and lives in Chiswick, London, says the memories of her secret wartime mission and the relief and jubilation of VJ Day are still fresh in her mind.

"I was in London on VJ Day," she told CGTN. "I had been stationed in the Wrens [Women's Royal Navy Service] down in Dover, but because our job was listening to the German fleet and the German fleet had capitulated, they had to find us other useful things to do.

"By the time we had got to VJ Day, that was the big one for my family because of my father being a prisoner of war in the Far East, so it was huge relief," she added.

Davies's father was captured in Thailand by Japanese forces and kept a secret diary which is now on show in London's Imperial War Museum.

"He was somehow able to keep a diary during his time as prisoner of war and buried it inside bamboo poles in a cemetery for safety," said Davies. "He dug up the handwritten diary at the end of the war and got it properly typed out and turned into chapters but never got it published in his lifetime."

Speaking German: a vital ability

Davies learned to speak German through hours of conversations with her grandfather's Austrian domestic staff, which would eventually help her become an invaluable asset in the wartime effort.

"We lived in my grandfather's house in Lancashire and because we are a large family, he liked to have a cook and a housemaid," she said. "He couldn't get English ones in the 1930s and he discovered he could get refugees from Austria who were Jewish and had to get out of Vienna, were desperate for work and would come and be cook or housemaid right in the countryside.

"I spent a lot of my time, because there was nothing for schoolgirls to do in the evenings in Lancashire in wartime, talking in German."

Davies realised her skills could be of vital use and responded to a recruitment drive by the Women's Royal Navy Service, who were actively recruiting female German speakers.

"The Wrens were looking for girls from reliable families who had conversational German for what they called the 'Y' Service, which was a coastal listening service to pick up messages between German ships and naval bases and ships," she explained. "They had little secret stations down the east coast and south coast and they wanted people just like me."

She was sent up to Liverpool – the closest port town to home – to take a German test.

"It suddenly struck me they didn't say why I was being sent for a German test," she said. "Is it because I was going to be trained as a spy? 

"I knew that spies had to jump out of aeroplanes and I have never been in the least bit brave and I thought that jumping out of an aeroplane would be absolutely terrifying. To my great relief they said 'You will be an interceptor'."

Seaside spy games

Davies was stationed in Abbot's Cliff, Kent, and on a clear day she could see the windscreens of German cars across the channel and the clocktower at Calais.

"You could sit there for hours going up and down the wavelengths," she recalled. "There were a few frequencies we knew they used, hoping that a ship would come up. Some nights or days you got nothing, then after your four hours you went off duty again. But other times you would get traffic and everything hotted up."

On those occasions, a calm head was essential. "You had to get down, absolutely accurately of course, what you were listening to," she recalled. "If it was operational – and it often was – that would be in-plain language German, and they would say things like 'Look out, there is a destroyer,' and it might be in Enigma Code.

"So I was the first step for Bletchley because if we hadn't had a listening service, they wouldn't have had codes to break.

"It was a time when you were very aware you were rather lucky to have a responsible job when you were young, with no previous training. And of course, all the period was tense because of our father being a prisoner-of-war and not knowing if he was alive or if we would see him again. I was lucky to be stationed in England and could go back on leave to see my mother. My sister Jean was sent to Egypt."

Pat and her sister Jean have collaborated on a book, Codebreaking Sisters, which is full of letters, photos and memories from their war years. The book has given the sisters the chance to recall the challenges of their work and the pride they felt in contributing to the war effort.

But Davies admits she's felt helpless in recent months as the world has faced another huge battle against the COVID-19 pandemic.

"Of course, it's different," she said. "I'm 97. I was 18 when I joined the Wrens and you were with a bunch of people your own age you would want to be with anyway. Whereas now you're an old lady marooned in a house that everybody is being very careful about not visiting because of the virus – although my neighbours are very good and do come and sit in the garden.

"I don't feel, particularly at my age, that you can contribute much during this lockdown. It is negative, whereas in the war you knew what you were doing was essential and you put all your effort into it and everybody else as doing the same.

"The war was more inspiring than the lockdown is."