THE week before Remembrance Sunday, youngsters at St John’s church, Ben Rhydding, had a visitor who transported them back to the 1940s, telling of her own wartime experiences.

While the main service continued in church, 93-year-old Mrs Dorothy Hobbs joined the Sunday school classes in the church hall to talk about her experiences of serving with the armed forces during the Second World War.

Mrs Hobbs, a regular member of the congregation at St John’s, gave a vivid account of how, as a teenager and without telling her parents, she joined the Women’s Royal Naval Service (W.R.N.S.) and became a ‘Wren’. After six weeks basic training in London and being taught to drive, she very soon found herself up in Scotland driving three ton trucks and tractors.

Her wartime exploits and adventures entranced the youngsters giving them first hand accounts of life as it was then. “Dorothy’s story was interesting and intriguing,” said 14-year old Oliver Rayment. “It’s important we remember, and there are not really many people left now who lived through that time and can tell us of their memories and experiences of how it was.”