JUNE Scott was delighted to be asked to join the national celebrations marking the 60th anniversary of war's end. But the invitation also delivered a problem. Where were her medals?

Mrs Scott, 79, was due to attend the Commemoration Show planned for Horse Guards Parade in London yesterday. The show's programme included music from the Forties, a flypast and an address by the Queen.

A former wireless operator with the First Aid Nursing Yeomanry, Mrs Scott had sent off an application to take part some weeks earlier. Thanks to the luck of the draw she was one of the veterans selected.

But how could she wear her medals to the parade - when she hadn't got them?

With the aid of her son, Giles, she got in touch with the Ministry of Defence and applied retrospectively for any honours she was due.

Realising the urgency of the request, the officials responded with impressive speed. Soon a padded brown envelope arrived at her York home. It contained the Defence Medal and the War Medal. Both of them should have been awarded to Mrs Scott in tribute to her war efforts in 1945 but, in the confusion of the times, they never were.

Six decades later, she was finally able to wear them with pride.

When war broke out it seemed a long way away to Mrs Scott. She was a 13-year-old pupil at a boarding school in Staffordshire with her twin sister. They were thought safer there than at home in Enfield, Middlesex.

She left school in December 1942 and went to a London secretarial college. After administration jobs at two hospitals in the capital Mrs Scott and a friend decided to join the Wrens. But the service didn't have any suitable vacancies, and an officer suggested they apply to the First Aid Nursing Yeomanry (FANY).

Created in 1907 as a link between the frontline fighting units and the field hospitals, the corps formed the nucleus of the Motor Driver Companies at the outbreak of the Second World War.

Another section was attached to the Polish Army, and a Kenyan unit formed in 1935 also joined the war effort.

But Mrs Scott was destined for a very different role in a very different part of the world.

She became a wireless operator. "It was tremendously exciting. It was quite intense training," she said. "Even now I am very sensitive when something isn't tuned in properly on the wireless."

Because she was aged under 18 when she joined up in 1943, she had to ask for her parents' consent. "Father didn't mind. He had been in the Army. Mother went along with it."

The initial six weeks' training was hard work. She remembered "a lot of marching and peeling potatoes" in addition to learning the technical skills. Some recruits didn't make it any further.

Mrs Scott, however, was sent to Dunbar, near Edinburgh, where she volunteered to take up a post in India.

Her ship docked in Bombay at the beginning of 1945. From there she was taken to Calcutta, which was to be her home for many months.

"There were three messes," she recalled. "You are talking about 60 of us, 20 to each.

"We had to get on with it. It was quite heavy going because of the heat and there were night duties."

Her role was to send and receive coded messages to the frontline troops in Burma. "We were attached to Force 136. And we were working for the SOE - the Special Operations Executive."

It was highly secret, hugely responsible work for someone still in her teens. "You have got to remember how young we were. You had to get exactly the right message, or else anything could have happened."

The troops' lives would be endangered by a wrongly sent or transcribed message. Did they feel the stress? "No you didn't. It was the way we had been trained. You were fighting for your country."

Fortunately, a hectic social life offered a relief from the pressure. Mrs Scott remembers going to fashionable clubs, or to the races. They could even stay for a few days at a house in Shillong, a hill town in north east India. Her Indian hosts were "very hospitable". "I was very impressed with the Taj Mahal," she added.

VE Day passed by with little impact on those still engaged in hostilities in the Far East. But Mrs Scott celebrated VJ Day, August 15, and attended a thanksgiving service "for Victory and Peace", at a theatre in Shillong on the following Sunday.

Her journey home was memorable too. She was on board the Mauritania when it made its record-breaking, 6,000-mile journey in 11 days in November 1945.

Mrs Scott went on to work for two MPs. Then, on holiday in Norfolk in 1950, she met Richard Scott, known to her as Dick. They were married the following year, and she moved to York where he was a partner in the long-establised law firm Munby and Scott, based in Blake Street. He died in 2000.

Mrs Scott would not wish to return to India. But in these last few weeks she has gone back there in her mind, remembering the work that brought her two medals - 60 years late.

Updated: 09:05 Tuesday, July 12, 2005