Pte. Nancy Ada Law
Auxiliary Territorial Service
In 1941 Nan Law was 19, working in Oxfordshire having been evacuated from Stepney and with a brother in the RAF and a boyfriend also in the RAF. Her parents had died and realising life would never be the same again Nan decided to join up. She also had an ambition to learn to drive and the branch of the service that offered that opportunity was the ATS.
Nan was accepted in the ATS and assessments directed her to driver training in Mold near Wrexham. One of the tests was to drive an ambulance with a bucket of water suspended in the back, if you did not spill too much water you passed. Because Nan was tall it was decided she should drive lorries and ambulances. Her first posting was to be London, but she swapped with a lass who had a boyfriend flying Spitfires and was desperate for a London posting.
Nan's first posting was Northern Ireland driving ration trucks. She was back in England late 1942 and drove convoy, taking lorries from the factory to Southampton for Operation Torch. General driving duties followed and she was in Sussex when the mulberry harbours were being built. A posting to Kent followed in 1944 and Nan was part of the decoy operation creating fake tracks into forests and delivering mock planes and tanks to Kent fields to create the overall appearance of troop movement round the logical channel crossing point of Dover. On 4th of June 1944 she swapped lorries for an ambulance and was posted to Portsmouth Harbour, part of a fleet ready to receive the evacuated wounded from the Normandy beaches.
