'D-Day had finally come'.

As Told By Lady Pamela

The winter of 1942 was the coldest February since 1914; the water on our bedside tables at boarding school froze as we slept and there was a mass outbreak of chilblains. Combined with the rationing of food, heating, and bathwater—we were allowed a bath only three times a week and the water level could not come above the five-inch mark that was clearly painted inside the tub—it was a pretty miserable few months. As our head mistress, Miss Faunce, reminded us "If it's good enough for the king…."

Even my mother, usually insulated by her wealth, ran out of fuel and had to live without heating or hot water. We also knew, being well-informed Fauncites, that our discomfort was nothing compared to that being suffered by our troops.

The horror of war did not intrude too much. We learned what to do in the event of a bombing raid, throw ourselves to the ground, lie flat on the floor, and leave our mouths slightly agape until the teachers had checked with their fingers to see whether they were open wide enough. Our gas masks were tested from time to time down on the village green by a man with a strange sort of van, and if the sirens sounded nearby, the teachers would summon us by calling out "Chocolate and biscuits in the cellars!" If it was nighttime, we would grab the dressing gown belt of the girl in front and walk quietly downstairs. In the daytime the cook would serve up lunch and as soon as the food appeared, our favorite occupation was to pull the stringy fat off our meat and poke it into the cavities of the cellar wall behind us.

All this was tedious rather than exciting, and even rumors that a mother had supplied Miss Faunce with a gun in case of an invasion did little to stir us. We were young girls, on the cusp of adolescence, more excited by the rare appearance of a man than by wartime logistics.

Actually, men were so rare that when the dance teacher brought her uniformed fiancé to the school, excitement bubbled contagiously along the corridors.

As we traveled home for Easter, I was met off the train by my father's good-looking flag lieutenant, which left my traveling companions somewhat speechless. And things only got better. My father had arranged for me to attend filming of Noël Coward's In Which We Serve, which was based upon my father's adventures in HMS Kelly, on the same day when the king and queen and the two princesses were also due to visit the studio. I went in the car with the girls, and as we drove through the small crowd that had gathered near the studio, Princess Elizabeth kept reminding her sister, Margaret, that she "really must wave at the people."

Noël was in his element that day—he adored being center stage, even if he did have to share it with the king—and we were allowed to stand on the "deck" as the storm scene was being prepared. The deck had been constructed so that it could pitch and roll in the "swell," and after a few minutes the princesses and I felt so sick we asked whether we could climb down. Although at first the Admiralty and the Ministry of Defence had been dead against a film showing a British ship being sunk, the film went ahead, and in fact turned out to be a huge and lasting success.

My beloved sister, Patricia, returned from America that June and came down to see me at school. She was eighteen and seemed very grown up to me. It was such a comfort to have her back—I was jittery from having witnessed a low-flying aircraft drag a man tangled up in his parachute, who was later found dead in Poole Harbour and I felt reassured by her presence.

I wasn't exactly sure what my parents' work really involved. I could imagine my mother improving conditions for Londoners at the mercy of the bombings but had never seen her at work outside of Southampton. The precise details of my father's responsibilities were necessarily secret, and although his name came up on the news broadcasts that I watched with my classmates, I was not aware that he was overseeing plans for the invasion of Europe. When I learned that there had been a "big Commando raid on Dieppe" I could only guess at my father's involvement.

On her return, Patricia had joined the Women's Royal Naval Service, qualifying soon after as a signals rating. She was positioned at the Combined Operations base HMS Tormentor just east of Southampton, and during my next visit home, I jumped on the bus with my bike, then cycled down as quickly as I could, she had saved me a Mars bar! -to see her. I was almost as excited by the prospect of the chocolate bar as I was by that of seeing my sister, but when the moment came, we discovered a mouse had nibbled half of it away.

At thirteen and home for the summer holidays, I needed to play my part in the war effort too. My grandmother had given me a lovely black-and-white pony and together we managed to get hold of an old dogcart which, with a new coat of paint and some varnish, was soon restored to its former glory.

Lady Pamela in-front of her family home Broadlands with the American service men, and her mother Edwina Mountbatten and sister Patrica in uniform.

Chiquita and I were thereafter purposefully employed, running errands and proudly circumventing the fuel shortage. We picked people up from the station and took flowers to the St. John's shop in Romsey to help raise funds. Our route often took us by the local prisoner-of-war camp, known as "Ganger Camp," which housed Italian and German POWs.

The camp's Nissen huts were well defended behind tall wire fences with gun batteries and a machine-gun post, and when the prisoners were out working on the local farms, they were watched over by a soldier with a gun. On one occasion, I noticed a Tommy reach into his pocket for a light. Fumbling a little, he passed his gun to a prisoner to hold for him while he lit his cigarette. He took a long, relaxed puff, then stuck out his arm, and his gun was gently handed back.

Every prisoner could work if he so wished. Most helped on local farms, hedging, ditching, and doing seasonal chores, and they became very much part of the landscape, as our farmworkers were away at war. That August, 1943, it was all hands to the pump as Grandmama and I worked with them to bring in the harvest. Even my mother came down to lend a hand for three days. As the workhorses drew the harvester across the hundred-acre field, trailing long uneven lines of hay in its wake, we walked behind gathering the hay into stooks and securing them with string. Grandmama was an old lady, yet she insisted on being involved, though she couldn't tie the string as her fingers were stiff and swollen with chilblains. I tied hers for her. The Italian men watched us and I wondered whether the presence of my grandmother made them think of their own families; whether my glamorous-looking mother in her corduroy slacks and scarf fixed decorously over her hair made them think of the women they had left behind. I hoped they didn't notice me—my prickled legs and bleeding forearms made me feel distinctly less than glamorous.

Putting my pony trap to good use and helping bring in the harvest gave me huge satisfaction, and I felt useful and productive from spending so much time outdoors. The war showed no sign of abating and tragedy struck when my god-father, the Duke of Kent, was killed in an air accident. He had been on his way-in thick fog-to Iceland on an RAF mission, when the Sunderland flying boat in which he was being flown crashed into a Scottish hillside in Caithness. I was very shocked by this news—he and his ADC, Michael Strutt, had stayed with us only two weeks earlier and now both men had been killed. This was what was meant by the fragility of life, I thought, and I prayed that such a fate would not befall my father.

When the British and American forces invaded French North Africa, I recorded optimistically in my diary, "The war news is wonderful about Libya and Egypt. Our Forces have driven the Germans back over the Egyptian border. We hope that the war over there is almost over." This hope was echoed by Winston Churchill in his dramatic speech the following day, words I turned over and over in my mind: "This is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning."

Allied success in Egypt did mean that a week later church bells rang all over the country for twenty minutes. Hearing them at school made me realize that I had never heard the sound of bells at our home Broadlands, as they'd been silenced at the beginning of the war under strict instruction that they should be rung only in the event of an invasion. That Sunday I felt optimistic, at least that the tide was turning. But waking the next morning to learn that "hit-and-run" raids had been carried out in twenty towns across southern England brought the harsh reality crashing back.

We had to get on as best we could. When, at Christmas, my mother was so preoccupied guarding a precious ham that General Marshall had given her she left all our presents on the train, I didn't complain. Actually, even if I had, no one would have listened: the loss of the presents paled into insignificance when my mother realized her nearly completed five-year diary was also still on the train. Both my parents were left worrying that we would come to see its contents in print and this sparked some lively conversations around the dinner table. My mother, always enterprising, paid a flying visit to London in a frantic search for replacement presents.

As a result of her tireless work my mother was made a CBE in the New Year Honours; Patricia was now a fully fledged Wren and my father was at the heart of Britain's war strategy. In fact, owing to overwork, he had recently succumbed to jaundice and pneumonia, worrying us all. He was well enough to discuss strategy with General Eisenhower but was unusually anxious that the visit should go smoothly. So it was with alarm that we watched as the great man's huge Cadillac veered off the drive and stopped dead in the ditch, trying to negotiate the awkward angle of the garden gates, which had now become our front entrance.

As well as being a hospital annex, Broadlands became a training encampment for the US troops of the Fourth Division. Even though this was the division's "laundry unit," many of these soldiers became frontline troops soon enough, going to their untimely deaths in France.

One time, over in Britain to entertain the American troops, Irving Berlin accompanied the soldiers to the house. Grandmama was delighted to meet him, as Grandpapa had been to a restaurant in New York when Irving Berlin was a singing waiter.

Life in the midst of all this activity could be vexing. Security at the American encampment soon became so tight that Grandmama and her lady-in-waiting Isa, could not come to stay with us until we had obtained a special permit allowing them to pass through.

This was also when poor Isa suffered a near disaster. Having been sent a packet of dehydrated bananas from America, she mistook them for crystallized fruit and, nibbling one, she found it so delicious she finished most of the packet. She then needed a long drink of water. The bananas swelled up inside her and her stomach nearly exploded.

For several months during the war, the whole area of Southampton was closed to anyone not living or working there. Broadlands was just within the fifteen-mile exclusion zone. The buildup of troops, vehicles, and temporary camps in the area was enormous, and as the weather improved in the late spring there was an air of expectation.

Suddenly, as quickly as they had arrived, the American soldiers left Broadlands.

D-Day had finally come.