This website brings the diary of Patricia Turner, nee Gardner, to a wider audience than her immediate family.

She joined the WRNS in 1941, and after serving at Portland Naval Base as a driver of lorries transporting, among other things, gas cannisters and torpedoes, she was posted to Egypt.

The diary starts with embarkation at Liverpool for the long journey around the Cape, up the Red Sea, to Egypt, and finishes towards the end of 1943, when she was posted to Ceylon for the last years of the war.

The diary notebooks, together with a large scrapbook of photographs, newspaper cuttings, and other souvenirs, combine with letters written home to give a vivid picture of life in Alexandria, Port Said and Cairo at a very exciting time for a young woman. Many of the people she met and worked with became friends for life.