As the nation prepares to mark the 80th anniversary of VE Day this week, Parklands Care Homes has released a podcast capturing the stories of women who lived and served during the Second World War.  

Peace at Last: Memories of VE Day is a two-part podcast featuring residents from care homes in Moray and the Highlands, sharing their first-hand experiences of wartime.

Now in their late 90s and early 100s, these remarkable women recount personal stories of service, sacrifice, and loss — from childhood evacuation, to top-secret codebreaking and surviving Soviet imprisonment. 

The podcast also captures the sense of optimism that swept the country after years of devastating conflict. 

It features Dr Jean Munro, now 101 and a resident at Lynemore in Grantown, who was a member of Hut 6 at Bletchley Park, the team responsible for deciphering German Army and Air Force Enigma messages.

She was not able to reveal her work to family and friends until the 1980s.

And historians believe that breaking the Enigma code may have shortened the war by 2-4 years, potentially saving hundreds of thousands of lives.

“I never thought of it that way, but if I think about it now, I think I’m really glad,’ she says.

Fellow Lynemore resident, Edith McCreadie, grew up in Battersea, London, and was just 15 when the war broke out.

At the time, she was working at Harrods as a trainee seamstress, but at just 17 she joined the RAF.

“I had to ask my parents first because, otherwise, you couldn’t go,” she recalls.

“My mum wasn’t very pleased.”

Edith was later posted to North Africa where she met her future husband.

And Margaret Radin, a resident at Urray House in Muir of Ord, was just nine years old when war broke out.

With fears that Edinburgh, where she lived, would be a target for Nazi bombing, Margaret and her siblings were briefly evacuated to Inverness, a journey that felt more like a holiday than a hardship.

She remembers idyllic days picking fruit and playing at the Ness Islands in Inverness, and the celebration in Edinburgh when peace finally came. 

But there were darker memories too: the fear of gas attacks and the heartache of being separated from her mum and dad.

Donald Morrison, director of communications at Parklands Care Homes, said: “It was incredibly humbling to meet people – some now in their 100s – who lived through the war and supported the war effort, whether as civilians or, in some cases, aiding our armed forces.

“There are some remarkable and poignant stories of service, sacrifice, and loss and I feel so privileged that we were able to capture them.

“We all owe that generation a huge debt of gratitude.”