Kay volunteered for the Auxiliary Territorial Service as a teenager in 1940. Toward the end of her training three ATS women were killed in Chatham and she volunteered as one of the replacements. This assignment was in the Y service, which was a worldwide network of intelligence gathering. Her work involved receiving messages from around the world, transcribing them so that they could be evaluated and passed on to various units. Some went to the Ultra decoding group at Bletchley Park. After several different locations her unit was sent to disguised purpose-built offices near Loughborough. Here she spent the next five years until the end of the war, which they knew was imminent when they received an uncoded message from Germany ‘Der Fuhrer ist kaput’! When the war ended she held the rank of sergeant. She was sworn to secrecy and did not talk about her work for thirty years, which irritated her mother. During her time in the Y service, she worked with Special Operations Executive and intelligence officers, including Kim Philby. She thinks that her work during the was worthwhile and has been told that it may have shortened the war by up to two years. In 1945 she married a man she met working at the same establishment, and they were both demobbed that year. She became a borough councillor and was thinking of standing as an MP but instead went with her husband to Ceylon (Sri Lanka) where they lived and worked for fifteen years.

In his interview he talks about his early life in Liverpool including recollections of the blitz and his first job as a rat-catcher. On the way to Korea, Alan and a friend set-up a make-shift photographic studio taking pics of some of the families that were also en-route to the Far East. He arrives in Pusan and then travels towards the front line where the desolation and cold are striking memories. Alan’s unit, a tight-knit group of 30 specialists, was tasked with teaching soldiers on disease prevention and health and hygiene. He talks in detail about his work including the various medications and processes for keeping the troops fighting fit. He reflects that despite the brutality of the war, there were surprisingly few cases of mental trauma. Alan was in Korea during the ceasefire. When he returned to England he married and became an army reservist. One morning he receives a telegram and by the afternoon he was back in barracks.  Then he's posted to the Suez and the start of a difficult posting. In later life, Alan became President of the British Korean Veterans Association and was instrumental in the building of the Korean War memorial on London's SouthBank.