Before the war Moyra Smiley worked aged fifteen as an au pair in France, Italy and Germany to learn the languages. From 1936 aged seventeen she went to a FANY (First Aid Nursing Yeomanry) camp once a year in Kenya where she grew up and learnt to drive, mend cars and shoot rifles.

When the war began, she was stationed as a FANY in Kent and Dover driving ambulances with wounded soldiers who had been brought over by ship. In Spring 1940 Moyra journeyed from Marseille via the Suez Canal to the East Africa FANYs and became a Lance Corporal. She recalls being appointed as the first NCO (Non-Commissioned Officer) woman cypher worker and after two years being a Sergeant FANY in charge of a well-established signals and cypher department in East Africa, receiving and relaying messages to local and British intelligence.

Moyra looks back fondly at the camaraderie between the FANYs in Kenya, when she lived in a convent outside Nairobi and how everyone pulled together. Moyra continued to use her cypher knowledge to work for M16 long after the war had ended.