Peter Brown talks to columnist Pat Dancer about her life so far.

To her husband, she was the village’s Miss Marple “riding round on her bike getting information from all over the place for her column”. To her customers, in earlier days, she was the welcome provider of regular hot lunches and delicious homemade cakes. But to her many, many friends in Penn and Tylers Green, she is simply our Pat, the lady with a winning smile, a sympathetic ear and ever-open arms of welcome.

Readers of Pat Dancer’s column in Village Voice and, for 20 years before that, her village column in the Buckinghamshire Advertiser, will know how much she loves this community.

 She was born in Bushey in 1925, but when Pat was seven, she and her parents settled in Gerrards Cross, where a happy, almost idyllic, childhood followed. War had broken out by the time she left school, so thoughts of university were out of the question – as a slightly headstrong, but deeply patriotic teenager she wanted to do her bit.

 Pat yearned to join the Women’s Royal Naval Service (WRNS) and fight from the deck of some battleship, but she was too young. Instead, in 1941, aged 16, she commuted daily to Regent Street Polytechnic for a commercial and secretarial course.

 Just before her 18^th birthday, her call up to the WRNS came, but her hopes of joining the front line were soon dashed: “They told me I could become a cook, a steward or a clerk,” she says today, still wistfully.

 Then, “without ceremony”, she found herself based in Stanmore being trained for what was described as work on “machines”. In fact, the machines were decoders, known as “bombes”, part of the top-secret Enigma decoding device.

It was intensive work, carried out in eighthour shifts over a 24-hour period, which not only needed alertness of mind to pick out tell-tale codes, but a physical strength to change heavy metal drums in the machines. On top of that, Pat was unable to tell anyone what she did because she was bound by the Official Secrets Act. “We were told that if we ever discussed our work with others we would be summarily executed,” she recalls.

Her decoding exploits stopped on the same day as the war in Europe, and within hours she was on the move again – this time to Chatham, where she spent months as part of the “demob” service, dealing with thousands of naval ratings leaving the services.

After her own demobilisation, she thought a career in newspapers beckoned when she had an interview with a news executive in Fleet St. But over lunch it soon became apparent he wanted to offer her more than a career. He made an unsubtle approach in a taxi and she leapt out of the cab when it stopped at some lights. After that, she didn’t return to newspapers for 40 years.

Life soon took an upturn again. During a year working in Paris, her boyfriend Peter proposed to Pat on top of the Eiffel Tower and in 1950 she married. Shortly afterwards her husband persuaded her to buy a sweet shop in Beaconsfield – called Poppies – which, at a time when food rationing was being lifted, was a big success.

That led, in 1954, to acquiring a second business – a tea shop called Fiveways, on the site of the current Costa in Beaconsfield new town, which was run by “three elderly Scottish ladies who only did cheese on toast”. It was a time when all shops shut between 1pm and 2pm for lunch, so Pat and her husband decided to sell hot lunches, even though both of them were complete novices in a commercial kitchen. “We managed to get a cook, but she walked out on the day she started because she said it was too hot in the kitchen,” recalls Pat with a laugh. But after lots of hard work it proved a success.

It wasn’t long before life took another dramatic turn. Pat's marriage broke up after seven years, which left her broken hearted, and she learned that her mother was an alcoholic. “We didn’t know what alcoholism was in those days; we just couldn’t understand why she couldn’t control her drinking,” says Pat.

Yet out of this trauma came another new direction for Pat, who was still in her thirties. Her mother became sober with the help of Alcoholics Anonymous, and it was at AA meetings of recovered alcoholics that Pat met Dave, a young New Zealander and recovering alcoholic who worked as a counsellor.

Their friendship grew and they married in 1960, two years after she arrived in the village to live in the 17th century cottage near the Red Lion where she still lives today. Jonathan, their only son, was born a year later.

Pat gave up her Beaconsfield shops and settled into village life, helping Dave with his “calling” to help alcoholics and becoming a secretary at Agropharm, the export company then based in the village. Without the grind of seven-day week working in her shops she was able to find time to make new friends and pursue her latent love of writing by composing fiction, poetry and prose and launching a student magazine Rhyme and Reason.

But when Dave suffered a brain haemorrhage in 1975 she began a long and tender period helping him recover and adjust. Ten years later, at the age of 60, Pat was able to begin her journalistic career – as a local correspondent for the Buckinghamshire Advertiser – gathering news from every section of the community and making many friends in the process. It was a job she carried on after becoming a widow in 1998, and when the paper dropped its village correspondents, she continued to write for VV, the parish magazine, Rhyme and Reason, and other publications.

She still helps families of alcoholics and assists people in many ways she would not want published by simply listening, caring and offering expertise. Pat likes people, and people like her. It is people like Pat that make communities like ours richer.

This article was written by Peter Brown and first appeared in the April/May 2011 edition of Village Voice (issue 143). To see it in its original format please select the relevant edition from the Village Voice pages of this website.