Wren Kathleen Oates was stationed on the Isle of Man from 1944 to 1946, writing letters home about life and operations at Ronaldsway. Her daughter, CHRISTINE SMITH, has written a series of columns based on these for Media Isle of Man, and this final article covers her first visit to the island, together with daughter Juliette, visiting the places Kathleen wrote about.

The Second World War wasn’t Kathleen’s only link with the Isle of Man.

She would find another at The Queen’s College Oxford, whenever she bumped into Carol Dorsman, who studied there, several decades after Kathleen was demobbed.

Kathleen would’ve been visiting her daughter, Christine – me.

Both Carol (Carol was known as Kate Dorsman at Oxford; there, she chose to go by the name her father used) and I belonged to a small group of female undergraduates, who were the first women students at the Queen’s College since it was founded in 1341. We all got to know one another, being 13 women in a college of around 300 men.

Both Carol and I were studying modern languages and for three years, would sit in some translation classes and literature lectures together, and see each other at College meals daily. She was my first contact with the Isle of Man and was a gentle, modest presence at Queen’s, despite being an academic powerhouse.

She loved her island and would describe Manx quirks, language and traditions.

I understand that not only did Carol narrowly miss a first-class degree, but that she received the best 2:1 in modern languages in our year across Oxford.

Not bad for someone whose school head, she told us, had advised her not to apply, as Oxbridge wasn’t ‘for people like you’.

She later added a high standard of Russian to her French and German, as well as becoming an accomplished Cordon Bleu cook.

So, on the occasions when they met, Kathleen would flash a huge happy smile and tell Carol again how much she had loved her time in the island during the Second World War.

Despite hearing Manx tales from Carol at Oxford, I had never been to the Isle of Man: after months of writing about Kathleen in Castletown and Ronaldsway on a weekly basis, this clearly had to change.

So it was 46 years after first knowing Carol, and 80 years after Kathleen had first arrived in the island, that my daughter Juliette and I landed at Ronaldsway in May last year.

And as we drove around the places Kathleen had loved and written about, I would also tell Juliette about Carol: thanks to her, we knew to greet the fairies as we drove over their bridge.

We knew we were somewhere very different, hours after arriving, when our Douglas hotel receptionist informed us that my passport would be dropped off by an Athol representative on her way home – this, before I had even realised that I had left it when signing for our hire car at the airport. And that set the tone for our Manx welcome wherever we went.

Our first stop just had to be at the Manx Aviation Museum, where we met director Ivor Ramsden, whose positive comment had originally prompted the 60 articles written about Wren Kathleen Oates’ wartime posting to the island.

He responded to the overview of her letters which I had sent, saying that they were the best combination of the social and operational aspects of the Ronaldsway base which he had seen. This feedback gave me the confidence that there might be a wider interest in Kathleen’s words.

We felt privileged to be shown around the WW2 exhibits, with Ivor telling us about the veterans he had met and the memorial ceremonies he had attended.

We especially loved his story about a photograph which mysteriously and repeatedly fell from a secure placing until Ivor undertook more research into the identity of the soldier and corrected the information. Since then, it has not moved.

We also felt we had friends at King William’s College, where Kathleen had so enjoyed the services in the chapel, when we received the warm Manx welcome.

Its pews where worshippers faced one another, made me feel quite at home, as the configuration resembled that of an Oxford college chapel.

I suspect that we may have seen even more of the school than Kathleen did, as we were kindly taken inside. A stained-glass window with the coats of arms of eight universities impressed me – they represented the full total in Britain at the time.

We did enjoy some Manx delights which didn’t feature in Kathleen’s letters: we ate the delicious Queenies whenever we could and we loved our measured progress down Douglas’ promenade on the horse-powered tram.

We also spent time in A&E after Juliette slipped a disc, and found the experience positively civilised, even luxurious, compared to the London equivalent!

Visiting the workplace of Media Isle of Man and meeting the journalists and editor was another highlight, after months of correspondence.

Otherwise, we saw ghosts everywhere we went.

We walked by Port Erin’s beach and thought of Kathleen and pilot Paul sitting there discussing their future prospects after the War; we had coffee at the old station in Douglas which Kathleen would have passed through; we enjoyed Bobotie at the George Hotel in Castletown where Paul had stayed; we raised our gin and tonics to Kathleen in memory of her outing at the Sefton Hotel; we lunched at the Shore Hotel and remembered the pilot who cycled off to get cider for a supper there from a licensed pub – and I choked up when I stood at Ronaldsway and saw the same hills Kathleen had so often checked for visibility, in order to predict whether there would be flying that day.

But the next article I wrote, once back, was of Kathleen’s expedition to the Laxey Wheel, where we hadn’t been - it was just the excuse I had been seeking for a return visit!

Juliette was just as enchanted by the beauty and tranquillity of the island as I was. Thus, à très bientôt, to our new Manx friends and ‘beloved island’ of Kathleen.