Chorley-born Women's Royal Army Corps member on The Troubles: 'It was terrifying, but being in the Army was the best time of my life'

But she can remember the sense of shock and surprise she felt when, flicking through the search results, she stumbled across a picture. A picture of her.

“There I was,” she says, having found the image on the Imperial War Museum website. “Your mind starts playing tricks on you and you start looking closer and thinking ‘is that definitely me?’ But I recognised my hat. During a house search, a young lad had knocked my hat off and jumped on it so it was squashed like a pancake and it never really recovered. There it was: my creased hat.”

Born in Chorley, Shirley paints a grim picture of her childhood. “My relationship with my family was awful,” she says. “I was brought up in between a pub and a council estate, so all I could hear was drunk men, all I could see was women with the black eyes, and all I could smell through the window was beer and pee.

“I didn’t want that life,” adds Shirley, now 62. “As a child, I felt completely worthless and so I was on a mission to escape. At that time, if you weren’t married by 20 there was something wrong with you and you’d been left on the shelf, so all my friends were getting married and having kids. But that life wasn’t for me at that stage.”

Shirley’s initial choice of escape route was to join the Navy as a chef, but the concept of a woman on a boat in the 1970s was far too much to bear and so she was forced to wait for a job on land. She got tired of waiting, and applied to the Army Corps and was accepted, starting basic training in the sweltering summer of 1976.

“As the train pulled away from Preston, all I felt was relief to be away at last,” says Shirley. “The Army was full of lost souls looking for a home and family, and I loved it. We were all like-minded girls and I’ve never laughed so much.”

After basic training, Shirley went to the Army catering college in Aldershot to train to become a chef, marveling at the standard of the cooking on show and feeling a world away from Chorley. Making new friends and finding herself, she felt her centre of gravity shift.

“I’m 5’2” with a kind face more in fitting with a librarian, not a female squaddie, but your attitude changes when you’re in the Army,” explains Shirley. “I was once at a taxi office on my own and a man came up to me and said ‘you’re coming with me’. I said ‘no, I’m not; how are you going to make me do that?’ and he said ‘by force if I have to’.

“So, I said to him ‘what job do you think I do?’ He asked what that had to do with anything,” she says. “I took out my Army ID card and showed him. His face dropped. I leaned in and said ‘now **** off before I hurt you’.”

Always intending to serve the minimum period of three years with the Army, after 18 months Shirley handed in her advance notice expressing her intentions to leave after another 18 months had passed. “I always wanted to leave on a high having enjoyed it so much,” says Shirley. “So I put my notice in, but the guilt came creeping in.

“The Army had given me life tools and taught me loyalty, respect, discipline, survival,” she adds. “I wanted to give something back.”

That something ended up being eight months serving as a searcher in Belfast