[5][6] When he served with the Royal Scots Fusiliers in India, she spent several summers in the Himalayan city of Srinigar, which she much preferred to her boarding school life in England.

[7]: 100 In 1934, she participated in a grand pageant at Runnymede which was organised by Gwen Lally to celebrate English democracy, Magna Carta and to raise money for charity.

[10] She discovered aviation at Brooklands in 1938 and then learnt to fly with the Civil Air Guard, going solo at Cambridge airfield on 13 February 1939.

[11][10] Veronica was driving ambulances for the Voluntary Aid Detachment while living in London with her father who was then working for MI5.

After a month of training, she passed a flying test at the ATA HQ of White Waltham and was commissioned as a second officer.

Finally, she completed the conversion course by flying the Hawker Hurricane – "it's like an Audax with about five hundred times more guts", she told a fellow trainee.

The evasive manoeuvre put the Hurricane into a dive and it was so difficult to pull out in time that the aircraft brought down the airfield's telegraph wires.

[8] In April 1942, she converted to fly light twin-engined planes, starting with the comparatively sedate Airspeed Oxford.

She was still ferrying new aircraft and was the first woman to fly an operational jet fighter – a Gloster Meteor which she took to RAF Moreton Valence.

[8] The jets were simpler to operate than a variable-pitch propeller but intense when at the full throttle of 16,500 rpm – "an almighty kick in the pants".