Taff In The WAAF by Mick Manning and Brita Granström Frances Lincoln Children’s Books, £11.99 Muriel Manning’s wartime years in the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force (WAAF), working in conjunction with the top-secret code-breaking establishment of Bletchley Park, have now been turned into a graphic novel by her son and his wife.

In her own words: “I don’t know what made me join the WAAF. But I did. Soon a letter arrived from the Air Ministry ordering me to report to a WAAF training centre... I trained to be a wireless operator.

“A man from MI5 came to talk to us. We signed the Official Secrets Act before he told us about the Y Service. Listening in to enemy messages, he promised, would shorten the war – so I volunteered.”

She was called Taff because of her Welsh upbringing in Colwyn Bay. In the 1960s and 1970s, Mrs Manning, her husband and their family lived in Riddlesden and later Haworth.

Her son Mick and his wife Brita have put together this visually-striking and engaging chronicle. Aimed primarily at children, in comic-book style – a cross between Posy Simmonds and Raymond Briggs – it combines history, biography and social history.

In 1940, Muriel worked in a grocer’s store with her friend Beryl. Rationing was in force because, as she says, convoy ships carrying food supplies from the United States were torpedoed and sunk in great numbers by German U-boats during the first few years of the war.

Unless families had the wherewithal to trade on the flourishing black market, they had to queue with their ration books for limited supplies of butter, eggs, bacon and other things we now take for granted.

Muriel later got a job in the Ministry of Food, which was relocated to Colwyn Bay – away from blitz-hit London.

“Writing down the amounts of powered milk delivered by the Atlantic convoys was pretty boring. I was helping the war effort, but somehow felt I should do more,” she remarks.

Beryl had already joined the WAAF, so Taff followed suit and was soon adopting a whole new set of words – “blackouts” were winter knickers; “twilights” were summer knickers; a “queen bee” was a WAAF officer; and “sparks” were wireless operators.

She says: “We worked in shifts, day and night, to search the airwaves for Nazi ‘traffic’. Suddenly, out of the crackly background noise, enemy Morse code would hit my eardrums at 90 letters a minute. Getting the whole message down without any mistakes was my way of fighting back.

“Our ‘intercepts’ – the blocks of code we wrote down – made no sense to us, but we guessed that someone somewhere must be decoding them. We didn’t know back then, but the intercepts were rushed to a place called Bletchley Park.”

Brilliant mathematicians at Bletchley such as Alan Turing devised massive computers to break the German Enigma code with their efforts greatly aided by secret Polish research.

Doodlebugs and jitterbugging, two aspects of wartime life in England, both get double-page illustrations. The first was the name given to the Nazi VI rocket launched shortly after D-Day. The jitterbug was, of course, an up-tempo form of dance bought to Europe by American GIs.

Other books in similar style by Mick and Brita have won prestigious awards. Taff in the WAAF might outdo them all.