IT was the sheer effrontery of it that got to Vee Collette most of all. “They shot at us,” she said, “while we were playing tennis.

It made me so angry, interrupting our match like that.”

Having spent an hour in her company and listened to tales of adventure and self-reliance in some of the world’s most hostile neighbourhoods, the terrorists who took a pop at her in Malaya in the 1950s should have been grateful Vee didn’t chase after them with her tightly strung Slazenger and deliver a whack where it hurts most.

As it was, she retired to the pavilion with her tennis partner and re-emerged to complete the game after the gunfire had died down. What the cause was, she had no idea, although at that place and time, tennis probably epitomised Empire and all that went with it.

Indeed, the British Empire was built by characters with the spirit of Vee Collette. Born a Cockney within the sound of Bow Bells, she has worked and travelled half-way round the world and now lives just across the city from our offices in the London Road area of Worcester.

Vee arrived at our front counter with a book she has written called Grandma’s Gap Year. It tells of her escapades backpacking around Australia and New Zealand – at the age of 65.

“There aren’t many people who do it at that time of their lives,” she said. “Most of the backpackers I met were much younger. But we got on fine. I think I was something of a curiosity to them.”

Had they known where this mother of three has been and what she’s done, they wouldn’t have been surprised at all.

For here is someone who has mixed it with trigger-happy Malayan terrorists and unpredictable Yemeni tribesmen, worked for Save the Children in Hong Kong and beaten female oppression in Saudi Arabia.

The opening page of her book relates a prickly encounter with a tour operator in Australia, who refuses to include Vee in his party because he considers her too old.

“You know nothing about me,”

she protests. “Four months ago, I was hiking through the jungle of Central Borneo with a medical team.” But the man refuses to relent. “I was so angry I wanted to slap his arrogant face,” she said.

“All those comments I had heard over the years about the Australian Male were obviously true.”

Eventually she goes on her own – and what follows is what the book is all about. But before that, Vee Collette appears to have lived enough lives for half a dozen people.

Straight from school she joined Queen Alexandra’s Royal Army Nursing Corps and spent two years in Malaya in the mid-1950s at the height of the Malayan Emergency, when communist forces fought a guerrilla war against Commonwealth troops.

She was based at a hospital at Kinrara, just outside Kuala Lumpur where, as Vee explained in her sang froid style: “The opposition would lob a few shells over the fence every now and again.” Although to come under mortar attack in a hospital must have been a pretty terrifying experience.

“Most of the time I was working with the King’s African Rifles and the Gurkahs,” she said. “They were wonderful people.” When an epidemic broke out among villagers in the Cameron Highlands, staff from the hospital were dispatched to help treat it and Vee was sent up there travelling with an armed guard.

An old hotel in the area served as their emergency base and it was here, on its tennis court, that her match with a colleague was rudely halted.

“I was so mad,” she recalled. “I thought, ‘How dare you’.”

Fortunately for them, the terrorists escaped before she could seek retribution.

After Malaya, Vee returned to England and worked as a district nurse in Cornwall for 15 years. A bit like a character in a period TV series, Sister Collette toured her patch in an assortment of cars which had seen better days.

But after her children had left for college, Vee’s wanderlust kicked in and she was off to Saudi Arabia, where she spent six years, which included working on the personal staff of King Khaled and for the old Sheik of Dubai.

In this notoriously maleorientated society, where women could not drive cars or go out unless they were accompanied by a male member of their own family, how did she cope?

“By treating it all as a joke,” she said. “There was an underground system you could use to beat the social system and you just kept your fingers crossed and hoped you didn’t get caught. It was all great fun.”

Vee then nursed in the Phillipines and afterwards pitched up in North Yemen, where warring tribes were knocking lumps out of each other.

“I was there with an agency and there was not much military protection,” she said. “After you passed the last checkpoint you were on your own.

“It was a scary feeling, but you got on with it.”

Later she worked in “the old Hong Kong” with Save the Children and on other assorted short-term medical contracts.

All of which meant that if any sexagenarian was going to backpack around Australia on their own, Vee Collette was better placed than most.

“I just turn up somewhere and manage,” she said. It’s what she’s been doing all her life.