A BLIND veteran from Marcham will attend a special thanksgiving service at Westminster Abbey tomorrow for a charity that “changed her life”.

Rosemary Stone, 87, will join the service marking the 100th anniversary of Blind Veterans UK.

Mrs Stone, a widowed mother of three sons, served with Queen Alexandra’s Royal Army Nursing Corps from 1952 to 1957.

She served in the UK, Japan, Korea and Singapore until 1956, and was then recalled for the Suez crisis to serve as a reserve before being discharged as a captain.

After the death of her husband Anthony, Mrs Stone began to lose her sight in the late 1990s due to a combination of age-related macular degeneration and glaucoma.

She said: “My sight has deteriorated quite slowly over the years but it’s now very bad indeed.”

Mrs Stone featured in the Oxford Mail last year when she took part in a national study by King’s College London which found that hallucinations associated with sight-loss were not as uncommon as previously thought.

She revealed then that she had been seeing things that weren’t there for years.

During her service, Mrs Stone worked in UN military hospitals in a peaceful period following the Second World War.

She recalled: “War was over by the time I got there but wounded soldiers were still coming back with the normal injuries, infections and illnesses.”

But it was only last year that Mrs Stone was introduced to Blind Veterans UK by a friend at Marcham WI whose husband had been helped by the charity.

She said: “I’d always heard of Blind Veterans UK, or St Dunstan’s as they used to be called, but didn’t think I would qualify for support.

“My friend told me I should get in touch and I’m so pleased she did. They have really changed my life.”

The charity helped her get access to specialist equipment which she now uses every day including a handheld recorder for shopping lists and a “talking” mobile phone.

She said: “ I’ve also been for training at the charity’s Brighton Centre where I was taught how to use the long white cane and now I use it every time I go out.

“The whole experience has given me a new lease of life.”

Mrs Stone said she was looking forward to meeting some of the 1,800 other veterans supported by the charity at tomorrow’s service.

The ceremony will be conducted by the Dean of Westminster, the Very Reverend Dr John Hall, with songs by the Choir of Westminster Abbey.

Blind Veterans UK (formerly St Dunstan’s) was founded in 1915 to support soldiers blinded in the First World War.

Find out more at blindveterans.org.uk.