From the archive, the 1948 Olympic Games:

Women's 100m final I Men's 800m final I The opening ceremony I Review of the Games

Sitting in the living room of her home in Woodford, Essex, Dorothy Parlett clearly remembers how afraid she felt while waiting to be called for the final of the 100m at the 1948 Olympics Games in London. "The noise of the crowd was overwhelming," she says. "I was terrified. If I could have run away I would have done."

Then a shy 21-year-old who had never before competed in an international athletics meeting, Parlett had impressed by unexpectedly winning her heat and semi-final with little difficulty, inspiring in the Wembley Stadium crowd the belief that she might give them their first British athletics champion of the Games.

Known then by her maiden name, Manley, Parlett however was finding it difficult to shoulder that expectation, partly because victory required her to beat Fanny Blankers-Koen, the brilliant Dutch athlete who had dominated women's sprinting and was the favourite to win the event, and also because of the conditions on that August Bank Holiday.

In a break to a long, hot summer, a headwind had picked up beneath the Twin Towers that would suit the powerful Blankers-Koen more than it would Parlett, a slim girl weighing little more than 8st. That the Dutchwoman had an ideal draw in a middle lane while Parlett was on the outside lane also counted against the Briton.

"There was talk about my chances of winning but I was happy just to have got to the final," Parlett says, recalling her achievement in the company of her second husband, John, also a former athlete who finished eighth in the final of the 800m at the Games. Friends in 1948, the pair married some three decades later long after their first marriages had ended.

There was no sign of complacency in her performance, though. After an excellent start, she briefly led the field and hung on to claim silver behind Blankers-Koen, much to the delight of the British support. They would have been even more impressed had they known what Parlett had overcome in her personal life simply to make it to the Olympics.

Parlett's fiance, Peter, had suffered a nervous breakdown in the spring of 1948 and was committed to hospital, where he would remain until after the Games. Modest and quietly spoken, Parlett is stoically reluctant to complain about her plight but does not contradict John when he says: "Dorothy had a hard old time of it."

One can only guess at the emotional toll Jim's illness had on her, but it is clear that only a young girl of great fortitude could have combined a job as a typist in the City - she commuted by bus from her parents' home in Woodford - with twice-weekly training for the Games at Victoria Park, in Hackney, and visits to her fiancee on the other side of London.

Initially selected to represent Britain in the high jump, she switched to the track event on the advice of her coach after she impressed him during a training warm-up. "I didn't mind because I loved to run," Parlett says. "Although everybody likes to win, athletics was something I did for fun. It provided a break from everyday life."

With the economy in a slow recovery after the Second World War, neither the State nor British athletics' governing body could afford to give their Olympians much financial assistance. Instead, as Parlett recalls, they received small privileges such as an extra weekly ration of meat and, shortly before the Games, an additional daily pint of milk.

Parlett had to ask her mother to make most of her tournament kit, including a pair of shorts that, for modesty's sake, the rules said could finish no more than four inches above the knee. Similarly, in the fortnight preceding the event, she and the rest of the British female competitors were asked to stay in sparsely furnished digs in Victoria. We didn't complain, nobody did then," Parlett says. "This was after the war and you were used to things being difficult."

Aside from winning silver, Parlett remembers the Games most fondly for the camaraderie enjoyed among the competitors from different nations and for the sober opening ceremony, in which each squad dressed smartly and marched in file. "The opening ceremony today is over the top," she says. "Ours had a dignity about it."

There was also a dignity about Parlett's outlook in 1948. Not one to allow success go to her head, she left the Games with the same overriding ambition that she had before it, regardless that she was now a local celebrity. "I wanted to get on with raising a family," she says. That was possible because Peter soon recovered and returned home. "I didn't expect winning an Olympic medal to change my life."