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This is Margaret Young’s story: it has been added by, Carole Randell and Pauline Colcutt with permission from the author who understands the terms and conditions of adding her story to the website.

When I started nursing at the age of sixteen I was paid £22.10s 0d per year for a 72 hour week and then at seventeen years of age I was paid £25 per year and £27 10s at the age of eighteen. The hours of work were reduced to 54 hours per week and then to 48 hours per week with no overtime payment. If you married during your training period you were required to relinquish your training

I was nursing in the Queen Mary’s hospital for children at Carshalton Beeches. The wards were all single story buildings and I remember one morning when staff were going on duty they were machine gunned by a German. Fortunately his plane was brought down. His intelligence brief showed the hospital as being a factory and he was horrified when he discovered that it was a children’s hospital.

The hospital was accessed via a drive which was a quarter of a mile long and it was not unusual during an air raid to have incendiary bombs, shrapnel and high explosives dropping whilst one was running in fright along the drive.

One night we had a high explosive bomb, which blew the night sister off the lavatory, there was also a student nurse on that ward and both were injured. Many times we had incendiaries but because we had had fire practices we knew how to cope with them. On another occasion, on one of my days off, I had returned home and can remember standing in my mother’s garden watching a squadron of German bombers flying over towards us. Suddenly two Spitfires shot up from Croydon airport and the whole German Squadron turned round and left without dropping their bombs on us.

In one of the wards on which I worked on night duty the boys slept on mattresses on the floor under their beds and some of the wretches would look up my skirts and let the rest of the ward know what colour knickers I was wearing!

Ward staff consisted of one student nurse and a night sister for each row of wards. These varied between eight and ten wards per row. We took our evening meals in a three-tiered aluminium container, and cooked and ate its contents during the middle of the night.

I then did my general training at University College Hospital (UCH). Again there were no shelters but the nursing staff were able to take a mattress on the floor into the corridor and sleep there at night. One busy lunchtime a rocket dropped in Tottenham Court Road. UCH received well over two hundred casualties and the operating theatres were working continuously for four days trying to cope with them. I was given a reporter to look after who had been blinded. Luckily we were able to find a bed for him at Moorfields eye hospital. I remember walking down the underground slope that led to the private patients wing where there was a double row of bunks with casualties. I still have a vivid memory of the sounds which one woman made when trying to breathe. I was then evacuated to Stanboroughs, a Seventh Day Adventist nursing home where they treated us very well, but they drunk neither tea nor coffee although they did allow us to do so. I was then evacuated to Ashridge, an old house in Hertfordshire. There were many wards and I worked on a men’s orthopaedic ward. I remember one poor student nurse who on her day off got onto the wrong train at Euston which took her to Crewe and when she returned to duty all the patients sang ‘Oh Mr Porter what shall I do I wanted to go to Birmingham and got carried on to Crewe - take me back to London as quickly as you can - Oh Mr Porter what a silly girl I am !

The social life at Ashridge was very we had many dances and concerts. It also had a most wonderful Rhododendron walk at the bottom of which was a circle, called the Monks’ circle and this was where ghostly monks were supposed to arrive at midnight. I stayed until 11:59 pm and then ran. I returned to UCH and worked on night duty in casualty. Whilst there I met four superb medical students. I invited all four of them to the Matron’s ball and shared them with one of my friends. Not that I was being greedy but I hadn’t known which one to invite and on the advice of Rev Scott from the Scottish church in London who kindly wrote out the characteristics of each of the individuals in an invitation which I used . These four, later on, volunteered to go to Belsen Concentration Camp when it was released by the Germans. They returned with horrifying account of the conditions of the inmates.

During this time camaraderie at UCH between the Medical Students and the nursing staff was strong and because Matron would not allow us to wear nylon stockings the medical students barricaded her in the house until she relented. Three cheers for the medical students!!

My war ended amongst the crowd outside Buckingham Palace celebrating the fall of the Japanese and release of war prisoners.

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