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Our food was really very good in the North Staffs, I don’t know how the cooks managed it. The milk supplied for the nurses came up in very large metal containers- you know the churns — and it was put out in glasses on a long table, and as one went in one took a glass of milk. That incidentally taught me a very useful lesson in cross infection because the night staff had their milk put out by a lady who was working in the kitchen, and one day the hospital had to be closed because we had a terrible outbreak of dysentery, and they traced it back to this lady who worked in the kitchen who was a carrier of dysentery so her hygiene wasn’t very good — she managed to infect the hospital, infect many of the nurses, and everyone was very ill.

The patients escaped this dysentery because their milk came up in bottles in crates, so we didn’t have any patients with it, but the nurses were very ill.

On a Thursday, we had to go down to the kitchen to collect our butter and sugar rations. I think we had two ounces of sugar and two ounces of butter, and we had to go and take our jam jars down, and the home sister was down there and she’d put our ration out. I used to save my sugar for my Mum and take it home, and she collected it in a big tin, and made cakes with it.

The butter soon ran out - always before the next Thursday, and you’d see us going down the corridor with our jam jars in to the dining room. We were very naughty; we used to take the top the milk and put it in a jam jar, and shake and shake and shake and shake and get some butter that way, and take that down for our tea.

This story was submitted to the People’s War site by Becky Barugh of the ´óÏó´«Ã½ Radio Shropshire CSV Action Desk on behalf of Patricia Davies and has been added to the site with her permission. The author fully understands the site's terms and conditions.

See more of Pat's stories:

• 1) I suppose it was inevitable…
• 2) Getting used to being on the wards
• 3) The unchanging rota
• 4) Othopaedic Wards
• 5) The Miners
• 6) Keeping coffee warm in the sterilizer
• 7) Mouth gags and tongue clips
• 8) Dear Flower Girl
• 9) Theatres
• 10) The Nurse’s Home
• 11) The ‘Guinea Pig Club’
• 12) Mice in the washing and other tricks
• 13) Enamel washbowls on your heads
• 14) Extra Work
• 16) Little Nurse
• 17) A lot of things were introduced during the War
• 18) Only two nights off
• 19) Making and Breaking
• 20) My little bucket and I
• My visit to post-War Germany

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