大象传媒

Anne Wingate was born in 1924. She lived in India as a child before moving to Sussex. She left school and became joined the Red Cross as a Voluntary Aid Detachment Nurse. She recalls some of her experiences nursing soldiers during the war:

鈥淚 remember cleaning 鈥� it never stopped and we did all the other work, such as taking temperatures, bedpans and turning the patients over so that they wouldn鈥檛 get bedsores. I remember the patients, particularly the ones who were so young and had been through such a lot. For instance the eighteen year old who was the only one left of his troop and who was terrified of the sound of planes. He ducked under his bed when he heard the first plane in hospital. Afterwards we told him that they were our planes and that he was safe. And there was the other one 鈥� a married soldier - who just sat and never said a word. I managed to get him through to him by talking of Wales because he was Welsh and I knew Wales (I had been evacuated there) and so he was able to talk to his wife when she came to see him.
All the men were such fun when you think about what they had been through. They never talked about it but they were good fun. I remember D-Day 鈥� we had patients after one week and I remember Arnhem 鈥� when we didn鈥檛 have any. We wondered where the hell they were - we were waiting for three weeks because they had been killed or wounded too badly for us to have them.鈥�

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