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This story is taken from an interview with Rose Anderson, and has been added to the site with her permission. The author fully understands the site's terms and conditions. The interviewer was David Reid, and the transcription was by Bruce Logan.
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I think the biggest thing, what I really hated about it was when we were in the 25th [Battalion, RAMC] over there an awful lot of young men lost their lives, and lost their legs and arms. That is the sad thing. People I got very attached to, you know? On the wards, they were very badly wounded. Both in Stranmillis hospital and in Bangor. That was a school there, the central school. It was made into a military hospital. It’s an awful pity they didn’t keep it that way. It was a nice hospital.

I was 20.
There was both men and women, and then we had the German soldiers. They were Prisoners of War there. They were in the, just as you go into the school there, I don’t know if it’s changed or not, on the left-hand side they had a whole ward where the Prisoners were kept. They weren’t kept with the other people, they were in the ward with themselves. They all had photos with them. I think they were very family-minded, the Germans, in their own way. I know they done a lot of trouble, but they always ... You’d always see the family photographs they had with them when they come in.

And then at Stranmillis we had a lot of, up on the top floor of it. You see, Stranmillis was a building to itself when you came in the front gate. But as you went up on the left-hand side, our billets was, we were sleeping up on the big white house, I was there. And then on the other side was then, you went up the hill, there was a sort of a hill. You know the way the front of it’s a college now? Well, up along the side there was a place with very very bad patients from abroad. Really bad patients in that. They were kept up in the top there. Officers and all. It is horrible, really horrible. It really learned you an awful lot. It educates you a lot, because you get to live with people, you know people and you don’t care what they are. I can’t understand them or anything like that. To me, I’m married, I was a catholic — I am a catholic. And my husband was a protestant. It never bothered me, we never spoke of religion that way. He went to his, and he came home and brought me to mine, and that was the way it was. And I was nearly 40 years married to him. I think it’s all about the way you were brought up.

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