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When war broke out I was 18 and in my first year of orthopaedic nursing in Oxford. In 1941 I went on to the Queen Elizabeth Hospital in Birmingham to do the general nursing course. About half the hospital was civilian, the other wards kept for the services. The convoys of wounded arrived from the coast at 2am, coming by train, often accompanied by medical students. They had to be registered in triplicated then warded. There were Russian, French, Belgian, even Turkish, which did make communication difficult. A few were German POWs who were patently frightened about what we might do to them.

I was very lucky in that the main bombing of Birmingham had ended and I only experienced a couple of raids, including Molotoff Cocktails which meant flooded wards where hoses had been played on them.

Socially I had a very jolly time, which countered the long hours — often twelve at a stretch — and veing hungry. Rations were a bit skimpy for active young people. We rarely saw newspapers, personal radios were unknown, TV didn’t exist, so we didn’t understand exactly what was going on. Antibiotics were just beginning to be released for treating the Military, until then the sulphonamides were the only weapons against infection. In my Finals exam in 1944 I was asked if I had every used penicillin, so the examiner and I had a cosy chat about it.

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