In the War I was a Nurses Aid in a maternity hospital and we did everything. We had to bath all the babies, make the beds, clean the wards, do the ironing, be on call with the patients coming in through the night – so it was really hard work…

All the trained staff were away at the war. We had the Matron in Charge but we had to do everything else. The pay wasn’t very good and we had to pay for broken thermometers and I broke one every week so I never had any pay left! We had to buy our own uniforms so we didn’t have much money. We used to love it when a patient came in and they had a lot of children because she would have coupons she didn’t need so we would get the coupons, and you needed them to buy things.