"There nurse, for now you are a nurse," Sister Tutor said on my donning the uniform of a probationer of the Royal Free Hospital, Gray’s Inn Road, London W.C.2, in the month of January of the year nineteen hundred and thirty nine.

I had stepped into a dress buttoned to below the waist, made to measure of grey cotton from a bolt of cloth supplied by the hospital. The trimly fitting bodice and long sleeves were lined, the skirt gathered, double tucked at the hem, with deep hidden side pockets and a long, narrow patch pocket on the bodice designed to take a fountain pen and a watch with a second hand, secured by a pin.

The bound neckline was circled by a starched clerical collar, fastened through four thicknesses by a collar stud. The long sleeves, buttoned ready to roll up, were circled at the wrists with starched white detachable cuffs, stud fastened.

Over the dress went a pleated square-topped starched white apron; the over-the-shoulder straps fixed with safety pins to the waistband, bustling out with pleats to just above the calf length dress.

Around the waist a white starched belt covered a pinned waistband, the safety pins shamed by the prim outfit, inspiring an echo of condemnation my mother might have made... ‘You sew that Marg, don’t you use a safety pin!’

I wore a cap on my head made up from a starched oblong of white linen folded low on the brow, the forehead steadied against the wall as my hands pleated the material, the bunching fixed with a larger safety pin, the starched folds standing up in an arc above the two long ends.

The black stockings, then usually worn only by schoolgirls, and black shoes, the latter firmly requested to be rubber soled and heeled, were provided by the probationer.

Nurse Marjorie Davies, Nurse Frances Brown and mature Nurse Gwendolyn Jackson formed an intake of three to the Preliminary Training School (with a capacity of twelve,) to be taught for three months in the theory and practice of nursing before admission to the wards.

Frances, short and slim, had shining brown shortcut hair, warm brown eyes, and a slightly toothy smile, with a way of walking, thrusting the upper part of her body forward, the folds of her dress twitching through the gap of her apron at the back, as if expressing hurried eagerness to assist. ‘Here, let me help you...’ ‘I’ll get that.’

Gwendolyn, tall, loose-limbed, her large feet turning firmly outwards, had pale blue eyes, laughter-wrinkled, a pale complexion, her cap made up low over her brow covering her sandy-coloured hair. Having nursed unregistered for several years, in her mid-twenties she was starting out to qualify as a state registered nurse.

At the age of eighteen and wanting to train as a nurse, I had sought the advice of the village chemist who suggested applying to a London teaching hospital.

A small man, a Polish refugee, his head scarcely showed above the counter, though his son was tall, pale complexioned, wearing the black shirt, black trousers and black leather belt of a member of the British Fascist Party. Sometimes to be seen, with a companion, standing on the edge of the pavement handing out leaflets.

A hospital was chosen from many advertised in the Nursing Mirror, responding to a written inquiry with a brochure of the Royal Free Hospital, established in the eighteenth century. It was illustrated by a black and white photograph of the Nurses Home, a boarding school atmosphere of classrooms, a long ward lined by beds with the staff frozen by the camera, and a formal common room.

From the outside it was a long, three-storied building fronting the pavement, of grey stone with many windows, entered through tall wooden gates set in an archway, partly open onto a quiet square, with plane trees and a fountain.

Not having sat matriculation, I had a take an exterior test in English and Mathematics at a Plymouth hospital, being coached in arithmetic by our lodger, who taught at the village council school.

The resulting pass led to a request to attend an interview in London, the fare paid by the hospital. Matron said "The patient is first, second and third. Anything left over is for yourself." A tall, well-built woman in her fifties, she wore a dark high-collared dress with a small frilled cap set on permed greying hair.

She was alone in not wearing an apron, the Assistant Matron and senior Sister wearing a square bibbed apron without straps, kept up by pins held in place on a dark dress, a black waistband fastened with silver buckles, and starched cuffs.

She invited me to take lunch in the nurses dining room, on my own, for it was past mealtime, and gave me advice on how to fill in my time before returning to Plymouth. Ignoring her instruction to take a bus to St. Paul’s Cathedral, I set out on foot, in the wrong direction, walking miles before, worried by the departure time of my train, I boarded the first bus to come along. The conductor pointed out that I was on the wrong side of the road for Paddington, and did not charge a fare.

That morning, coming out of the terminus into Praed Streets, I had been unimpressed by the small, scruffy shops: "We’ve better than this in Plymouth," I had decided. Waiting at platform eight, with the livery of chocolate and cream, was the corridor train. Boarding the middle coach and sliding open the compartment door, I sat down opposite a couple from Plymouth whom I recognised, for Mr. Dobell was the manager of the Co-operative Wholesale Meat Department, where my sister had worked since leaving school.

Talking it over later at home, nothing would persuade me this meeting was a coincidence, being convinced the provincial pair had been asked to "look out for our Marg."

Wearing a long, loose, belted grey coat and a grey felt hat with a green ribbon, gloved and carrying an overarm handbag, I had been shown over a ward by a Sister who took me into the kitchen where tea for the patients was in preparation.

We also visited the nurses Common Room, in the basement of the Nurses Home, where off-duty nurses played a record of the current song ‘When they Begin the Begine.’ Loudly.

I returned to hospital on the evening before the start of the January term, shown, after supper, to my room in the Nurses Home. A tall building adjoining the back gate, every nurse had her own room, identical in cream distempered walls, brown paint and polished brown linoleum with a black iron bedstead covered by a white Alhambra quilt. A built-in wardrobe, mirror backed chest of drawers, a bedside cupboard and a single upright chair completed the furnishing. A bag was provided for dirty linen, and a hanging bookshelf on one wall. Over the doorway was a fanlight of clear glass, a peephole for Home Sister to rap on the door if the light had not been turned out by ten thirty p.m. The view was of an ancient graveyard, the dead hosting the living in a green park of a soot-laden city thick with coal smoke from domestic chimneys.

We lived protected in a nursery flat sheltered within the Nurses Home, taught by Sister Tutor, in retirement from running her own ward, dressed by her... "there nurse, for now you are a nurse..." as a novice entering a convent, putting aside our own clothes when on duty.

The day began at seven thirty, by turning out our bedroom, each moveable piece of furniture dragged out to block the corridor before sweeping a clean floor, dusting spotless surfaces, each telling the other to dust the top edge of the door... ‘that’s where she’ll draw her finger."

I had not slept well on my first night away from home, unused to central heating and the noise of traffic. All night I had imagined ambulances had motored through the back gates, only to be corrected by a smiling Sister Tutor, who told me those were Post Office vans as the Royal Free adjoined Mount Pleasant sorting office, the largest in London.

Later in the morning, dressed in mufti, we were escorted to Charing Cross Road to buy text books and lecture folders in a specialist shop.

On the windowsill of a small conventional classroom stood a wooden box containing the skeleton of a child. Fib and Tib tripped lightly off the tongue, but we had to study further. Each notch, each knob on every bone, had a name, the discoverer honoured, as any explorer of terrestrial fame, by having his name perpetuated.

For instruction the body was divided into cavities, illustrated by full page colour plates or wall charts: thoracic, abdominal, pelvic. Skeletal man, smiling inanely, muscular man with bulging biceps, the trapezius muscles worn like a shawl over his massive shoulders: the blood system outlined like trunk roads on a map with secondary roads leading off into cul-de-sac capillaries, the pumping heart the overseeing traffic headquarters. Organic man, like a victim of persecution, hung drawn and quartered yet with no expression on his passive, unmarked face.

Lecturing on the reproductive system, the maidenly Sister Tutor came from behind her desk to sit informally on the edge, explaining the facts of life to two eighteen-year-olds, with Gwendolyn sitting in.

We drew diagrams, meticulously labelled, learning to recite the spinal bones as a litany... ‘seven cervical, twelve thoracic...’ and was it tarsal for the small bones of the feet and carpal for the knobby bones of the hand, or the other way around?

A life-size rubber model complete with orifices lay on a rubber draw sheet in a hospital bed in the demonstration ward, where we first learned to make hospital corners, trying to follow the flick of the wrist as performed by Sister Tutor.

On the counter tops above capacious cupboards we laid up trays for the administration of an enema, for dressings, setting out kidney-shaped dishes to cope with vomit after an anaesthetic. Laid out coiled feet of rubber tubing to invade the body for colonic lavage; trays set for the examination of the throat, or to give an injection, myself giving a cheating glance at a neighbouring tray before Sister Tutor inspected.

We set out elaborate individual meal trays, a travesty of the catering standard, hand drawing a menu card, in my case of a crinolined lady coyly opening her skirt to tempt the sick with chicken broth, egg custard and oxtail soup, our work closely inspected by Matron on her daily visit.

One day a week, and the afternoons, were free to explore London on foot and gaze awe-struck at the Houses of Parliament, Buckingham Palace, Oxford Street and Westminster Abbey, impressed by the sheer size of famous places seen only before on cinema newsreels.

Barrel organs played ‘Down Argentine Way" or ‘Night and Day You Are the One’ with a shivering monkey dressed in mocking clothes; its pitiful brown eyes staring out of a bony skull; its teeth chattering as the animal handed around a collecting bag. Chestnut vendors cooked on coal braziers parked at the curbside.

I witnessed a funeral in Farringdon Road, an area where the Royal Free drew its patients, the glass-cased hearse piled with wreaths, drawn by matching black horses wearing tall black plumes on their heads, passing very slowly, the mourners following on foot, stopping the traffic. Sundays, in High Holborn, meant pavements wide and bare where cats stalked and newspapers blew about in the empty streets.

At four o’clock we took tea with Sister Tutor, who sometimes baked scones in the school kitchen, the smell wafting over the institutional rooms. She too came from Devon, she said, and had been as slim as me, once.

Evening lectures took us up to suppertime at eight thirty, joined in our sitting-room by one of the foreign nurses on a training course at the Royal Free. Lisa was a jolly girl who taught us to make Mocha coffee from a blend of coffee and cocoa.

After four weeks instruction we were presented on a male medical ward, every evening at six o’clock, clinging together, self-conscious in our dark grey dresses, raw against the washed-out grey of the ward pro, our status even lower than hers.

Plunged into the bedroom of strangers, who dubbed us Faith, Hope and Charity or the Three Fairy Elephants, we stood just inside the ward door, seemingly having no role, as ‘Staff’ dispensed medicines and the second year nurse helped make beds with the pro.

The team split up, taking on Gwen and Frances, the new girl starting on the top end of the bed as the experienced nurse reached for the foot, the twenty beds a statutory three feet apart demanded by the London County Council.

I was ordered to ‘do backs’ fetching the tray of surgical spirit and talc from the sluice, bringing a screen to place around the bed. I rolled up my sleeves, placing the cuffs in one pocket, before folding back the bedclothes. Gingerly I rubbed the patient’s back beneath his pyjama jacket, vaguely below the waist. "Lower down, Nurse, lower down," he said, kindly releasing his pyjama bottoms.

I helped an up-patient to walk on the highly-polished floor, two of us with an arm hooked under his as he clung on without confidence, shuffling in slippered feet. I shook pillows, piling them up only for the patient to shake his head. I measured menthol into a mug for false teeth to be lodged for the night, and emptied sputum mugs.

A young man suffering from bronchitis was nursed within screens, like hands cupped around the flickering life, the air trapped and kept humid by steam laced with friar’s balsam from a special long-spouted kettle on a stand.

In the daytime we continued our studies, escorted by Sister Tutor to a sewage disposal works, being invited to drink the brackish water drawn off at the end of the cleansing process. We declined.

We toured the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and visited out neighbours, the Eastman Dental Clinic.

All first-year nurses were asked to take part in a nation-wide survey on the incidence of tuberculosis, having to state whether we came from a town or a country district. We submitted to a chest X-ray followed by a medical examination carried out by a senior physician and held in the ornate Victorian chambers of the hospital Chairman. Behind screens we undressed above the waist, and were given voluminous ‘Mother Hubbard’ garments of soft white flannel, the style that of modesty dresses issued by missionaries to naked native women in Africa in Victorian times. Scarcely lifting the hem of the garment, the aged doctor sounded one’s chest, with a solemn-faced Assistant Matron acting a chaperone standing by.

On Sundays we three students were sent to help out on the wards to cover for the four-hour Sunday break, staff having time off to attend either an outside religious service or one held in the memorial chapel built deep in the basement, a sacred place also open to patients and their relatives.

The Royal Free had been founded on religion by its seagoing benefactor, the general public allowed access to its medical care without having to produce a note of introduction from a worthy person of prominence. Hence... Free.

I was sent to work on Children’s. Like nursery quarters in large houses, Children’s occupied the top storey of the medical wing, bearing its founder’s name, Riddell’s.

Noise was my first impression on coming through the ward door; not just babies crying but yelling, screaming, shouting, talking, crashing, thumping noise. And the smell of milk feeds and wet nappies. The high-sided cots, or iron bedsteads, were of white enamel, chipped, the walls tiled, the floor of wooden parquet. Large patio windows opened out to a flat roof space, where beds and cots were pushed in good weather, the area enclosed by high small-meshed screens.

The child patients perceptively called the newest pro ‘Miss’ and not ‘Nurse.’

"Cor, Miss, you’ll have Sister after you if you do that."

"Now Miss, you gotta do the lockers."

Many of the older children, malnourished and suffering from rheumatic fever, were nursed flat in bed, a huckaback towel being held in place across the chest by a sandbag on either side, pinning the child down to save straining an already stressed heart.

"Eating again," the children exclaimed as mugs of cocoa or milk were handed out at elevenses at nine thirty after breakfast at six o’clock. High-sided feeding plates were picked clean by the children, after the first course of minced meat, carrots and potatoes, retaining their licked spoons for the second course of plum duff and custard.

I returned early from lunch.

"You won’t keep that up," the staff said.

I didn’t.

Ward Sister pinned up scolding notices at strategic points around the ward. In the nursery staff were chided for making up a day’s feed at a time. ‘Make up only enough baby food for one feed.’

‘Dirty nappies must not be dried on the radiators’

‘Please leave these shelves as you would wish to find them.’ she admonished in the walk-in Linen Room.

A small boy, out of bed, pillowed in a wheelchair, pale leaden eyes with dried, cracked lips, suffering from pneumonia, was frequently visited by his parents, each working as a doctor within the hospital. Normally patients could only be visited on a Thursday or a Sunday, 2 p.m. to 4 p.m., with evening visits restricted to those who could not comply with visiting hours. Visiting was not encouraged. ‘It upsets the children. They cry,’ was the explanation, mistaking their silence for contentment and not the silence of withdrawal. A feeling of having been abandoned by their parents.

On my first visiting day I felt self-conscious, dressed up as a nurse, thinking all eyes would be on this impostor, thankfully directing inquiries to Sister or ‘Staff,’ always available in an office off the ward.

That night I bathed my first patient, trying to coax the small girl to speak as I undressed, bathed and dried her, with no response until, wrapped in a towel she said "My Dad’s teeth takes out."

Towards the end of our course we were tested on our progress in written and practical examinations.

"Here today and gone tomorrow," we joked, studying the test papers left on our desktops. We worked in pairs, difficult with a trio, in the Demonstration Ward, making up a bed with hospital corners, changing a bottom sheet with the patient in bed, washing the hair of a bed-bound patient, ‘laying up’ the many treatment trays. We all passed, it could hardly be otherwise given the staff shortages and our intensive coaching, in varying placings.

We celebrated at the nearest Lyons Corner House, paying one shilling for a Knickerbocker Glory, being entertained by a gyrating middle-aged singer, holding aloft a Japanese parasol and singing ‘Any Umberellas, any Umberellas to mend today’ in rather a sad lament.

In early March an outbreak of influenza hit patients and staff. Sister Tutor said it would not be possible to complete the full three months preliminary course. We were needed to make up the numbers on the wards.

It was time for the children to leave the nursery and join the big girls, on the wards.