"There is not reason why you cannot make as good a nurse as the next girl," Matron concluded, having reprimanded me for a poor report from the V.D. Clinic.

William was awaiting call-up for his age group, and we continued to meet, choosing Admiralty Arch as our meeting place. In five minutes, I changed from uniform to mufti, coming in at night on curfew, the piles of sandbags like flying buttresses against the hospital walls, ideal shelter for a parting kiss.

The top wards of the old blocks had been evacuated, the hospital taking over the Eastman Dental Clinic. The Theatre was now reconstructed in the basement, the corridors enforced with metal uprights, the miles of hot water pipes threaded overhead, ghastly threats of scalding in the event of a bomb.

As a second year nurse I took temperature, pulse and respiration rates, keeping neat charts. I admitted a new patient, putting away the unworn slippers, the spruce dressing gown, but having to run (‘we only run for fire or haemorrhage, nurse’) after her husband for him to sign the form agreeing to his wife’s undergoing an anaesthetic.

To actually do a dressing was less stomach-churning than to watch, ward sister taking on herself the dressing of mastectomy cases, sheltered behind screens, the patient revived with a medicinal tot of brandy after the ordeal.

A colostomy case, with tears in her eyes, pleading for understanding... ‘what if the bag erupted when she was getting on the tram?

Our female patients were described as suffering for carcinoma.. cancer was too murderous a word to use. I fretted over patients kept alive by a feeding tube when it seemed to me, in my ignorance, kinder to let them go.

The Royal Free pioneered kidney transplants, with just a glimmer of survivals.

From Women’s surgical I went to Children’s; now set up in marbled halls, vast ceilings, huge windows with the threat of a bomb shattering the glass and our having nowhere to move the patients’ beds away. It looked out on a tranquil inner courtyard, a mockery in wartime.

In the street there were air-raid shelters; in their homes or at least nearby in the street, the children would have been offered shelter, a paper umbrella against the blitz, but in the hospital there was nothing.

The cosy one-space atmosphere in the old hospital wards had been replaced by a series of smaller wards, separated by long corridors: the kitchen, the sluice, and the bathrooms formed an apex at the head of a mass of connecting passages.

A boy of seven was admitted for an operation to correct a badly set elbow, cosmetic almost. A straightforward procedure. He would be going home the next day. I made up a post-operative bed after the porter had taken him off, the little boy still smiling cheerfully, his curly golden hair resisting the hairbrush. The bedding was made up in a way that it lifted off in a pack when the unconscious patient was returned. Rubber sheeting in place, the swept bare bedside locker set with a vomit bowl.

And then we heard that he had died on the operating table. There was nowhere for his mother to grieve in private. Ward Sister took her into her office shutting the door, and I stripped the bed, washing the iron frame in disinfectant, making it up with clean sheets to receive the next patient.

"Could he possibly have had anything to eat or drink?" Sister’s words were anxious, not accusative.

No, we said, remembering his pleas. Another child, mistakenly kind?

He had never been left alone, we assured her.

The word came back that he had died from pressure on the wind-pipe, a one in a million chance. No-one was to blame.

Our kidney case was not responding to treatment, his bloated body distressing to the eyes, like a younger Billy Bunter, not in a comedy school situation but a life or death threat.

"Find out what he would like to eat, Nurse, and bring it to him," Sister told me.

Even as I gave him a slice of cake and a cup of tea requested I felt guilty, for a strict diet had been so much a part of his regime. He died that night.

Three babies ill with diarrhoea and vomiting, nursed apart in a small room, the most ill the only one to be visited, the mother and her friend coming in every afternoon to sit, one each side of the cot, with nothing they could do.

Like chicks the babies were fed with a fountain pen pipette, a mixture of brandy and milk, but they died, Sister laying out the bodies, tucking a single cornflower into the shroud.

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"Easy to see you’re in love, Nurse," the patient said, when I came on duty of a Sunday, having time to meet William in the extra four-hour break.

This was a Gynaecology Ward where dressings were a daily ordeal for the patient, lying in bed listening to the clatter of instruments piled into enamel dishes, and wheeled threateningly nearer the victim. To ease off surgical tape by pressing the finger just under the material and not to rip it off in an attitude of ‘getting it over’

Douches a twice-daily ritual, reminding me of my early embarrassment having to leave my patient, baffled by the reality not being like the familiar blown-up doll on our P.T.S. Rightly scornfully amused by Staff coming to my rescue.

The Sister on this ward had a way of arranging the flowers by stripping off every leaf, standing each bloom upright in a vase, like sticks in an umbrella stand.

In August William was called up, visiting me in the Nurses Home, tall and trim in khaki battledress, heavy boots slipping on the polished parquet flooring.

Only once had he seen me in uniform, when one evening, due for a six o’clock off duty it had to be cancelled. In my crisp blue and white striped dress, cap flying in the evening breeze, I had slipped across the busy road to our rendezvous in a working men’s’ café to explain.

I sought an interview with Matron to give a month’s notice, for at that time to marry meant dismissal.

William had been posted to Ilfracombe, within meeting distance of Plymouth. We would be married in Devon, having called our banns at the Chelsea Registry office, thwarted by call-up.

"Have you any furniture?" Matron asked, leaving me to wonder silently why she did not ask if we had a house to put furniture in, or a newly married husband to inhabit a non-existent house bare of furniture.

She did not point out the waste of eighteen months training and tuition for both sides. Had it been possible to continue I would not have considered it for a moment. We were too deeply in love for any consideration of practicality to affect us.

I sold my text books, my navy blue scarlet-lined cloak, my one prize book, to raise my fare home, with the last month’s salary to come.

On duty the last afternoon a patient lent out of bed to whisper in my ear, as I stooped low to put away belongings in her locker.

"Keep the dickie out," she advised the bride to be.