10,000 cases of Diphtheria in Plymouth, during the war.

The white, short-sleeved, one-piece uniform of a nursing auxiliary was like a charwoman’s wrap-around apron worn back to front, fastened with a belt of self material, finished with a turn-down collar at the neck. The cap was lifted from a chambermaid’s gathered at the back with a turned back brim in front. Complemented by black shoes and stockings. And not hand tailored.

Mount Gould was an Orthopaedic and Tuberculosis Sanatorium, a range of one-storey detached wards in extensive grounds built on high ground looking down on the main railway line at the bend of a river flowing into Plymouth Sound.

Easily pinpointed by the German Air Force.

I started working on a children’s ward, designated a fever ward in name only for there were no glass partitions between the beds; no isolation wards; no access for parents and relatives.

Plymouth, under attack from the air, was attacked by diphtheria on the ground, germs rapidly spreading amongst its children by close contact in airless public air-raid shelters, the fever hospital unable to take more patients.

Those T.B cases fit to be moved were evacuated to a moorland home leaving the seriously ill jammed together in one building, freeing a large complex and a wooden recreational building for the admittance of convalescent children from the fever hospital.

William, based in a commandeered hotel in Ilfracombe, hitched a lift to Plymouth when duty allowed and we were pledged to marry on Saturday October 12^th at Plympton Registry Office.

The ex-TB ward was like a hamlet, home to patients confined for weeks, months, years just as long as the TB bacilli crawled around their bodies, turning their lungs to a spongy pulp.

There were two large wards leading off a big hallway and kitchen, linked to the outside by a series of rooms needed by its inhabitants; metal wardrobes for outer clothing, storage rooms, locker rooms, recreation rooms, treatment rooms.

To the front was a wide, glazed balcony for sitting out. The building was surrounded by shrubs and mown grass, the TB patients separated from the buildings of orthopaedic patients where the TB had attacked their bones, working it’s way into the spine, eating away into the limbs of children and babies.

The work was light, for these children were convalescent, passed on to this outpost from the Fever Hospital dealing with the first critical weeks, transferring children to Mount Gould, where they needs must stay for fear of spreading the infection, just as long as throat and nose swabs were positive.

The two twenty-bed wards were backed up by a smaller ward where children who had picked up cross infections were nursed; measles, mumps, German measles, whooping cough, on top of diphtheria.

We took turns to look after these, "Nurse, you’ve washed your hands twenty-one times," a boy shouted as I stood at the hand basin on a table outside the isolation ward.

At the Fever Hospital, the visitors gowned and masked, visiting had been possible, but here, with our poor facilities visiting was restricted to Sundays when smiling parents, standing on tiptoe at the window, waved to sickly looking children, confined to bed. Their only contact was by gifts, packed into carrier bags, the child’s name clearly inscribed: sweets from Gran, a comic from a big brother, a knitted doll from Mum, a thin line passed from the parent on the outside to the patient on the inside. Hopelessly tangled by Ward Sister objecting that one child might have nothing while another had plenty.

The messages lost, the contact broken. The one comfort snatched away for the sake of fairness. Some Charity, somewhere would have provided gifts for those left out so that the hands that packed the loving gifts were still warm when the pale, too-clean hands of the recipients unpacked the parcel from home. Weeks went by without any direct contact.

Before our wedding day I went on nights, bussing in from the suburb where we lived by the sea, changing to a town bus unless there had been an air raid.

With Teutonic regularity, I set out for the hospital at the same hour each night just as, with characteristic punctuality a German plane came over, tantalisingly out of reach of anti-aircraft fire, to drop phosphorescent flares like the flash of an old-fashioned camera, lighting up Plymouth for reconnaissance photography. ‘Smile, please, say cheese,’ if only one of us could have varied our routine.

Air raid regulations compelled the bus driver to pull up at the nearest air raid shelter to house the passengers. Any nurse on the way to duty could claim sanctuary, not reporting for duty that night. I walked through the blacked-out unlit streets, reaching the hospital one night to find the wooden-walled ward still trembling from a near miss.

A fire-bomb had landed on the wooden steps to the wooden veranda, a thunderbolt doused by a foot stirrup pump by a quick-witted nurse. To a child, the boys were excited, jumping up and down in bed, and to the last patient the girls were quiet and subdued. Boys collected shrapnel in wartime, twisted pieces of metal to add to the pieces of string conkers, marbles boys had traditionally hoarded in their pockets.

A directive came from Matron. The nights were cold. We were ordered to refill hot water bottles, placed at the end of each child’s bed, at four o’clock in the morning. Rousing them to an extra bedpan and bottle round in the night. We made porridge in a double steamer, and settled down after the All Clear, one continuous note on the air raid sirens, as if the breath held since the broken note of the warning had been released. A rolled-over exhalation from thousands of citizens, thanking God that was over, grateful to be alive.

I returned from a weekend honeymoon to duty in the main ward, fellow staff curious to see my new signature, William returning to his unit in Ilfracombe.

We nursing staff were a rag-tag lot. A mother and daughter, on duty together, brought in deck chairs and wrapped themselves up in blankets after Night Sister’s last visit, at midnight, to sleep.

Of a nervous disposition, if we were staffed by two or more, the junior was asked to accompany her through the dark grounds to the next ward.

A motherly nurse fried a deep pan of onions for her on-beat policeman husband, snatching a brief sleep on a mattress in the locker room.

Thankfully there were two on duty the night the children went down with food poisoning. Only one child escaped, sitting upright in bed gazing at the prone forms all around her. we changed sheets until there were none left, rinsing the soiled bed-linen to spread out on the rails of the veranda, like a white flag to the streptococci attacking our patients. Some wore pyjama jackets only, some wore bottoms. we ran out of nappies. We ran out of bibs.

At three a.m. we switched on the main lights, but Night Sister objected and we had to use bed-lights instead. As it was, with flimsy blackout curtains, it was said that Mount Gould’s light could be seen out on the breakwater.

Morning dawned. The sun rose. We handed over our shipwrecked children to the day staff to rescue, this being my last night before my weekend off to get married. I walked home under blue skies where a tiny plane was doing a victory roll. ‘I killed him before he killed me.’

I lived in for a few weeks, allocated a room familiar from the Royal Free nurses home, brown paint, cream walls, brown lino. A previous occupant, an unmarried ‘mum,’ had delivered herself of a stillborn baby, hiding the body... "in that drawer, there..." indicating the long drawer under the wardrobe.

"That was a bread basket," a jokey name for a particularly heavy land bomb, the thoughtless words jerked out of our mouth by the force of an explosion nearby.

A little one began to cry as we searched for reassurance. "That means," a boy said, "we’ll have fresh bread for breakfast in the morning, not fish pie."

They cheered. They hated fish pie. Thick wodges of grey fish lapped by a glutinous mass of potatoes. Dry for sore throats to swallow. At eight o’clock in the morning.

One evening in January 1941, William and I were in a Plymouth cinema after a leave spent together before he would leave in the early hours to report for duty, when the air raid sirens sounded. The audience stayed, self-consciously, many, like us, cutting short our visit with an excuse.

We had supper in a little Italian restaurant across the road, interrupted by a bomb falling nearby, diners sitting with feigned bravura but for one Naval commander who dived under the nearest shelter of a flimsy bamboo table. From instinct. From experience.

I was never issued with a tin hat nor a gas mask, but we walked through the town, where no traffic moved, along a main shopping street famous for the smell of its coffee percolators discharging into the air from the basement.

A warden came out of a doorway to offer shelter, but we explained that I had to be on duty that night. It took a direct hit later that night.

In the centre of the town hearing the characteristic swoosh and rattle of a bomb we ducked down in front of a plate glass shop window. The sky was very clear. The mmonlight merciless.

At the cross roads we paused but, a car having fallen into a crater in the road, decided to skirt behind the park. Not through. Poor people, sheltering in a brick air raid shelter in the park, were killed.

A stick of three bombs came over and we curled up, head between our arms, legs folded in. Glass shattered in every window in the residential streets.

We walked on to a cross roads where an ARP ambulance waited. "Take us to Mount Gould?" William asked. "Might as well," they said, "we were at the top of Greenbank Hill and found ourselves here."

I climbed in beside the two women crew, William stood on the mudguard. At the gates, we parted. I went to the changing room in the Nurses Home and reported for duty. I would be alone.

There were no lights. There was no heat. No gas. No water.

At home, parents would have wrapped their children in blankets to carry tenderly to the air-raid shelter in the garden. Or walked with them to the nearest street centre, well wrapped up.

At school, teachers would lead the well-drilled children to school air raid shelters.

I lit a hurricane lamp to place in each doorway of the two large wards of the complex. The blackout curtains fluttered in the breeze. What had we to offer them? A cross on a Luftwaffe map marking a hospital built on a hill overlooking a railway marshalling yard, the main railway line between the west and up country, on a bend in a river shimmering in the moonlight.

I sat in the office, a smaller space than the kitchen where we usually spent the night, eating out of bowls used by the infected children, drinking from ward cups with a joking "I could just do with a spell in sick bay." In the Nurses Home, fire-watchers would be on duty and residents of a nearby estate rushed over to put out firebombs when they fell in clusters.

It was bitterly cold. I sat, wrapped in blankets, one shawled over the shoulders, with a strong torch for lighting, but a little boy cried. He had fallen out of bed and lay beneath it beside the locker. I tucked him up.

I tucked him up again and again, as it was a full-size bed and there were no cots. Later they produced restrainers to anchor the youngest ones to the bed frame.

Below us in the valley truck loads of timber burned with explosive reports. The sky was red. Beams of searchlights tried to trap the German planes for the anti-aircraft fire to attempt to hit, but the enemy craft were too high.

The kitchen sent down cold meats and bread. No tea. Even a plate of tripe and onions would have been welcome. The Meal, of Royal Free days, was more generous in this municipal hospital.

I was fully alert on Night Sister’s first round. It was etiquette to rise when one first heard the outer door being opened. To meet her in the passageway. Not to be taken unawares.

And she would stand, in the doorway of the ward, sniffing for any child who might be in a dirty nappy. A city hospital had been bombed, a nurse jammed up against the hot water pipes, scalded.

Carrying a large torch I made a bedpan round, of the two halves of the ward, took temperatures, washed the shivering children in cold water, straightened the beds before the day staff came on.

To walk home through streets where the gutters held powdered glass, and streams of people walked into work in the city, spread out across the empty roads.

William had left and I only heard his story later. The area around the hospital, built on at the end of the last century, consisted of terraced avenues running down, bisected by main through roads running across, and walking home William had entered a bombed house to find a man with his leg blown off. An ARP team came up.

At the bridge across the tell-tale pinpointing river, William paused, for something seemed odd, and it took him a while to discover much of the bridge structure was missing. The railway lines gleamed. He had saved himself from falling.

Reaching the turning for home, he was told a land mine had embedded itself in the policeman’s garden. At our house, fire bombs had fallen on our garage.

Our hospital was reconnected to gas within a few days, but it was three months before we had gas connected at home. All cooking was done on a coal fire.

The centre of Plymouth was wiped out over the space of two nights.

The number of cases was slowing down. Children, grown tall and leggy, weak from being confined in bed, were being discharged home.

One morning I could not sleep. My throat raged. I had a splitting headache. I longed for my mother to come home from shopping. When she did it was to send for the doctor.

"Follicular Tonsillitis," he diagnosed, his opinion backed up by a negative throat swab. No nose swab was taken. I could go to the Fever Hospital if I liked, he said. I was six weeks off sick, frequently visited by William, still stationed in Ilfracombe.

In the camaraderie of war, the driver of any vehicle, private, commercial or even Forces in some circumstances, would offer a lift to Service personnel leapfrogging across Devon, a few miles here, twenty miles there. William saw Plymouth in flames from the outer edge of Dartmoor. In our cold bedroom, it was light enough to read by the glow of burning buildings.

A cluster of gas holders received a direct hit, the firemen on their ladders thrown into the inferno.

I returned to duty, being assigned the light task of looking after a ward sister who had contracted diphtheria, anxious to do everything right.

Waking her as late as the schedule allowed. Testing the warmth of water for washing, warming the towels, clean night clothing arranged on a stand only to trip over the wire lead of the radio and deposit the contents over her bed. She was very nice about it.