The orthopaedics ward, again a complex of two separate wards, men one side, women the other, children in side wards, was a one storey building with a utility building at right angles housing storage rooms. Like an aircraft hangar one entire long wall of each ward, ceiling-to-floor doors rolled back to allow access for the beds to a concreted area, even in winter. Even in wartime, though we had to be quick and nip out to push the beds to the comparative safety of the wards if the air raid warning sounded.

The tuberculosis-ridden patients were treated by surgery, a healthy segment of bone taken from the leg and replacing a TB diseased section of the spine, the healthy bone growing, the spine segments knitting together over months stretching out to years.

The patient lay in a plaster cast from neck to feet resting on a metal-framed canvas stretcher held up on wooden blocks supported on an ordinary hospital mattress, the sheet tucked in with hospital corners.

Over the contraption was a frame to take the weight of the bedclothes, a blanket and a counterpane left loose. A certain movement of the head and their arm movement was all the patients had. day after day, week after week, stretched out like the skin of an animal pegged out to dry.

Once weekly the consultant did a solemn round, examining X-rays, parrying requests for sleeping pills. If one had slept all day in bed it was difficult to sleep all night.

No one invited these nurses to Theatre. We received no lectures, other than ARP exercises, and such skills as we gained were ‘picked up’ from our peers.

Once weekly there was a cinema show, the beds in the women’s ward herring-boned for the beds from the men’s ward to crowd in the back, the screen flashed onto an end wall, blackout curtains drawn, the sound track bellowing into every corner.

The office was midway between the two sections, glass-walled for observation, cosy at night. The babies and very small children shared a nursery, three-year-olds too traumatised to speak, legs in plaster from thigh to toes, joined by a lifting bar, for their limbs to grow straight and not gnarled like a twisted oak.

Bedpans, for the women, were exactly like Swiss roll tins, the patients grateful the receptacles were warmed. Nursing was light, and not technically demanding.

The main event, apart from visiting times, was the weekly bath for every patient, jealously guarded, taking place in one of the several treatment rooms which, with toilets and bathrooms, occupied the ends of each ward.

Each patient had a matching plaster-of-Paris cast. Like two halves of a walnut, joining and this top cast was placed over the patient, wheeled in in his bed.

Over this went a canvas metal-framed stretcher, fastened with heavy leather straps, the whole edifice turned, the under plaster taken off and stood against the wall, like the patient’s shadow solidified, and very, very carefully brushed for crumbs, smoothed for wrinkles.

The back exposed, the prone patient was carefully examined for pressure points, any reddened area. Washed, rubbed with surgical spirit, thoroughly dried. Grateful.

Whilst one nurse could comfortably manage treatment, it needed two to turn the patient upright. Once, headstrong, impatient, not immediately finding a helper, I turned the patient myself, taking a risk which now horrifies me for I was short and slight, the patient male: if he had slipped what damage would have been done!

I joined the Red Cross, for the sake of the uniform, Matron having objected to the fit of my white overall, bunching the spare material at the back of my neck in her hand, remarking that one could see down the back.

A fact already noted by the male patients. Young men, they sometimes quarrelled. "Don’t you put him next to me, Nurse," one would complain for, like one unit patient and bed moved as one.

The blue-grey cotton dress was fitted, an apron worn over it with a melodramatic red cross appliquéd across the bosom and a coif type white cap worn on the head. With a navy blue raincoat and navy blue cap for outdoors.

Older children had lessons from a teacher anxious on behalf of her pupils to parry any loss of school time to treatment. The nursing staff defending their home ground giving priority to the patient, not the schoolchild.

I first heard the ‘Warsaw Concerto’ played on a patient’s gramophone in the female ward in that taut atmosphere of illness overlaid by war.

The air raids had ceased. The routine became boring. I put in for a posting away, as a nursing auxiliary.