Seeking a posting, I was directed as an auxiliary nurse to an old people’s home in Highgate, reached from Chelsea on a No. 11 bus from King’s Road.

Intended for bombed-out victims from the East End, the Home had been converted from two Edwardian houses knocked into one, and staffed on a twenty-four hours on, twenty-four hours off rota, as if it was an ARP post.

Four hours on. Four hours off, serving as a waitress, chambermaid and an attendant at a residential home, none of the staff fully trained nurses. Our Commandant, of the British Red Cross, was a large lady, full-bodied, thin-limbed, wearing a navy-blue costume with shoulder tabs denoting rank. She lived out, but a civilian manager, a Jewish girl, had a cosy flat up in the attics where I went sometimes of an evening to drink coffee sitting in front of a gas fire, and talking.

Our quarters were in the basement, consisting of a small dining room, a large store with shelves packed to the ceiling with tinned food, and a dark kitchen.

The inmates slept in separate dormitories, men and women, sharing a sitting room and large dining hall. A Kosher establishment, the milk kitchen was on the ground floor, with the meat kitchen in the basement.

Apart from one man, the old people spoke only Yiddish, having emigrated from across Europe. Bombed out of their homes in the East End, they had nowhere to go unless their first-generation Enlgish-speaking children, visiting on Sundays, could have provided a home.

The one English-speaking man, dapper in a lounge suit, went out each day carrying a basket and a shopping list, to return in late afternoon.

I learned to carry three food-laden dinner plates at a time, two balanced on my left, one in the right hand, helping to serve three meals a day.

On Friday nights, seven-stemmed candelabra were lit on long tables draped in white cloths. The cook put extra effort into the menu, and a religious ceremony was observed, guided by a rabbi.

At night, out task was to patrol the dormitories, trying to persuade old men who had retired for the night to bed fully clothed, to take off a heavy jacket, an embroidered waistcoat, thick trousers and put on a nightshirt, but with little success.

No doubt this was how they had dressed during air raids, and apart from an anti-social fug, what did it matter?

In a side room lay an incontinent, senile old lady. To conserve scarce material, sphagnum moss had been found useful as a pad, the earthy smell of the springy green plant releasing memories, for me, of Dartmoor. Green hillocks, brown brackish streams, tufts of living grass, lichen-covered rocks, blocking out the present stench of urine in a stuffy blacked-out bedroom.

"Lock the door," I was warned on my first night on going downstairs for the first four hours off duty. The Army blankets were harsh and fusty, the room airless. When, before I had got off to sleep on the narrow camp bed, I saw the door handle being turned, baulked, I realised what good advice this was, for I should not have thought of it for myself. Our handyman was a civilian.

At Passover, we Gentiles were requested not to bring unleavened bread on to the premises. Not just for a snack we might have prepared, but even in our shopping bags.

We ate motza biscuits instead and our lady Commandant told a lively tale of her son, a student at Cambridge, having to walk across an open quadrangle in all weathers to the bathroom.

This at a time when the newspapers first published accounts of Belsen and the other prison camps, the details questioned as propaganda, the stories too horrific to take in. Both sides put out propaganda, one said.

Our shift system, designed for staff on First Aid Posts who might go days, weeks even without an incident, was getting us down, our normal sleep pattern disturbed.

Our commandant went in person to the headquarters of the GLC, and succeeded in altering our hours to two shifts of days and nights. But it was 1942, and William and I longed to live in the country, feeling trapped in London. By telegraphing where other applicants wrote, William won the tenancy of Apple Tree Cottage in Hertfordshire, and I left the Home.

He travelled to his war every morning on the milk train from Royston, returning home in the evening at seven.