I trained as a nurse just after the war finished and I loved it. I worked at Kenmore Psychiatric Hospital when I was seventeen. There were six of us nurses to start with and we had to clean up after the war. They used Kenmore as a military hospital and they had Japanese prisoners in one ward. They didn’t fumigate afterwards and they had all these skin problems and when we went to work we all got scabies and boils. That was the bad part but the good part was the patients, I loved all the patients. In the end I was in a ward where they were absolutely lovely ladies and I was there on my own and I just loved them…

I can remember my pay was four pounds a week, with one pound, three shillings and seven-pence taken out for board and laundering of my uniforms.

I did my three years of training at Kenmore just after the war finished, but because I got married before I registered they wouldn’t let me go back. So 22 years and 4 children later, I went back to school and got my registration. When I went back I ended up working at Kenmore for another twelve years.

It was hard working at Kenmore, my friend and I wrote a book in 2007 and we sold lots of copies.