Some fascinating tales of nursing between the two world wars came to light in some memoirs left by the late Miss Norah Hillman.

    I went to the Children's Hospital in Birmingham to start my training in 1929, wrote Norah, at that time one of the most up to date in the country having been re-built after the First World War and in fact building was still going on while I was there.

    We were told on arrival that it was a very noisy hospital but a happy one, so it was too, although the children were much better behaved than they are now. Fresh air was the keynote in those days. Now you never seem to get a window open. The wards were long and narrow with glass doors one side facing the garden. This was really a partition that could be folded up in good weather so that the children on the ground floor could run in and out or be put out in their beds, but the children from the wards upstairs were brought down too if at all possible and the babies went out on the balconies on little portable cribs.

    We had a wide concrete terrace and quite a large garden for the centre of Birmingham, just kept for the children and part for the staff. Of course we had to work hard in those days, much longer hours than the girls do now, and all our studying was done in our own time. No trotting off to the Central School of Nursing for several weeks study every so often as they do now. However in some ways I think we had it easier. We felt we belonged. We were not always being pushed round from hospital to hospital as they are now. We were with our friends and we were all in the same boat -- no orderlies, or auxiliaries and all the other people who make up most of the present day staff.

These were the days of the Depression and much unemployment. Many of the children who came in were from very poor homes and it was a matter of amazement to them that they had a hot dinner every day. Some of the children would arrive in 'sewn up for the winter', so you can guess what their condition was underneath.

When a child was ready to go home, it was very common for its clothes to be in pawn. In these cases when the mother came to collect the child, the Almoner would have to help out.

    Of course in some ways it was more of a joy to look after the children then and try to find little treats for them, they appreciated them so. Christmas was a real thrill. Santa usually called twice, once from one of the big stores (usually in a sleigh); a few days before Christmas when all the children would receive a gift and again on Christmas Eve to fill the stockings. We had ward parties for the children with games and country dancing and of course the wards themselves were transformed with decorations. The staff had tea parties, a concert aided effort of medical and nursing staff and various other festivities.

    When here, although the children were sick, they got up to mischief, such as borrowing the red twill blankets to make wigwams in the garden and hiding round the corners of the stairs with water pistols, etc.; while medical students and nurses also did dreadful things at times. I was once sent down in the lift in a large laundry basket from which I was not able to escape on my own. Unfortunately it was Matron who found me, and various other things.

    We had in those days a dreadful horse-drawn conveyance belonging to the hospital in which the unfortunate night nurse concerned would sometimes have to accompany children after duty, in the morning to the long term branch hospital in the suburbs or to various other homes, etc. in the area, a duty we all disliked as we usually felt so sleepy.

(Nora made friendships at the Birmingham hospital which lasted all her life. Indeed, she was visiting to of those friends to spend Christmas with them when she died in 1995)

    I next went on to do General Training and then another spell in Birmingham at a different hospital, then landed up in 1939 at the Bristol Children's Hospital, a town which I loved in spite of being there during the 'Blitz'. We had some bad times there with raids but I never saw a child panic while the adults around them were calm.