Well I came to Leeds to do my nurse training just before the national health service started. If you can get it, two years ago when they started closing the nurses home they did an article on it and videos. And I was the oldest one! I had to tell them all about how we trained which is totally different to how they do things now. And they took pictures of us going into the nurses’ home where we had to live when we first went there.

It was very different in those days. You weren’t allowed out unless you had a pass after 10 o’clock. And you weren’t allowed to have a man in until matron organised what we called ‘The Beaus Room’. If you made an appointment, you could go and sit in the room with a man. It didn’t matter if it was your father or not, he still had to do it. You had to leave the door open so the sister could see.

They had bars on the lower windows but a lot of the nurses, the older ones who’d been there a while had a way of getting in, but otherwise you had to present a pass when you came back.

In those days, you did three months of what we called PTS which was the training part. And we learnt to do everything. making beds, bed baths, treating bedsores, all that sort of thing. And then, when we went off to the wards we used to go onto a ward for so many months. So we would be going to the wards, the operating theatres.