The day after I sat my final O level exam, I came home at lunchtime and my mother told me she had found me a position as an orderly in a cottage hospital an hour away from home. I was sixteen.

My mother had been a nurse and she wanted me to be one too. I was too young to start nursing training, so she used her influence with an old colleague to get me a job. It meant leaving home, not something I was ready for. I started work that week.

The cottage hospital was used as a convalescence hospital for the major hospitals in the area and also did some minor operations. It was an attractive building with honeysuckle and roses round the doors and windows. There were two wings with big bay windows. One side was for men, with a five bed ward and two single rooms and, the other, a mirror, for women. At the end of each wing was a sluice, toilets and bathrooms. In the center of the building was a central corridor. On one side, a small operating theater, anesthetic room and sterile room. On the opposite of these was the staff room and at the end a kitchen. Bedrooms and Matron's quarters were upstairs. Apart from myself only one other auxiliary was resident plus the cook.

Thinking back, I was SO young - and innocent. I soon learned my duties which included all those mundane things you associate with nursing; bed-making, cleaning, helping at meals and washing soiled bedsheets. This was before central sterilizing, so we also had to clean and sterilize all the instruments, rolling cotton wool balls and making gauze swabs and bandages for packing them into containers for autoclaving. Where smell rules memory, I will always associate the smell of ether with that place.

We had fun times too though; I can remember playing tricks on patients and staff. We would put a brush in someone's bed and watch them screech when they got in or make up an 'apple pie' bed, where you folded the top sheet in half so they couldn't get their feet down to the bottom. Silly things, but in a small community, a life-line to sanity.

I learned a lot in the year and a half I worked there before I started training as a nurse. The Matron took a special interest in me, perhaps because of my mother, perhaps because of my age. Before I left, I was the very best at sticking a needle in an orange - a training trick I used to teach my own student nurses many years later.

Would I have preferred to do something else? Yes, but every step we take makes us into the person we are now, so if I had done something else I would be someone else. Wouldn't I?

Learn more about this author, Ann Miller.
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