Book description
'Matron smiled. It was the smile that one woman gives to another
and not the chilly facial movement from Matrons of old. "Do you
think you would be able to work 9 to 3. 30?" For a moment I
couldn't think at all. There seemed something not quite right in
being paid for so little labour.'
At the end of the Second World War, as husbands came back to
Civvy Street their wives had the luxury of staying at home with the
children. For a short while at least. Soon Evelyn realised she had to
find part-time work to make ends meet, and to her astonishment she was
offered part-time hours at her old hospital.
The day-to-day job hadn't changed much, but she was now a nurse and
mother. Whooping cough and measles could still kill a small child, and
the early '50s polio epidemic left the whole country in shock.
But the nurses worked hard, moaned incessantly about their aching
feet and yet found things to laugh at, just as they did from the start
of their training. If old soldiers never die, then neither do nurses.
Brought up in Lincolnshire, Evelyn Prentis (real name Evelyn Taws)
left home at eighteen to become a nurse. She later moved to London
during the war, where she married and raised her family. Like so many
other nurses, she went back to hospital and used any spare time she
might have had bringing up her children and running her home. Born in
1915, she sadly died in 2001 at the age of eighty-five.
