Book description
Desperate circumstances were something Evelyn Prentis had to get very
used to when she began her life as a nurse. It was in 1934 that Evelyn
left home for the first time to enrol as a trainee at a busy
Nottingham hospital in the hope of £25 a year.
A Nurse in Time is Evelyn's affectionate and funny account of
those days of dedication and hardship, when never-ending nightshifts,
strict Sisters and permanent hunger ruled life, and joy was to be
found in a late-night pass and a packet of Woodbines.
The second memoir in this collection is A Nurse in Action.
Surprising Matron as well as herself, Evelyn Prentis managed to pass
her Finals and become a staff-nurse. Encouraged, she took the brave
leap of moving from Nottingham to London - brave not least because war
was about to break.
Not only did the nurses have to cope with stray bombs and influxes
of patients from as far away Dunkirk, but there were also RAF men
stationed nearby - which caused considerable entertainment and
disappointment, and a good number of marriages ...
But despite all the disruption to the hospital routine, Evelyn's
warm and compelling account of a nurse in action, shows a nurse's life
would always revolve around the comforting discomfort of porridge and
rissoles, bandages and bedpans.
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.
