I did my prac at the old Sunshine Hospital, and there wasn’t that much supervision. They basically let us loose on wards that were filled with people who were coughing and dying. We did what used to be called ‘rounds’, which meant taking the patients’ blood pressure and giving injections and handing out pills and changing bandages.

I know that people say I’m hard as nails, and I’m cruel and whatever, but you can ask anyone I trained with, I was the most squeamish of all the new nurses. I didn’t want to do anything that might hurt somebody. Like, the first time I had to give a patient an injection, it was to an old, old man and he had that skin that was thick like leather, and brown and spotty from being in the sun for seventy years. He was sitting in one of those blood-taking chairs they have, with the wide armrest, and he was wearing one of those cotton robes that was open all down the back and he was pretty much bald except for white fluff on his head. I was supposed to stick a needle in him and get some blood out so I said, ‘I’m sorry, Mr Whatever-His-Name-Was, but I need to do this.’ He said, ‘Oh, that’s fine, love, don’t be scared,’ but I couldn’t stop shaking. I was doing that thing where you try to get the needle in the right spot, pointing at the vein, but it wouldn’t go in.

The old bloke could see how I was shaking and he said, ‘Just push it in and don’t worry.’ But I couldn’t do it, and then I got the wrong spot and blood came pouring out, and I panicked and pushed the emergency button and the matron came and shook her head like I was a complete idiot. She said, ‘Just do it like this, Snow,’ and jabbed the old bloke really quick, and really hard, and he cried out, and his mouth was left hanging open. I was shocked but the matron said, ‘You need to be in control, Snow. No mucking around, just get things done,’ and before long it was me who was just jabbing old people and letting them cry out and not even worrying about it, because you get conditioned to it and you’re busy and you know it doesn’t really hurt. Plus it’s always better when it’s quick, and to say, ‘Let’s get it over with.’

My first job after I finished training was at oncology, which is the cancer ward. If I had still been squeamish that would have been even worse because it was doing things like peeling back bandages for people who had skin cancer and bits of their flesh would come away, and no matter what you did you couldn’t get it to stick back on.

You could still smoke in hospitals in those days, and plenty of people did – and yes, I mean on the cancer ward. One old bloke used to beg me to hold his durry up to his tracheotomy – the hole they’d made in his windpipe – so he could get some nicotine into him! That was nothing: we had patients who had lost both their legs and three fingers on each hand and they’d still want to smoke.