I stayed on oncology for about six months and then, when I was in my last year of training, I got sent up to geriatrics, where basically it was my job to feed old ladies who had no teeth and who were lying there on the wards all day with cataracts over their eyes, pretty much blind. It was hard to get them to eat because most of them had basically given up on living, and I didn’t blame them. It was pretty obvious that nobody cared about those people. Everyone they’d ever known was dead, except maybe their kids who would come in on Sundays or else on what we called the ‘duty’ visits on Mother’s Day and maybe Christmas Day. Then they’d just sit there in the visitors’ chairs, trying to make small talk – ‘Oh, little Kevin has made the final of the district spelling bee!’ – and I’d see them sneaking glances at their watches and wondering how long they’d have to sit there before they could get up and leave and get on with their lives.

Maybe you’re wondering why I’m telling you all this. It’s because I think you should know what nurses know, or what the honest ones know, which is that it’s just rubbish that people care about their families, because the minute they get old or sick the first thing they want to do is shut them up in some kind of institution and keep them locked away. As long as they’re fed, and there’s somebody there to change their filthy bed sheets and clean their teeth, that’s all they care about.

But anyway, after two years of training I was a qualified nurse looking for something to specialise in. Some girls I’d done training with were talking about going to Emergency and ‘saving lives’ and some wanted to go to midwifery to deliver babies, but I wasn’t interested in either of those things. Believe it or not (and nobody believes it), even back then I had a big social conscience and what I wanted to do was go and work with retarded children – especially those children like Annie McDonald, who everyone was talking about at that time. And in case you don’t know who she is, she was a famous retarded person, and she’d been in the papers, and there had been stories about her on the news, and the story basically was that she looked retarded but she was a normal person on the inside, meaning she had a normal brain but she couldn’t walk or talk, she could only dribble so nobody knew that she was normal on the inside.

Somehow she’d been rescued from whatever home she’d been living in for years and years, with nobody ever talking to her or reading to her, and then there were stories about how there were other people like her, also stuck in homes for the retarded, and suddenly the government was talking about ways to get them all out. Every week there were ads in Nursing magazine – jobs for people to go into homes for retarded people and see how many of them were also normal on the inside – and one of those ads was for nurses to join the staff at Caloola, which was a home for retarded people in Sunbury. I went to one of the information sessions and they said, ‘We’re looking for people who can help us find out which of the patients at Caloola might be able to live in the outside world.’ I thought, ‘Yes, that’s what I want to do,’ because that was me back then, a big bleeding heart. At least until I actually started at Caloola, and had the bleeding heart knocked right out of me.