I expect most people who have never had anything to do with nursing think of it as rather harrowing, wrote Nora Hillman, but after all the years I spent on the job I think my chief recollections are of the fun, especially during the years of training, and of how interesting it all was.

    I started my career with the Blind Babies at the Sunshine Home in Leamington Spa. Visitors would come to see them and say 'How can you bear to look after them, it must be so sad?' We however thought if you only knew the mischief some of them got up to, you would feel differently about it.

    Truly they could be divided into two categories: some absolutely fearless, running round and into everything; others having to be encouraged to take each step. We had 30 babies in the house, of all ages up to five or seven years, when they went on to the Blind School.

    Each nurse had her own little family guide, advanced for those days, for which she was specially responsible, although at times we all had to be responsible for supervising the lot when they were playing in the garden, or supposedly taking an after dinner rest.

    At three years of age they went to kindergarten, which was their great joy and delight. They hated holidays. Here they played with the usual toys, learned country dancing and had a percussion band. The older ones learned to do up buttons, tapes, etc. and when they got to this stage the nurse responsible for them was supposed to help them dress themselves in preparation for school.

    They also started to learn the Braille letters. At holiday time the great difficulty was to keep them amused -- one way was to walk them round the garden in a 'tail', singing everything one could think of over and over again and playing ring games with them.

    Each nurse would at times take her special ones out and that was a great excitement. Some of the mischief they got up to swinging on the bird cage, collecting shoes when playing in the garden and throwing them into the sand pit or over the fence into a paddock which didn't belong to us.

    Our dining room was immediately below the nursery where the older ones slept and one evening at supper we heard little voices up above saying 'My shoes are in the garden, are yours?' 'My trousers are in the garden.' And so on. When we went up to see, nearly all the clothes had been collected and thrown out of the window.

    On another occasion everybody was wearing a pair of new shoes in bed and on another, clean clothes had been given out all round. This while the nurse left on duty was busy with the smaller ones in another room.

    Probably because they were blind most of them possessed phenomenal memories.

    Well after several years here I went on to the Children's Hospital in Birmingham to start my training, at that time one of the most up to date in the country, having been re-built after the first world war and, in fact, building was still going on while I was there.