Memories of St Bart's Hospital, Rochester, in 1943

In the war years, I started school when I was 5 years old. Bombs were dropping everywhere. I was 8 in 1943 and was taken into St Bart's Hospital, Rochester, and I was scared. The soldiers plastered the windows over with tape, and then there was Nurse West - she used to kiss me on the forehead every night and then one night she missed me, and she was killed that night on the low road in Rochester by a bomb dropping in the river. When I asked the nurse the next day, she told me she wasn't available because she was working on another ward, but this wasn't true.