A GREAT-grandmother has looked back on her time nursing during the Second World War as she celebrates her 100th birthday.
Gladys Middleton, who lives at Lugano care home in Powell Road, Buckhurst Hill, worked as a nurse at Whipps Cross hospital in the late 1930s and early 1940s, after moving to London from Derbyshire.
“I was in charge of a ward,” she said. “It was all men and sometimes they would smoke on the ward, even though they weren’t supposed to.
“I told the doctor and he’d say ‘leave them to me’.
“I had to write lots of notes and paperwork there and I lived at the hospital.”
Another memory is of putting tuberculosis patients on the hospital’s balconies in all weather, sometimes covered in plastic sheeting to keep the rain off, in the belief that fresh air was all that could cure the disease.
Although she battled rheumatic fever while training, she passed her exams and was promoted from staff nurse to ward sister while at Whipps Cross.
She met her husband, Bill, at the hospital, while he was visiting a relative there and the couple married in 1941, back in Derbyshire.
She left nursing before the end of the Second World War, to work at a nursery in Knotts Green, Leytonstone, looking after children as young as 18 months old while their mothers were working long hours towards the war effort.
The couple lived in Walnut Way, Buckhurst Hill, when they first married, later moving to Leytonstone and then Leyton with their daughters, Janet, who was born in 1944, and Margaret, born five years later.
Mr Middleton died in 1977 and Mrs Middleton lived at their home in Murchison Road, Leyton, until she moved to the nursing home six years ago.
She said seeing her family, including her two grandchildren and two great-grandchildren, had helped keep her young.
“The odd drop of sherry has kept me going too,” she added.
To celebrate her birthday on Saturday (May 5), her family visited her at the nursing home and staff there had a picture from her nursing days printed on her cake.
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