Sandbags piled up to protect the Australasian Hospital. Dorothy who sent this memory into the Guild magazine is pictured standing far right. She joined nursing staff in The Girls Village Home in 1938, as a medical ward sister, and believes she might have stayed a lifetime if the outbreak of war had not disrupted her career. Dorothy wrote;

I arrived at The Village at the end of December 1938, in time for a party to welcome in the New Year. The staff all went to bed tired and very happy in the early hours of 1939. Little did they guess what the year ahead held.

All the staff of The Village were committed Christians, so we had a lot in common. We were pledged to make the evangelising of the children our first priority. Each workday started and ended with ward prayers, which I had not been used to but I was very happy to take my part of leader as ward sister. Those prayers set the pattern for our day in the morning and left our night staff and the young patients in God's loving care for the night.

What a lovely place I found The Village to be, with everything a small community could need. There were, I remember, about 1,400 children there; girls from babyhood to 16 years old and boys up to five years old, living in cottages. Each cottage held a 'family' of children of ascending ages with mother and auntie in charge, as near to a proper family as possible. One cottage was the home of invalid girls who had never been well enough to go out into the world to earn a living, so Barnardo's continued to care for them - they did the most beautiful embroidery. Another cottage was the home of girls who went out to daily jobs, mostly housework, and were not paid enough to be self-supporting. Barnardo's acted in 'loco parentis' until they married or became self-supporting.

Of course, as everybody knows, 1939 saw Herr Hitler ranting and raving all over Europe. Everyone felt threatened. The war clouds quickly gathered and children all over the country were torn from their homes if they were in dangerous areas and evacuated to safer places.

Barnardo's children were no exception and I well remember the tears in our eyes and lumps in our throats as we saw The Village children lined up, gas masks over their shoulders and carrying a day's rations, waiting for transport. They looked so lost and frightened, not knowing where or to what they were going.

The children went to private families, one, two or three to a house, and attended local schools. The Village looked deserted but soon evacuees from France and Belgium came to live there.

The hospital took patients from the London Hospital in the East End of London so we changed from caring for children to nursing adults, some of who had their operations at 'the London' and came to us a day or so afterwards to convalesce.

In 1998 Dorothy was in her nineties and a window, she had married Mr. Maclean in 1944

Reproduced from the Guild Magazine Summer 1998

Who remembers the out patients sister at Barkingside who was there from 1947 to 1967 click here to read a letter she sent to the Guild magazine. Note: they used to say the day sister Dyson leaves, Barkingside will close. Well she left in 1967 to take up her appointment in a Nursing home. See it was true!

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