I first went to the Butterfield in 1940 to do odd jobs and to see if I could cope. I made the beds and swept the floors in the wards. When the cook left I volunteered for the job and liked it so much that I stayed there until I retired. It was wonderful and I loved it. I had my own room so that I could be there early to provide breakfasts. I did the cooking on my own although a young woman came in to do the washing up.

The hospital was a busy place with beds for twelve patients, outpatient and casualty departments. I always thought of it as a beehive full of busy little bodies. Surgeons came from London to perform operations, dentists pulled teeth, tonsils were removed, babies were circumcised and broken limbs were x-rayed and plastered.

Domestic science was always a favourite subject at school and I loved cooking. I used to read as much about it as I could, studying the subject constantly. My mother was a very knowledgeable and brilliant cook and a great help in those early years.

I would never buy cheap meat because I always felt that the patients wanted to get better and so they deserved the best. Tuesdays it would be stuffed shoulder or roast leg of lamb and roast sirloin of beef on Saturdays. I cooked liver, sausage, and minced beef too. We gave equal support to the local butchers although it was always fish on Fridays. I bought plaice for patients with gastric trouble because it has a finer texture than cod or haddock.

I remember buying meat from the shop in Abbey Road which is now known as Alec Day and W H Ewles and Sons in the same street but nearer the Market Place. Groceries were bought from John Smith’s shop in North Street for six months of the year and then from another business on the corner of Meadowgate where my parents’ shop used to be [Richard Pattison, ladies’ and gents’ tailoring, destroyed by fire in 1922].

Saturday afternoons were reserved for baking and I used to make fruit pies, mince pies, or jam tarts so that there were plenty of sweets for the weekend. I also used to get the Sunday lunch ready. I had Sunday off and so the patients always had a cold lunch on that day. I used to slice Saturday’s meat so that it could be heated in gravy. I prepared the vegetables and then someone else went in on a Sunday morning to prepare it all. I used to buy a lot of vegetables, nice fresh stuff like carrots and swedes, but the hospital was always blessed with kind farmers as friends who would bring in crates of lovely cabbages and loads of sprouts.

In the autumn, after the harvest festival services had been held at the local churches, the produce was often brought to us for the benefit of the patients. There was a shed available to store apples and stacks and stacks of marrows while a mountain of carrots would be buried in the hospital garden to preserve them. This helped out in the winter and I used to fetch them in as I needed.

Fresh milk was brought round in metal churns which Mrs Curtis from the dairy in Eastgate would struggle to bring in. The pint or half-pint measures were clipped inside each churn and I would ladle the milk into bowls according to how many pints we wanted. Twenty pints per day was our usual order. Later on, when conditions became more hygienic, it came in bottles.

I prepared a lot of meals for convalescent patients, those still in bed after undergoing an operation and I found it enjoyable and interesting cooking for people with diabetes or tummy trouble. Food for a diabetic diet had to be weighed and measured in those days. If people had gastric problems it was more or less like feeding a baby from start to finish. They would be on watered milk for twenty-four hours followed by a little milk pudding and then perhaps some steamed fish.

There was a private ward at the Butterfield and those patients had the same food but different cutlery with china plates and a glass dish when they had fruit for tea. The other patients had green pottery plates and then pink ones when the green ones were damaged. Everything was very respectable.

There was one elderly gentleman well known to the town who had a terrible gastric problem. He had a stomach ulcer and was in hospital quite a while before he could have anything solid. The matron told me that I could take him off the milk diet and offer him a light breakfast in the mornings. A light breakfast meant bread and butter with the crust cut off and a lightly boiled, poached or scrambled egg.

I chatted through the options with him and he chose a boiled egg. He was such a lovely old man. When I got up the following morning to go to the kitchen the night nurse came to me to tell me that the elderly patient had died during the night. This really upset me because I was so looking forward to giving him his first decent meal for a long time but he never got it in the end. At least they couldn’t blame me for the egg.