But it meant she could throw herself into her work which, despite the restrictions of the uniform, offered freedom.

Her team of 10 would meet their superintendent at 8.30pm at the district office who would then hand out jobs. At 9am, they would sally forth on their bikes, vast leather bags strapped on rattling with equipment.

“We didn’t wear caps, we were issued with storm hats which we could pull down over our ears when we were cycling about, because it could be very cold and wet. It could be very tiring getting to patients, because Liverpool is quite hilly. You couldn’t go from house to house according to who was the nearest – you first went to people who were most seriously ill and you were criss-crossing the area all day. I must have covered the length and breadth of Liverpool. It wasn’t like Holby City. Christian names weren’t tolerated, and, as for all the romance, nothing could be further from the truth.”

First task was always the diabetics, who needed their injections of insulin so they could begin their day.

“We’d give all sorts of injections, like iron injections for anaemia. We didn’t have those throw-away syringes. They were glass and metal and we had to boil them up on people’s cookers to sterilise them. Everything was done in the kitchen.”

Dressings changes – bandages boiled and re-used – catheterisation, and washing and turning of bed bound patients were routine. The likes of MRSA was practically unheard of, Beryl says.

“There was lots of TB in Liverpool then. We had to go round testing sufferers’ urine to find out whether they were taking their medication. We were given special gowns to wear in the home, and our hands were sore with wash, wash, wash wherever we went. Now it’s all gels. Such a waste, I think.”

Without so many treatments to offer for cancer, nor hospices, nursing cancer patients at home was common.

They were issued with morphia to administer to help sufferers sleep, sometimes visiting with it twice a day.

“I would have loved to have been married and have children but the men were all lost in Dunkirk,” says Beryl.

“But, because I didn’t have a husband to go home and make an evening meal for, I just pressed on. I got home at all hours. It meant you could work without clock-watching.”

Pedalling home, she’d often be waylaid by new emergencies.

“I can remember, in a very poverty-stricken house, a man haemorrhaged all over me, he coughed and bled all over me. Very few people had telephones then, there was just a lane then a row of shops.