IT is 60 years since Wendy Grounds, of Pickersleigh Road, started her training as a paediatric nurse, and this week she recalls her days at St Cuthbert's Hospital, an annexe of the Birmingham Children's Hospital, which stood on Worcester Road on the site now occupied by Morgan Court. Next door is Baxhill Nursery, formerly the hospital's training school, which remains very much as it was then.

MY colleagues and I were 18 years old in that hot August of 1947.

We arrived in summer dresses, soon replaced by white uniforms, with black shoes and stockings, topped off with starched caps.

During the preliminary training we learned how to give bed baths, enemas, injections and sit patients on bed pans - all with the help of a floppy, worn dummy. We bandaged each other into spirals, reverse spirals and figures of eight and learned how to cope with anyone haemorrhaging to death. We wrote essays and drew diagrams and at the end of nine weeks we were fully-fledged probationary nurses.

The young patients were suffering from tuberculosis, arthritis, burns that needed skin grafts and so on. They stayed at St Cuthbert's for months at a time and when well enough went to the hospital school next door.

For the night nurse it was a long, lonely vigil as the wind whistled through the windows of the open-air ward where children with weak chests slept.

It was unnerving when curious strangers prowled around and peered through the shutters, but even more unnerving when one night one actually got in.

On that night a little boy from the open-air ward climbed out of his cot and sat on my knee. I put him back to bed and tucked him in but within minutes he was out again demanding to be cuddled.

"What's the matter with you tonight?" I enquired, non-plussed by his behaviour.

"I'm frickened," he admitted.

"Why are you afraid?" I asked.

"Cos there's a man under my bed and I want him to go away."

I had to do something.

I placed the child on my chair, wrapped him in my cloak and walked into the open-air ward. I looked straight under the cot and sure enough a soldier was crouched there.

"Out!" I commanded.

He struggled from under the cot, jumped through the open window and headed off up the Worcester Road.

What had he got in mind? Perhaps he had just come in out of the cold.

We often talk about our hospital days and think fondly of St Cuthbert's and the children there.

Many of them were only a few years younger than us but we wonder if they remember their days playing in the garden with the young nurses and splashing in the pool.

I hope they grew up to overcome the problems of their early years and look back with pleasant memories of their spell at Malvern.