Paperback review: Sisters, By Barbara Mortimer

These “Heroic true-life stories from the nurses of World War Two” are moving oral histories, spoken by nurses in short interview form.

Beginning with their training just before the war, it takes us into the Battle of Britain and military nursing abroad.

We hear a vast range of voices, from a Jewish refugee training in Ealing (“Everyone said I wouldn’t like it [Ealing] and I didn’t”) to a Sister posted to Basra and a partially trained Jewish nurse in Egypt (“The hospital was built in tents”).

A fascinating slice of lived history.