“It was always, Thank God. That day's over.” Highvolume Play Pause Stop

The main building at Brockhall Hospital 1993. This building would have been here since its first days as Lancashire Inebriates Reformatory, which opened in 1904.

Courtesy of Lancashire County Council Museums Service

“It was always, Thank God. That day’s over.”

John, born in 1960, was a Nursing Auxillary at Brockhall Hospital for about a year from 1982 to 1983.

His main involvement was with the children. However, if the males adult wards were short staffed they would often ring the children’s wards and ask for staff to come across and help. Here he recalls how he felt working on an adult ward.

Transcript:

You saying there about it being physically demanding… The way you’re describing it John it sounds so emotionally demanding.

“It was. I think because it was just so – If you could have the attitude that it’s a job and it’s just got to be done, and do it, I don’t think I would’ve been as drained. Because it was just my whole upbringing and my attitude to life and people that I struggled so much with that in the fact that you couldn’t give people time, you couldn’t give people you know life that I think mentally it was just so much hard work because it just didn’t feel right. You did your best but at the end of the day – I never drove home on that moped once I think, thinking, What a great day today. Certainly not from the male wards. I did from working with the kids. It was always, Thank God. That day’s over. Please don’t let that phone ring tomorrow. Or, Please don’t ask me. Because it was, it was worlds’ apart. Worlds’ apart.”