IT makes me very sad to read about elderly or very ill patients being left without food or drink. It often makes me want to turn the clock back to when nurses were trained in hospitals instead of universities.

I did my training on the wards, when I was in the Army nursing service during the war.

I often had patients to care for who had half of their faces blown away. They had to be fed.

We didn’t have things like liquidisers, we had to put their food through a sieve then in a feeding cup with a rubber tube attached to the spout (as they were in those days). It was very time consuming and we were very busy, but it had to be done.

Christmas Day 1944 was the Battle of the Bulge. I was in Belgium and on Christmas night had to cope with 69 patients with the help of one orderly.

We had a visit one day by Sir Harold Gillis, who was in charge of the facial injuries unit.

He came to our hospital in Brussels for an inspection and said the patients were the best looked after he had ever seen. That made the grateful looks from our patients very heart warming and encouraging.

Those boys were so brave. We would feed them then, so why not now?

Penicillin was given by three hourly injections in those days.

Since then, antibiotics and vaccines have made a big difference.

I am proud that my husband worked on them, first with penicillin and then antibiotics.

Mrs M Floyd-Norris, Robin Hood’s Bay.