In Love and War: Nursing Heroes

In the aftermath of the Battle of Britain, nurses in the burns ward of the Queen Victoria Hospital in East Grinstead, Sussex, began caring for aircrew with horrific and disfiguring facial burns. The ward was under the direction of pioneering plastic surgeon Archibald McIndoe, who established revolutionary new surgical and therapeutic treatments. His patients banded together to form the Guinea Pig Club. Their experiences, and McIndoe’s trailblazing work, created a company of heroes. The surgeon encouraged friendships and relationships between patients and nursing staff, and nurses played a vital role in the treatment and rehabilitation of these men, but it was a contribution made at significant personal and professional cost. For the child Liz Byrski, born in 1944 and growing up in East Grinstead, the faces of the Guinea Pigs were literally the stuff of her nightmares. In her late sixties, Liz goes to make peace with those memories, and to hear from the nurses whose stories have never been told. This thought-provoking memoir considers issues of truth, fact, fiction and the nature of memory, of how we respond to facial disfigurement, and the challenge of weaving a personal narrative of childhood fears and their impact into a story of wartime and immediate post-war history.