St Helena Hospice came about because several people could see that we could be looking after people who we then called ‘terminally ill’, much better. Deidre Allen, who worked at Severalls Hospital, had been up to another hospice and came back to Colchester wanting to do that, supported by the consultant Dr Peter Kennedy. 

At the same time Irene Overton, who was chair of the soroptimists, also thought we should be looking at hospice care locally, and wanted her year of being chair to raise the money for the launch of a hospice. They all went to the former Mayor, councillor Joyce Brooks, and she held an open meeting at the town hall.

I’d been thinking about it too because my husband Chris was doing general practice and I was working in the oncology department at Essex County Hospital. When we were students we knew Cicely Saunders, the founder of the modern hospice movement, and we’d visited St Joseph’s Hospice in London.

I’d gone all over the country looking at different hospices, looking at what I thought was good practice, and wherever I went, people were telling me ‘I feel so safe here’. After we opened I thought, I wonder how long it’s going to be before somebody says that. And it was within 48 hours, which was wonderful.

But we were still fighting the concept that you go there to die. I always echo Cicely Saunders that you go to a hospice to live until you die.

The whole idea of helping people live until their last breath and for the family to be involved and supported, all this time later is still something that people don’t realise until they’ve actually experienced it. 

So there we were with the first few people being admitted and I always remember it was like living in a fog because I was learning on the hoof as well. I started to find people were coming in looking awful and then within 24/48 hours they were sitting up, they weren’t feeling so sick, and they were feeling out of pain.