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I came to England in 1951, just before my 18th birthday. My life in Guyana was pleasant. I was a school girl and had a settled home. We were not rich in any way, but we had a comfortable life. The school I went to was like an English grammar school, and we followed the English curriculum very closely.
My older sister was already a nurse in Yorkshire and got the application forms for me and a friend; two of us went over together in 1957.
When my brother was little, an ambulance came to take him to hospital. I remember the ambulance pulling into our street and I saw this nurse sat in the front and I thought, ‘What a wonderful job. I would love to do that.’ I was only seven or eight years old at the time, but that thought kept in my mind. I kept telling my mum, ‘I would like to be a nurse.’
Dad was born in the town of Bharuch, in Gujarat in 1919, a regional centre of commerce on the Namada River. His father, an accountant, ran a company importing coconuts. One of nine children he loved sport especially swimming, which he did surreptitiously against his parents’ wishes after a friend died of drowning.
I travelled from Malaysia in 1959 to train to be a nurse at Edgware General in London. I wanted to be independent. My cousin had already came over, and suggested it. I didn't realise it would be such hard work!
It must have been around 1955, but I can’t be exact about when I arrived in England. I came from Waterford in Southern Ireland. I was the third youngest of nine siblings.
Colonel Yvette Gussie Gordon MBE, MR (nee Spencer-Auber) is a retired nursing sister and the first Sierra Leonean female to enlist in the Sierra Leone Military Forces after Sierra Leone’s independence.
