`LOVE IS MY CALLING' I

PICTURES & STORY by BERNARD COCKSHUTT
TELEVISION cameras invading Et convent are no new thing, but when ATV broadcast "About Religion" on Sunday, November 20, an actual clothing ceremony will appear on the screen for the first time in a programme entitled "Love Is My Calling".
Thirty of their technicians were sent last week to the mother house and novitiate of
the "Blue Nuns" at Sudbury Hill, Middlesex, where they
made a telerecording of the
ceremony conducted by Mgr. Vernon Johnson.
The postulant who will appear on the screen is 21-year-old Ann Currie — Sister Mary Rose from South Uist in the Hebrides, who was a cadet nurse for two years at the Blue Nuns' hospital in Edinburgh and who is now one of the novices at Sudbury.
The Blue Nuns — strictly speaking, the Little Company of Mary, the English congregation founded by Mother Mary Potter in 1877 are perhaps best known in the south for their work at St. Andrew's Hospital, Dollis Hill, in northwest London.
St. Andrew's deals particularly with kidney and similar disorders, under the direction of Sir Eric Riohey, one of the leading authorities in this work, and it was here, in the Mary Potter ward now used for nursing old people. that the first plastic skin unit in this country was formed by the late Sir Archibald Macindoc. famous for his plastic surgery on injured airmen at East Grinstead during the war.
But at St. Andrew's there are now fewer Sisters nursing than for many years, which means that pressure on some departments is very great and that the Sisters in the operating theatre and the X-ray department are particularly busy. Recently, the Sisters were able to reopen their novitiate in England at Sudbury Hill, where next month's broadcast is coming from. They began in February, 1959, with four postulants. Now there are 18 — including seven qualified nurses -and it is hoped that in a few years' time the wards at Dollis Hill will again be fully staffed by the nuns. Meanwhile, anyone wishing to enter the hospital should have no fears. There are also 75 devoted lay nurses on the staff, and, as somebody who directed me to the hospital remarked ; "It's got a wonderful reputation, you know!"