AT the end of May 1940 as some 338,000 British and French soldiers were being rescued from the beaches of Northern France, hospitals all over Britain were geared up to receive the wounded.

One such institution was Calderstones near Whalley - a mental institution set in lovely country with its own beautiful grounds, that had been converted into a wartime children's hospital.

The children were evacuated before the troops came back from Dunkirk according to Nancy Harker, who was then a 29-year-old nurse working there.

Now 96, and still living in the Ribble Valley, Nancy vivdly remembers the day when she first saw the lines of wounded men returning from France.

"I will never forget being in the team of nurses that awaited the long hospital train littered with red crosses as it steamed into Whalley station," Nancy said. "I remember asking Why have these poor things had to come all the way to the top of England after all they have been through?' The answer came quickly. Because hospitals in the south have been emptied for the (German) invasion.' That struck home!"

But there was no time to dwell on her country's uncertain future as stretcher after stretcher bearing men who had suffered all sorts of wounds and mutilations were carried off the train and transported to Calderstones. The frenetic activity is faithfully reproduced in the film, Nancy said. "Even now I remember the horror of it all," she recalled. "The stench of gangrene, and the sight of wounds that cried out for immediate treatment but which had had to wait for days to be treated. Of the 64 who were brought on to my ward, seven had to have limbs amputated.

"The amputees included a man called Bert Heath. He was a lad of 30 who was an example to us all. One leg had been smashed to bits by gun shot wounds on the battlefield. He had to have his leg amputated in an ambulance in France. Then he was caught again when the enemy attacked the ambulances. As soon as he reached us his right arm was amputated. There was a cavity in his side which in the words of one of the other nurses included half a vest and enough iron stuff to build a tank'. He referred to his arm stump as his baby', and he promised to race me round the ward as soon as he got his peg leg'.

"His bravery was not lost on the man in the next bed with multiple gun shot wounds. He could not stop groaning, and time and again he asked me for the needle' so he would not disturb Heath."

But it is the touching scene in the film where Keira Knightley's character, Briony Tallis, is sent by the ward sister to hold the hand of a delirious wounded soldier which is closest to Nancy's experience.

"As the nights went by it seemed that our patients became immune to the drugs we were giving them," she recalls. "Then there was little one could do other than spend a few moments with them, laying a hand on their foreheads, holding their hands and saying a prayer."

Some of the senior nurses in Atonement have a steely no-nonsense air about them. In spite of her kind nature, Nancy took no nonsense. Some French soldiers who had pretended to be wounded to be evacuated from Dunkirk arrived at Calderstones and miraculously recovered' and spent their first night listening to the news in a linen cupboard. "No time for them!" Harker scrawled indignantly in her report. They were taken away the next day.

As for Nancy, she carried on treating the Dunkirk wounded until most of them recovered enought to be sent home.

She was transferred to another hospital where she looked after servicemen with infectious diseases. Only after the war did she hang up her uniform, just in time to give her the chance to have children and to enjoy a well-rounded life with her soldier-cum-solicitor husband.

It was a life far removed from the tortured lives of the nurses in Atonement.