We were all in denial ... People were dying

NOTHING annoys Gertie Shields more than the unwritten rule that some things should remain unspoken.

She remembers as a child, coming home from school with an instruction from the nuns to ask for a contribution “for the black babies”.

In exasperation, her widowed mother, struggling to raise five young children on her meagre dressmaker’s earnings, sighed an off-the-cuff reply: “Tell them I have enough white babies to look after.”