Bumping into author Anne Watts - Anna Turns

Just as I don't often bump into interviewees out of context, I also don’t often bring emotion into my work but meeting Anne Watts really made me think long and hard.

Anne, 70, spent many of her years as a nurse working for the Save the Children Fund in the wartorn camps of Vietnam and Cambodia.

The perspective of someone who comes from a background of war wounds and broken hearts makes you wonder. Anne is a lady with an incredibly hopeful outlook on life – not completely disheartened like you might perhaps expect. Quite the opposite. And her book ‘Always the Children’ tells the story of her nursing years in her words through the eyes of the children she cared for and the doctors, nurses and soldiers she met along the way. It is powerful stuff and I defy anyone to read the book without a box of Kleenex nearby.

Through all the darkness, human faith is restored and it’s an inspiring book, one which will stay with you long after you finish reading the last page and make you want to find some way of ending the cycle of destruction that comes from soldiers going to battle, civilians being attacked and the unjust cruelty that stems from war, which ever side you fight for. Anne’s stories tell of the faces behind the news headlines and make you realise that just one person can make a real difference.

Read my full interview with Anne Watts in the November issue of Devon Life magazine.

ALWAYS THE CHILDREN: A nurse’s story of home and war by Anne Watts is published by Simon & Schuster UK and is out now priced £12.99.