Walking into The Black Cap in Camden Town in the early 1980s, you’d be overwhelmed by the smell of poppers, or amyl nitrate, as in any other gay club in London at that time. Yet other smoke wisps were slowly rising through our community, an undercurrent of something that everyone pretended not to see at first. We carried on using the poppers, even though they’d been linked with the ‘gay cancer’ we’d heard about from America. Volunteers distributed photocopied paper carrying advice: be careful, use a condom. You’d find crumpled leaflets discarded on the bar. Few took them home. It won’t happen to me, we all thought, with the immortality of youth. Then my flatmate Ben’s partner was diagnosed with HTLV-III, the thing I’d seen on a leaflet.

I’d begun my nursing training back in 1977 and now, in my early twenties, was fully qualified and working at a women’s health clinic. I thought: I need to get involved in this. I’d been on the gay scene for years. This was my community and I wanted to help.

I heard about a ward at St Mary’s Hospital that took in people with HTLV-III who were sick. After being interviewed by Ken Fortune, senior nurse, and Mary Bee, ward sister, I started in December 1985. By then, Almroth Wright ward, originally the infectious disease unit, had become the natural place for people to go. There was no treatment for the HIV, and sometimes even the symptom control was pretty poor because we were learning as we went along.

The unit was a long corridor of 14 single, very basic rooms. No ensuites or communal room. We made it as homely as we could, and people could make their room their own. ‘The Pickford van’s going to be outside!’ we’d joke, whenever one particular guy was admitted, he’d bring that much stuff from home. You couldn’t do that on an open ward. Patients would bring their own quilts or duvet covers and we allowed it because it made them happy. Privacy also allowed intimacy. If the flap was up when a partner visited, you gave a loud knock! Everyone smoked back then, and did so in their room. They weren’t going to be around long enough to die of lung cancer, so why not? As nurses, we understood that we couldn’t cure this infection. But we could make it as pleasant, as peaceful and as pain-free as possible.

People got better and left, then got sick and returned again. Until they didn’t. It was hardest when people chose to give up. Some would simply say, ‘I’ve had enough. I don’t want any more treatment. I just want to go now.’ Instinctively, you wanted to respond, ‘Where there’s life, there’s hope!’ or ‘You’ve beaten this before, you’ll beat it again!’ Deep down, though, you’d know they were right. They weren’t going to get better. Many had painful Kaposi’s sarcoma, and chronic diarrhoea. They just wanted to be left alone to fade away. Patients who opted for palliative care would be offered a drip up to keep them hydrated and a morphine pump for the pain. Gradually their bodies gave up.

One sweet guy with awful internal KS and cryptosporidium kept repeating, ‘I just want to go!’ Somehow he took weeks to pass. I remember the anguish in his eyes. By the end he was skin and bone. His skin was breaking down, so we got a special bed that moved around to try and keep his skin intact. His insides were just imploding. When his friends carried his coffin in at his funeral you could tell it wasn’t heavy. There was nothing of him when he died.

Another chose the music he wanted playing around him for the last few days of his life. He was 22. To this day I can’t listen to the Cockteau Twins without thinking of him, the ethereal music coming from his room, and his partner holding his hand. It was like something out of a Shakespearean tragedy.

A patient from Dublin, said, ‘If I’m going to die, I’m going out with a bang!’ He cashed in everything he could, maxed out credit cards and travelled to Australia, New Zealand and Hawaii. For six months he managed to stay well. ‘How was the trip?’ I asked when he returned.

‘Oh Jesus, Theresa, they’re chasing me for all the money. They’re after me! I’m not supposed to be alive…’

But most people fought.

In early 1986 a dancer was admitted to Almroth. He was supremely fit, but PCP had brought his oxygen levels so low we assumed he wasn’t going to make it. Somehow he did. Over the next three years he came in and out, and each time he’d have a procession of dancers arriving to visit. I’d never been exposed to such elegant, beautiful people. They seemed to waft in, two inches above the ground. What a contrast to me in my size 18 scrubs.

‘Darling, if I get better, you’re coming to see a ballet,’ he told me, knowing that I’d never been. He was true to his word, taking me to the ballet at Festival Hall. What he didn’t say was that it was his last performance. In patients like him, I saw incredible strength, tenacity and hope, even when there wasn’t any.

Another patient’s cat died. When he passed, his neighbour came in with two urns. ‘He wants the cat in with him,’ she explained. We unscrewed the lid and tipped the cat ashes in. I’m glad there were no cameras. But I’m also glad that we did our damnedest to fulfil people’s wishes.

It wasn’t all doom and gloom. We organised a TV and video recorder, and a Saturday night tradition was established. Word would go round that we were watching a movie. We’d all gather in the nurses’ station, the floor covered in bean bags, quilts and mattresses. Another nurse, Fiona, would bring popcorn. Sometimes, after a late shift, we’d see if anyone fancied a pint and we’d take them to the pub, the Tavistock, across the road.

Being the top floor of the wing, a fire escape ran up the side of the side of the ward to the roof. In the summertime we’d bring people up there to sunbathe. It was like a beach party. My heart races when I think of the health and safety implications today.

After one funeral too many, I knew I had to get off the ward. People normally get better when you’re a nurse. You expect to encounter death, but this was relentless. In 1988 I moved to the National Aids Counselling Training Unit. Then a community job in Tower Hamlets brought me to working with women living with HIV. From there I went to the Mildmay Hospice, where I met Diana. My patient, Robert, had special educational needs, very little filter, and was a chain smoker.

‘You can’t smoke, the Princess is coming,’ we told Robert, hiding the cigarettes before Diana appeared. She sat on Robert’s bed, shook his hand and said, ‘Now, is there anything I can get you?’

‘Yes. She won’t let me have my cigarettes!’ he said, pointing to me. I thought, I’m going to kill him! But she asked where they were, got the fags out and lit one for him. I’m no royalist but she oozed charisma.

Later, I did four years in Holloway Prison, coordinating and caring for women with HIV. Once you went through those gates, you quickly learned not to break the rules. What I viewed as care, the prison service saw as security risk. After six weeks of working there, I had to give a young woman a HIV-positive result, the first one I’d had to give inside.

She got up and screamed at me. ‘You’re f_____ng kidding!’ as she paced my tiny office. I’ve learned from years of experience that immediately after a positive result, there’s no point in telling people anything because they’re not listening. If we’d been in a traditional clinic, I’d have been able to have more time, invite her back. But I couldn’t do that. I was in a prison.

There was a horrific attitude to HIV amongst inmates and officers. You brought it on yourself. You’re a dirty junkie. Don’t come near me. I reassured her that only she and the clinic would know. She walked out into a packed waiting room of other inmates, holding it together before being taken back to her wing and locked up. What had brought her to prison wasn’t my business, but taking care of her was. I’d just told a woman the most life-changing information, and she was alone in a prison cell! I explained to the wing officer that she needed to return to collect some results. Meanwhile another nurse had nipped out for cream cakes. We sat together and ate them with a cup of tea. There was no support group. I was the only person she could talk to. She came out the other side and we’re still in touch. It’s a joy every time I see her. But she was the exception, not the rule. Most of the women were injecting drug users from horrendously abusive childhoods. Their stories gave me nightmares. But they’d want to tell you. I carried a lot of secrets in my head.

Just before I retired I saw a man in his early twenties for routine bloods. He’d been diagnosed HIV positive and was on medication. He chattered away through the appointment, then asked, ‘Did people used to die of this?’

What a question. On one hand it’s wonderful that it has become such a distant memory, those days are gone. But we can’t forget. We wouldn’t have a fraction of the treatments, education and awareness that we have now if it wasn’t for the men in those beds.

‘Pretty much everyone. Everyone died,’ I told him. I hope he went off and discovered more. If we don’t learn from those days how ignorance and fear, and misinformation can damage a whole community of normal, everyday folk, then we’ve learned nothing. HIV shouldn’t define gay men, or gay culture, but it’s part of our history, of human history.

To quote Dickens: It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. I’d love it if it’d never happened, of course I would. I’d love to see that whole generation reaching old age like me. But I can’t do that. So all I can say is, I’m proud of the nursing. I trained at the Whittington. But I learned to be a nurse at St Mary’s. There I learned compassion, love, and fun. And that what’s good for the patient might not be what the rules say. That’s what it was all about.