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NURSES have been the standout heroes of this pandemic: immortalised in art by Banksy and applauded by all of us at our front doors.

There are other key worker heroes, of course: the unsung carers, cleaners, shop and postal workers; the teachers toiling in schools kept open for essential workers’ children, and not forgetting the transport workers.

At the end of the first weekend in lockdown, a mother of three from my sons’ primary school, always the snappiest dresser at pick-up, posted an exhausted-looking picture of herself in scrubs, at the end of a long weekend working in ICU.

Her nose and cheeks were blistered from the mask, her eyes looked shocked. She did not complain but instead described it as a privilege to have the skills needed; her sympathy was with the patients and families unable to be with them.

There are lots of wonderful books featuring nurses. My mother, who tells winning anecdotes from her training days in the early 1960s, loves the Call The Midwife books by J ennifer Worth. After Florence Nightingale led the professionalisation of nursing in the 19th century, it became one of the more respectable careers open to women.

Vera Brittain’s compelling First World War memoir, Testament Of Youth, vividly conveys what an eyeopening, politicising experience nursing the war-wounded was for a blue-stocking product of the Edwardian bourgeoisie.

In Ernest Hemingway’s terrific tragic love story A Farewell To Arms, Frederic Henry, an American volunteer with the Italian ambulance service, falls deeply in love with Catherine Barkley, an English nurse. Together they flee the Italian front to try to live in peace.

Much of Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient also takes place in Italy. There, at an abandoned villa, Canadian nurse Hana devotedly nurses the devastatingly injured man labelled ‘the English patient’, though he is not.

Let’s hope our respect and gratitude to health workers extends way beyond this emergency and the doorstep claps.