Natália Dias Costa was born in 1937 in Lemede, in the municipality of Cantanhede. She was the daughter of Manuel, a tavern keeper and barber, and Maria de Jesus, and had four sisters and two brothers. She told us that she began working at a very young age in agriculture, on the land her parents rented: “We were always working. Our parents didn’t give us days off. With the hoe, or at the wells drawing water, with cows and the press, or with buckets at the sweep or pulley. We also went to collect firewood in the pine forests… It was hard!”

She recalled that at that time “men’s shaving was paid for yearly, with sacks of maize. But it gave my mother plenty to make cornbread. We lived through the war and everything was rationed—sugar and rice. We could only buy a quarter of a kilo!”

Girls went to school only until they learned how to read, and Mrs Natália studied only up to the third grade because “parents thought that boys were the ones who needed the fourth grade. I only took the fourth-grade exam when I was 23, and it was a brother who prepared me.”

It was 1960, and Mrs Natália wanted to leave farm work and went to work at the Crèche of the Rovisco Pais Colony Hospital. She remembers going with her father by bus to Tocha and that when she arrived she did not know what had been planned for her: “It was the first time I worked outside the fields—I had always worked in agriculture, but I didn’t really want to continue, it was very hard work, so I decided to try something else. Right at the gate they told me that the employee who had stayed the longest had been there only eight months. So I thought: this can’t be good, whatever they have in store for me… I was already afraid! And when I got there they sent me to the kitchen. It was a very unpleasant surprise! They had saved that position (as cook) for me and I had never cooked.”

Mrs Natália explained that at the Crèche there were small children up to the age of three, children of patients who were taken there shortly after birth. The facilities were good, the children seemed cheerful, and they were closely cared for during the day. At that time, she said, there were around 30 children and 10 employees. She was responsible for the kitchen: “It was a lot of work, because in a place like that you never stop—breakfasts, washing dishes, then lunch, and more dishes… And I wouldn’t stop until my fingernails were gone, which made such a difference to me! And I couldn’t sit down. The kitchen was inside the Crèche and it was just me. There was a kind girl who took the children for walks and helped me a little, setting and clearing the table, for example.” Among the dishes she cooked, Mrs Natália clearly remembers a large pork leg roasted in the oven with just a few drops of vinegar, which was very tasty.

She had little contact with the children, as she said: “That wasn’t my job—if it had been, it would have been more pleasant—but I didn’t have the education for that either.”

At night, Mrs Natália couldn’t sleep because her room was in the nursery hall and the children made noise: “And I would wake up and go to them, but I couldn’t do anything, because they needed their diapers changed… I don’t know how it was at the time, but there wasn’t much monitoring of babies during the night.”

Mrs Natália stayed only a short time at the Crèche: “I worked there for only two months. When I said I was leaving, I was called to the office to explain the reasons, but I couldn’t say that it was Mrs Maria Luísa who created a bad atmosphere. So I had to make something up and say it was to help my mother. What I really wanted was to leave because I couldn’t cope—I didn’t adapt. It didn’t work out for me. Whenever Mrs Maria Luísa came in, I would start crying. I was afraid of that woman. She would go into the kitchen and run her finger over each dish, one by one, to check if it was properly washed. Her personality and strictness were the reason many people stayed only a short time. And that was why I left, even though she promised to place me as a seamstress. I didn’t complain about the kitchen work and I didn’t accept the offer. I think that, deep down, she knew that no one wanted to be there because it was far too hard a job for just one person.”

Before going to work at the Hospital, she had already heard that there were around 800 patients there and even knew people who were admitted: “From Vilamar, for example. There were two brothers there, and one of them with his wife. I was even a godmother at one of their weddings. It was a disease that affected the skin, very strange. It was a miracle that they managed to eradicate that disease.”