[3] Two years later she moved to Moscow, where she was employed as English tutor to the two daughters of Pavel Sergeyvich Usov, a distinguished heart surgeon.

[4] On the outbreak of the Great War in 1914, she qualified and worked as a Red Cross nurse with the Imperial Russian army, and saw service at both the Galician and the Romanian Fronts.

[6] During and after this journey she wrote a number of articles for The Times, which were based on what she had witnessed and experienced in Russia in the aftermath of the Bolshevik coup.

[11] In 1974, the year in which her First World War diaries were published, she was the subject of a programme English Nurse with the Tsar's Army in the BBC Television documentary series Yesterday's Witness.

[12] The idea of publishing a book based on her 1914–18 diaries and photographs, which had been carefully preserved by her sister Margaret,[13] came as a result of an exhibition she gave of her Russian memorabilia[14] at Heswall in April 1971.

She declined the services of a ghost writer and, working daily from morning until night over a period of thirteen months, she prepared her manuscript entirely by herself, producing over 400,000 words.