The novelist A.J. Cronin based some of his best selling stories on his earlier experience as a doctor in a small mining community in Wales just after the First World War. There was a nurse there who used to help him. Her name was Oliven Davies. She’d served that impoverished community for more than twenty years with a degree of competence, patience and cheerfulness that deeply impressed Dr Cronin. Late one night, after a long and strenuous operation, he asked her why she didn’t make the miners and their families pay her more for her invaluable services to the community. She smiled and told him she had enough to get along. He said to her, ‘You ought at least to get an extra pound a week, God knows you’re worth it.’ To which she replied, ‘If God knows I’m worth it, then that’s all that matters.’