Millie prefers bows and arrows to dolls but when asked to be the bridesmaid, it's the cruellest task she's endured - and it's all for love.

In this extract, Millie who was raised in Rhyl, North Wales, enjoyed a happy childhood playing with boys and making bows and arrows using six-inch nails. She did not like playing with dolls.

She never heard the word 'lesbian' until she was in her 20s, though she knew about 'queers' as being effeminate men like the characters Julian and Sandy in the BBC's radio show, 'Round the Horne'. Nobody spoke about the sexuality of homosexual people.

She mentions the novel 'The Well of Loneliness' but didn't know anyone who had a copy. It was, after all, considered a 'disgusting book'.

Millie left school at 16 before taking her 'A' levels and after a spell working in a shop, decided to train as a nurse. She moved to Banbury and later London to complete her training where she specialised in midwifery. Millie recalls that the nurses' home was fun and it was 'all girls together'. They often went to a nearby US Air Force base for Saturday night dances, though Millie never formed any relationships with any of the men.

When she was twenty, she met her first real love and the experience was a shockingly pleasurable 'eye-opener', which set the standard for all her subsequent relationships. Unfortunately, the other woman then got married and Millie was asked to be her bridesmaid - a task Millie claims was the hardest thing she ever had to do.

Born in North Wales in 1939, Millie lived alone with her mother and sister after her father left the family when she was still very young. Her mother remarried but Millie did not get on with her stepfather.

A while after leaving school, she trained to be a nurse, eventually being hired as a ship's nurse by the Union Castle Line, which travelled between Southampton and Cape Town.

Millie would later adopt a straight lifestyle when she migrated to Canada but returned to the UK in 1969. Millie rose with the nursing ranks eventually becoming a director of nursing in London during the 1980s. Moving into the private sector she ran several operating theatres at an exclusive hospital in London.

In 1975 Millie enjoyed her first proper relationship before having a shorter affair with another hospital matron. In the late 1990s she met her current partner and both received a blessing from a local priest at Christmas-time in front of all their family members.

'The Well of Loneliness' was a groundbreaking and overtly lesbian novel written by the author Radclyffe Hall in 1928. The novel became the subject of an obscenity trial in Britain after becoming the target of a campaign initiated by the then editor of the Sunday Express, James Douglas. He is quoted as saying that he'd 'rather give a healthy boy or girl a phial of prussic acid than this novel'.

After Radclyffe Hall lost the case, the court ordered that all copies of the book be destroyed. Three decades later, in 1959, 'The Well of Loneliness' was finally re-published and made available in the UK.