My friend Sheila Cross, who has died aged 81, was a formidable doctor (practising under her maiden name, Sheila Lewis) who devoted the whole of her professional career to the care of children, even though she had none of her own. She had the major share in creating the paediatric department at the North Middlesex hospital, and became its head. When she eventually retired in 1993 after 21 years as a tough and demanding consultant paediatrician, she flung herself with equal energy into charitable work, much of it also to do with children.
She was a volunteer with Childline for 19 years, manning telephones to advise and comfort distressed children who rang up anonymously in search of help. When she began to develop macular degeneration in both eyes and seemed in danger of losing her sight, she began voluntary work for the Royal National Institute of Blind People. She was still working at the RNIB a few weeks before her death.
But if this account of her working life seems to picture her as a stern workaholic, that image could hardly be further from the truth. In reality, Sheila was a joyously outgoing woman with a tremendous zest for life. She was an enthusiast about both music and the theatre, a keen amateur painter, and there are some delightful photographs of her as a member of a rowing eight during her time as a medical student in the early 1950s.
By far her greatest talent, however, turned out to be that of friendship. Though she had scarcely any direct relatives, she acquired a vast assembly of devoted friends, all of whom were frequent guests at her home in north London. As a result, her room in the hospice where she eventually died was constantly crowded with affectionate friends, laughing and sipping champagne.
The taste for champagne had come to her late in life. Realising how much she had been missing, she decided to make up for lost time. When she learned last August that she had terminal lung cancer, she declared her intention to go out in a haze of bubbly. The cancer was the last of a series of misfortunes with her health, but she bore them all with a rueful laugh and a defiant lift of her glass.
Sheila was the daughter of an Anglican clergyman, the Rev Henry Lewis, who was vicar of Ton Pentre in the Rhondda Valley, in the grim years of the prewar depression. She learned then about the reality of poverty and its impact on children. Later, she was sent away to a boarding school for clergymen's daughters, but while she was there her mother, May, died. Then, two years into her medical training at King's College hospital in London, her father died too.
Somehow, the funding was found to enable her to carry on. She qualified in 1956, moving immediately to the London Hospital to do a PhD in neonatal respiration. Her boss there was Professor Kenneth Cross, a distinguished medical scientist. The two fell in love and in 1970 married, creating a very happy partnership which came to an end with Kenneth's death in 1990. He was the love of her life, and she never married again.