Roden, Bessie Rata née Lever, 1907-1997 (Person)

Employment: Rata Lever trained as a nurse at the Auckland Hospital and did her midwifery training at Queen Charlotte Hospital in London. She later nursed in Kenya and South Africa. She also worked in a branch of the RAF in Secret Service in the Sudan and Egypt. On returning to NZ she worked for seven years with a local doctor followed by several years with the Crippled Children’s Society. 

Author: She wrote many newspaper articles, translated English into Braille for the blind and on her retirement her autobiography was published in 1973 Here There and Most Places.

"It is the biography of a New Zealander, a farmer’s daughter, who, through dogged persistence realised her two main ambitions – to become a nurse, and to travel to foreign places. It is an absorbing account covering backblock farming days, nursing in the slums of London, living in many parts of Africa, the World War II in Egypt and England, travel to Japan, the Orient, Iceland, Greenland, Russia and Scandinavia. Altogether Mrs Roden has made eleven trips out of New Zealand and in her story she takes us with her."

Family life overseas: Rata married RAF Flight Lt Alan Roden in Nairobi, Kenya, in 1940. Their daughter Margaret was born in South Africa in 1942 and travelled to the UK with her mother at three months old. In December 1943, Squadron Leader Alan Roden failed to return after a bombing raid on Berlin. With difficulty, as it was wartime, Rata managed to get passage for herself and her daughter on a ship to New Zealand, arriving in Auckland in December 1944 and going straight to Tauranga.

Tauranga: She lived in Tauranga for the rest of her life, she retained a taste for travel, and took many trips both in New Zealand and overseas.

See also: Lever family papers, Ams 406/5.