A Norfolk nurse, mother of three, and saviour of thousands of children in Romania, tells Peter Stanford why she’ll be celebrating twice over this year

Jane Nicholson celebrates two twenty-fifth anniversaries this year – the first of her reception into the Catholic Church at the shrine of Walsingham in July 1991, and the second of founding  the British-based charity, Fara. The organisation was created in the wake of the overthrow of communism in Romania, back in the days when our TV screens were full of images of state-run institutions where abandoned youngsters were kept chained to beds, starved and unloved. Today Fara – which means “without” in Romanian – runs a whole child-care network in the Eastern European country, serving those who would otherwise quite literally go without.

The two anniversaries, Nicholson is the first to acknowledge, are intimately linked. “I don’t know how I would ever have done the work in Romania without being Catholic. There were times when it was very hard there, and I had to give the work to God. I needed to do that. And the support of the Church, of the sacraments, of my faith, they all seemed to be so much part of me being there, part of every decision I made.”

This former nurse from Norfolk, mother to three grown-up daughters and grandmother of four, speaks softly when we meet in Fara’s UK offices on the medieval high street of Walsingham. So much so that I cannot imagine her ever raising her voice in anger or frustration. “I’m always very polite,” she said with a chuckle, “and that makes people think I am an easy touch, but I’m not.”