A chance telephone call 16 years ago from the parents of a desperately sick child let to the founding of a hospice movement for children which has new spread across the world. Maureen Cleave meets Sister Frances, the founder of Helen House Hospice, one of the charities in this year's Daily Telegraph Christmas Appeal.

SISTER FRANCES Dominica is a creature of impulse; she responds to the woman in trouble on the telephone,the stranger in distress at the gate. This is due partly to her calling - she is a nun,a member of the Society of All Saints, an Anglican community in Oxford - and partly to her habit, when young, of fainting at the sight of anything upsetting that she could do nothing about.'It was at the Festival of Britain in 1951,' she said. 'I must have been about nine. We went to the newly opened Festival Hall which was full of plate-glass doors.This woman walked straight into me. Her nose was smashed in, there was blood all over her face, yet it was I who fainted.That,and other occasions, made me realise that to be an onlooker in the face of suffering is unbearable.'

She felt she had to pitch in and that is how Helen House, the world's first hospice for children, came into being in 1982.'It was so obvious what had to be done, she said.'The church must be a pioneer. God is always one step ahead.'

The story is well-known. As a result of a telephone call from a stranger, Sister Frances became friendly with the parents of Helen Worswick, a little girl of two-and-a half who had never recovered from an operation for a massive brain tumour. When the doctors said there was no more to be done, her parents, Jacqueline and Richard, brought her home.'Home was where she belonged. Whatever it costs in any terms, that was where she should be cared for. But I watched her parents getting more and more tired, looking after her day and night, and a new baby day. So I asked them if they would trust me enough to lend her to me.' Helen would come to stay in Sister Frances's room at the convent for a few nights at a time. She never heard Helen speak, never saw her smile, but she and the sisters came to love her and still do. She will be 21 in December. Sister Frances began to see the need for a place where such children and their parents could go for a rest.

She is 54 but youthful in the disconcerting manner of nuns - tall and graceful with swift, deft movements, blessed with energy and good health. She had just driven back from Ely, where she had been leading a Methodist retreat, and was leaning against a filing cabinet in the office at Helen House, eating lunch from a tray behind her, chatting to Catherine Wilson, the secretary, and opening her letters. There was a cheque for £55 from a primary school in Ealing and an invitation to give a talk in Houston, Texas, next summer.

Helen House costs £3,000 a day to run, all of it coming from voluntary contributions, most of it in small sums. Someone had just donated all her wedding cheques, with which some bright red garden furniture had been bought. They never ask for money, but Catherine Wilson sends a newsletter to 7,000 people twice a year. She and Sister Frances were talking about the pervious weekend.

Once a year they close Helen House and have an open weekend for the parents of the 240 children who have stayed there and who have died since its founding 14 years ago.There had been 100 parents on both the Saturday and Sunday. They attend a service in the nuns' chapel, walk in the garden, have lunch and talk. Invariably they pick out their child's photograph on the pinboard in the playroom, their child's name in the book of remembrance. The children may die at home or in hospital, but they are always remembered at Helen House. Some of the parents have been coming back for 10, 12 years. Catherine keeps in touch with them all. She has worked there for six years. 'Three children died in my first week, but there hasn't been a day when I didn't want to come in,' she said 'It's lovely.'

Most of the time it's good fun. The previous night some Morris dancers had arrived with a cheque for œ1,000 and they had danced for the children in the playroom. The following day she was off to London to pick up the collection tins from Claridge's.

Helen House is for children with slowly progressive, life-limiting diseases such as muscular dystrophy. Other diseases are more obscure, and some are so rare they have yet to be named. Many are genetic, so you may find two or three children afflicted in the same family. The children come to Helen House - up to eight at a time - at any stage during their illness, often with their parents and siblings, and even their grandparents. Everyone has a good time, in particular the siblings, who often have less of their parents' attention at home. Someone comes in specially to play with them. As Catherine says, 'We make the best of every day.' The house comprises two sides of a triangle, so the garden invades all the rooms. Each child has his own. It's pretty, spacious, comfortable and the food is delicious.

There are 40 full and part-time staff, called the team. One of them is allotted to each child for feeding, bathing, changing, turning, playing with and cuddling, but they put their hand to anything. Two people do the weekly shopping and cooking. The night staff do the ironing. Catherine had just had the hoover out. If they have one thing to give, it's their time. They always have time to talk to parents and children. The Worswicks can remember, when Helen was desperately ill, having to leave notes pinned to her bed begging for information in case the consultant flashed in and out when they weren't there. Twenty-four hours a day, 365 days a year, there's someone on the telephone to talk to at Helen House.

Everyone has meals together - the team, parents, siblings, children if well enough, me. There are no uniforms, no plaques saying 'In Memory of...', no officious signs but for one - an illuminated green sign saying 'Exit', on which the safety regulation people insisted. Sister Frances had been affronted. 'When you come to stay with friends,' she said, 'you don't expect to find illuminated green signs saying Exit.'

We were now in a small sitting-room. If there is a mystery about Sister Frances it is how her school, Cheltenham Ladies' College failed to spot a very effective operator. She is also a persuasive speaker and a good writer, but as a schoolgirl, Frances Ritchie was a failure. The daughter of a chartered accountant and a musician, surrounded in childhood by high hopes, she made three stabs at O-levels and even then got only five. But she already knew what she had to do. 'I knew at the age of three that I was going to be a nurse. My dolls and teddies were always ill. When I was 5 1/2, my brother was born with one lung and I used to visit him in Great Ormond Street. I had to mark time for the next 13 years. I think nursing is a very good basic grounding for anything in life. It teaches you common sense, compassion and sense of humour. You meet people at their most vulnerable, and when they recover you help them to become independent.' The Royal College of Nursing has made her a Fellow, which pleases her very much, but prompts the wry reflection that, with five 0-levels, the profession would now be closed to her.

She believes that religious faith is caught, not taught, and hers was caught from her grandfather, an elder of the Church of Scotland for 49 years. 'He rarely talked about God - he just lived his faith, and example is infinitely more telling than words. I can recall sitting beside him in church, not understanding a word but being overawed by the mystery of it all. I was confirmed when I was 16, and felt rather frightened by my religious fervour. I hate God to be dramatic, and he has tended to be dramatic in my life from time to time. It's a grievance I have. But when I started nursing in Great Ormond Street, church dropped off a bit.'

It was during her general training at the Middlesex that she nursed a priest for six weeks after a coronary thrombosis. 'He had strangely clad visitors, nuns heavily swathed in black, clutching black books with coloured markers. He was an extreme Anglo-Catholic in his allegiance. When he left, he said to keep in touch, as lots of people do.'

She found herself having tea with him in Clerkenwell and she began to go to his church. 'I didn't fall in love with God at this stage, but I became more and more committed. Nine months later, I went on a pilgrimage to Walsingham for the weekend, and this was a very emotional episode in my life. I didn't know whether to be absolutely thrilled or horrified by the extremity of people's faith. It was a long way from the Church of Scotland and from Quakerism. At the time, Elizabeth Fry was my great heroine, with her desire for social justice, simplicity of life and love of silence. Besides, I had my future planned, all good missionary stuff. I would work for Save the Children, nursing war wounded in Vietnam, and then marry, have five children and adopt five more.

'On Sunday morning, October 4, 1964, waiting in church for the service to begin, I knew what I was going to do. It was God being dramatic again.'

She completed her training and went to visit a convent belonging to the Society of All Saints outside St Albans.'The bus put me down at the bottom of a poplar-lined drive, and I thought to myself, This is it.' There was consternation in the family; the whole thing smacked of Rome.' In the religious life you have eight years to make your final decision. Not many engagements last that long - marriage is far more risky. But I had no doubts from start to finish - I had fallen in love with God. Just as in marriage, this heady experience gave way to a steadier loving, the kind that sees you through ups and downs. Do you know the Butterfly song? "If I were a butterfly, I'd thank you Lord for giving me wings," Each verse ends, "But I just thank you Father for making me, me". That's how I feel. I want it sung at my funeral; I've told the Sisters.'

In the end her family came round - indeed, her parents now live in the convent grounds - and the Order, recognising what Cheltenham Ladies' College had not, made her Mother General at the astonishingly early age of 34. She had three houses in England and two in America in her charge, and the sisters in the Oxford house had two surprises in store for them. The first of these was the building of Helen House in their large garden of the Cowley Road.

Sister Frances had the idea in February 1980. By November 1982, they had raised £1 million, built Helen House and opened it to children. 'We just had a little working party, including Helen's parents,' she said. 'I'm allergic to committees. We had no governing body, no board, no official fundraiser. All Saints is a registered charity, so we had a structure and trustees in place. There was nothing to stop us getting on with it. Once the plans were drawn up, the money flowed in and everything fell into place.'

She is now honorary director. She does the speaking, travelling all over the world talking about it and the care of sick and dying children. In 1989 she asked no to be re-elected as Mother General.' To the relief of the community,' she said lightly. 'You tend to run out of creative energy.' Besides, she had already sprung her second surprise.

In 1988 she had gone to Ghana to lead a clergy conference on healing. She was invited to visit a hospital. 'There on a bed was this little chap. There had been a terrible drought and he and his mother were starving - she couldn't look after him. He was 10 months old and he weighed eight pounds. He grinned up at me and held out his arms. I picked him up and cuddled him. They closed that ward because of cholera and the next time I saw him he'd been moved. He wasn't even in a cot but on a piece of cloth on a concrete floor and he was grey with gastro-enteritis. The doctor said he would not survive.'

The reader mindful of paragraph one will know what happened next.

'I found myself saying, "Can I take care of him?" I'd fallen in love with him - he was absolutely beautiful. I couldn't bear to think of him dying. I left some money for him with the doctor. And then I thought, "My God, what have I done?" We were 25 sisters in the convent; there would be 25 different reactions - from ecstasy to shock horror.'

The baby was not expected to survive, but he did, and arrived two weeks later at Heathrow Airport with a spare nappy, a KLM rug saying Property of Royal Dutch Airlines, a bib and a toy elephant the stewardess had given him. He could not sit unsupported, couldn't hold objects, couldn't sallow solid food. Five and half months later, with the devoted attention of so many admirers, he was walking. Two years ago she adopted him officially and they now live in a flat together near the convent. This February they went back to Ghana to meet his birth parents and baby sister, call Frances after her.

There are now 11 hospices for the children in Britain and more in the planning. They are being built in Canada, the US and Australia. Sister Frances said, 'In St Paul's Epistle to the Ephesians, he says, "We are God's work of art." However helpless a person, they are deserving of infinite respect, infinite love, infinite care. They are very damaged works of art, but in God's eyes they are infinitely precious.'

The art of living we can all work at, not so the art of dying. The more sophisticated a society, she said, the less well it will cope with death. She learnt what she now knows from a Protestant Irishwoman who came to the door of the convent one day to ask for help. 'She had a 10-year-old daughter dying of cancer and she was desperate. I went with her to see the specialist in London and at the end of her daughter's life I went to live with her. She was a single parent and she needed a friend.

'When her daughter died, I could see she wasn't going to let any undertaker or priest take charge. She laid her daughter's body on her own bed, washed her and dressed her beautifully and lifted her body into the coffin. She knew exactly what to do. She hadn't lost touch with her roots; she did everything for her child to the last. It was because of her that I planned the little room.'

When children die in Helen House - sometimes if they die in hospital or even at home - they often come to lie in this small bedroom, which is kept especially cold. There's a bed with a green quilt decorated with daffodils and geese. When your child dies, Sister Frances said, you tend to think everything is beyond your control. Here, parents and family can wander in and out of the little room, tend the body of their child, arrange favourite toys and objects. In the sitting-room next door they can plan the funeral, taking their time for there is no hurry. 'Only they can do it to perfection,' she said.

We can all help. 'It's one of my hobby horses,' she said. 'We're so used to being referred to experts that, when we're faced with someone grieving, our instinct is to undervalue ourselves. But we all have what it takes, just by being fully human. Parents will tell you they don't want good advice, they don't want people to say the right thing. They just want someone to say, "How are you?" and wait long enough to hear the answer.'

She herself has witnessed many deaths, most of them young children and teenagers. 'Sometimes when I'm giving a talk I'm asked, "How do you do this job without getting emotionally involved?" And the answer is, you couldn't do it if you weren't emotionally involved. I don't mean making a nuisance of yourself and getting in the way, but to show emotion is sometimes a comfort to the family. The parents of a child who took a turn for the worse told me they were very touched when the doctor broke down and cried.

'Death can be very ugly, but people have buried with them the strength and dignity to meet it; and, given encouragement and loving surroundings, they will do this with what I can only describe as a severe beauty. I believe in the Resurrection, that death is not the end but the beginning, an I have yet to meet a mother or father who believed at the moment of death that their child had ceased to exist.'

© Maureen Cleave 1996. This article was first published in the Telegraph Magazine.