CLAIRE BERTSCHINGER remembers exactly how she felt 20 years ago as the rest of the Western world counted down the days to Bob Geldof’s historic Live Aid concert.

“I felt dead — dead inside. I was so emotionally drained. I had cried so much that I had no tears left. Live Aid was going on but I really didn’t understand what was happening.”

The young nurse had just flown back to England after a 12-month stint running two feeding centres for the Red Cross at the epicentre of Ethiopia’s devastating 1984-85 famine.

While the rest of Britain focused on the country she had just left, Bertschinger headed home to Essex to recharge her batteries and to work out the answer to a question that had started to obsess her.

“I started to ask ‘Why?’,” she said, speaking from her home in the leafy village of Sheering where she still lives two decades later. “I had seen all this suffering and was thinking now why, why are people suffering? Why should there be haves and have-nots?

“I looked into Christianity because that was my background. I tried to go to church and follow it through. But it just didn’t seem right. I couldn’t believe in this outside deity saying you can die and you can’t die. That was the start of a 20-year spiritual journey.”

It was ironic that Bertschinger felt so separated from all the Live Aid razzmatazz surrounding her at the time. Because, in many ways, she was at the heart of it.

Bertschinger was the Red Cross nurse whom Michael Buerk had interviewed just eight months earlier in his seminal BBC news report that first raised the alarm about Ethiopia’s famine.

She was the “young nurse” whom Bob Geldof saw on his television screen the evening that he started phoning around his friends to sign them up for a single called Do They Know It’s Christmas?

“There were tens of thousands of people in the camp in Ethiopia . . . where a handful of European aid-workers were distributing a pitiful amount of food,” the Irish singer later wrote in his autobiography Is That It? “One young nurse had the awesome task of selecting the few hundred individuals who were to be fed.”

That nurse was Bertschinger, and that was the experience at the heart of her spiritual crisis. “We could maybe take 50 or 60 at a time at the feeding centre and there were one or two thousand that needed to come in. All the rest would die.

“I remember Michael Buerk asking me how it felt to make that decision. I said that it broke my heart.” It also left her with a deep feeling of guilt that took many years to disperse.

In the years after the famine, she decided to keep her experiences to her self. “When I came home, everyone kept saying, ‘Oh you did a wonderful job Claire. It was fantastic what you did.’