Sister Gerard Fernandez is sitting in a meeting room at the Good Shepherd Place in Toa Payoh, telling stories about her past in a voice clear, calm and soothing.

It was the early 1940s and she was then barely six years old.

Her late father - who was secretary to the chief justice - spoke impeccable English, and would put his children through enunciation drills while waiting for breakfast.

One morning, they had to recite a verse which went: "And I commit you to Sing Sing Prison, there to be hanged, drawn and quartered."

Sing Sing is a maximum security prison in New York City.

"I remember saying to myself 'I don't like those words and I'm not going to say them when my turn comes'," says the nun, now 78.

Instead, she recited a prayer honouring the Virgin Mary when her turn came. "I went: 'Hail Holy Queen, Mother of mercy, hail, our life, our sweetness and our hope'."

Her father, who did not know she had committed the prayer to memory, was stunned, and delighted.

For Sister Gerard herself, the episode is perhaps prescient. She became a Changi Prison counsellor for those sentenced to hang. Among them were Catherine Tan Mui Choo and Hoe Kah Hong, the women who helped medium Adrian Lim kill two children in the sensational ritual murders case of 1981; Flor Contemplacion who murdered a fellow Filipino domestic worker and her four-year-old charge in 1991, and Van Tuong Nguyen, the Australian drug trafficker sentenced in 2004.

"At the age of 36, I walked with my first inmate on death row. I wasn't aware of the call then but I guess it was long implanted in my heart," says Sister Gerard who joined the Good Shepherd Sisters, a Roman Catholic order of nuns, when she was 18.

Blessed with a serene demeanour and prone to bouts of girlish giggles, she is the fourth of 10 children.

"My parents were the most generous and loving of parents; my faith came from them," she says, adding that two of her sisters are Franciscan nuns.

Her early years were happy ones, spent in a house in McNair Road. The chief justice visited the family every Christmas, and allowed them use of his Jaguar during this period.

"We also had a pet pig running around the house," she recalls.

But the pig got slaughtered when her father uprooted the family to Malacca during the Japanese Occupation. "My uncle came to do it. Mum salted the meat, put it in a jar and that was what we lived on during our journey to Malacca."

After a couple of years in the Malaysian state where one of her younger sisters died of tetanus poisoning after being pricked by a thorn, the Fernandez family returned to Singapore and a new home in Cairnhill.

After completing her secondary education at Convent of the Holy Infant Jesus in Victoria Street, she taught briefly at the Good Shepherd Kindergarten in Kampung Java before becoming a nun.

She felt the call to serve, she says, after meeting the Good Shepherd sisters who ran Marymount Centre in Thomson. The place, which had to make way for the North-South Expressway, had several outfits including a welfare home and shelter for women and troubled teens.

"At the shelter, I saw this teenage girl, and she had such sadness on her face. I told myself: 'This is where I want to work, with girls like her'."