A Spoonful of Sugar

by Brenda Ashford

  All we have in life is our health and our experiences; and fortunately mine were shaping me for the better.

  As the bombing began, blessedly, to die down, things in Appleton grew calmer; that is, until the peace and quiet of the nursery was shattered one morning.

  I was changing Benjy’s nappy when I heard an ear-piercing scream. Whirling around I saw Peter sitting on his potty, his little face a picture of pain.

  “Sweetheart,” I gasped. “What on earth is wrong?”

  It was then that I saw his willy was in his hand. He’d been playing around, as three-and-a-half-year-old boys do, and somehow he’d managed to get the foreskin rolled right back and it was stuck fast.

  “My winkie hurts,” he roared.

  Oh, crumbs. The Norland taught me for every eventuality except this one. In fact, over the last year and a half I daresay there was little I hadn’t encountered in my first job. Now certainly wasn’t the time to lose my head.

  Dashing downstairs I picked up the phone and rang the doctor’s surgery.

  “It’s Peter,” I said to the receptionist. “He’s got his foreskin stuck.”

  Not five minutes later, the GP was bounding up the stairs, his black leather bag in hand. He took one look at Peter, who by now was quite red in the face.

  “Hmm.” He frowned. “We need to do something about this now. Get him on the nursery table.”

  Sweeping aside my knitting, I lifted Peter off the potty and onto the table. Poor little mite was howling in pain.

  Seconds later the doctor had administered chloroform with a cloth over Peter’s face, and Peter’s little body slumped back on the table.

  The doctor moved with astonishing speed. Whipping his scalpel out of his bag, he took Peter’s penis in his hand and with a few deft cuts had circumcised him … right there on the nursery table. I couldn’t believe my eyes.

  Bewildered, Peter came round to find his willy wrapped in blood-soaked gauze.

  I had to break the news to a bemused Iris later, when she visited the nursery for tea. She was relieved that Peter was going to be perfectly fine, of course, but she stayed no longer than usual and there was still nothing but that chilly kiss on the forehead for either of her sons.

  It was me who cuddled little Peter when he cried, me who whooped with delight when I saw Benjy’s first teeth break through his gums, and me who watched his first faltering steps in the garden with pride. Both boys ran to me instinctively when they hurt themselves and needed a cuddle.

  I daresay they loved Frank and Iris, who, in turn, loved their adopted sons, but really the only time they spent with them was an hour or so a day. The boys’ entire lives and day-to-day care was in my hands. I had grown to love them dearly, but my bond with Benjy was absolute. I suppose when you’ve shared a child’s first milestones, you feel your life is intertwined with his.

  I have often thought of those moments and shuddered at the emotion of them. Of course it hurt to walk away from him to my next job, but my devotion to duty was everything and overrode any feeling of attachment.

  Benjy was a part of my life, but I didn’t own him, nor was he my child. Today I consider it a privilege to have been a part of his life and to have influenced it in some small way.

  I feel that way about all my former charges, in fact. Being a part of children’s lives and witnessing the events that shape them and their minds and bodies as they blossom and grow are an honor, not a right. I just wish more people realized that.

  I certainly got an enormous thrill out of watching Benjy blossom into a cheeky, happy little boy. His legs were nicely chubby and his cheeks had filled out like ripe plums. But as he approached his second birthday and Peter his fourth, my time with them was coming to an end.

  As ever in wartime, events moved rapidly, and something was always round the corner to make you realize that your life was never really under your control.

  By December 1941 all single women ages eighteen to sixty-five who weren’t already contributing were to be conscripted into the war effort, whether they liked it or not. They had to take up work either in the services, nursing, factories, transport, or the Land Army. Five million women were needed to help fill the roles that the men, fighting on battlefields, had left behind.

  Iris’s days as a lady of leisure were up, and so was my time in her household. It was considered selfish, reckless even, for a woman to employ a nanny to do a job she could quite easily be doing herself. In any case, Iris may have been exempt from conscription, but I wasn’t. War was about to open up a whole host of opportunities. Or so I thought.

  I marched along to nearby Leatherhead to register.

  En route all sorts of fantastical and exciting possibilities whirled around my mind.

  Perhaps I could join the RAF, learn to fly a plane like those brave Spitfire pilots who’d captured my imagination ever since I saw them shoot down a German. Or get my hands dirty driving an ambulance or an army truck.

  The sky was the limit.…

  “Impossible,” snapped the bespectacled clerk with whom I had just shared my ambitions.

  My dreams burst like a balloon. “But why?” I asked.

  “You have a skill,” he said firmly. “You are a trained nursemaid. Do you know how many evacuees there are in this country?”

  Not off the top of my head, but I could see where this conversation was going.

  He was right: I must have been mad to think I could learn to fly a plane. My thoughts drifted back to the Bethnal Greenies and to little Rita and Sally. I had to stay focused on why I had trained with the Norland in the first place.

  What was it that Miss Whitehead had drummed into us over and over? “The future is made by the children for whose characters and training you are responsible. Your contribution and examples are valuable.”

  There was no point lamenting the fact that I wasn’t going to drive ambulances. My contribution was more powerful and needed more than ever before: construction, not destruction. I couldn’t fail my charges now. The children of this dreadful war needed stability and love.

  Soon after my meeting with the conscription clerk, I received notification of my next assignment. Scanning the letter, my eye fixed on the signature of my new employer: Lady Francesca Smythe-Villiers of Granville House in the village of Little Cranford.

  I gulped. Who’d have thought it? Little Brenda Ashford mixing with the aristocracy.

  What was I to call her? Francesca? No, that wouldn’t do. Lady Smythe-Villiers, or even your ladyship? My tummy did little flip-flops of nervous excitement.

  I did so hope she was nice. Some of these ladies had some funny ways, as well I knew after hearing about Lady Lillian.

  When it was time to kiss little Benjy and Peter good-bye, I found myself sadder than I could ever have imagined. But as sad as I was, there was also another emotion tingling just beneath the surface.

  Excitement!

  Excitement at the children I’d yet to meet and the adventures I’d yet to have. That’s young people for you, I suppose, always looking to what’s around the corner.

  I kissed and hugged them tightly.

  “Be good boys for your mummy, my darlings,” I whispered.

  Bill drove me to the station in the Rolls. As the car pulled off down the drive, I turned to wave a last good-bye to my charges through the back window.

  Peter was waving furiously and smiling, but Benjy’s little face wore a worried frown as he stared bewildered after my departing car.

  I sighed heavily. So many changes already for him—how I hoped his life would settle down and he’d get the stability he so desperately needed.

  But as we sped to Leatherhead train station I could never have guessed at what was coming his way next. Something unspeakably awful and tragic had been unfolding, right under my very nose.

  TESTIMONIAL

  Nurse Brenda leaves of her own accord to take up work in a war nursery. We are very sorry to lose her as she has always proved to be a very capable and conscientious nu
rse. She was kind and patient with the two boys (aged two and four years) and also took great pains in their training. In short she was very satisfactory in every way and she leaves with our genuine regret.

  —IRIS BEAUMONT, JANUARY 1, 1942

  Nanny’s Wisdom

  RESPECT YOUR CHILDREN.

  Why is the saying “respect your elders” so well known but not “respect your children”? I believe that respect should go two ways; and even though they are little, children deserve our respect. Don’t lie to them, treat them like fools, or tease them.

  Also, and this is something I feel passionate about, I simply never call children “kids.” Baby goats are kids, not children! I know it may seem silly to some, but it’s something I feel most strongly. If we respect little people, then they in turn will grow up to respect others.

  LEARN TO SEW.

  So many people these days simply don’t bother, but I can’t tell you what an invaluable skill it is.

  In my day people always darned and knitted. During the war everybody lived by the principle “make do or mend.” Surely now, in these times of economic hardship, that principle is more relevant than ever.

  Even if you just learn how to sew on a button or do a hem, it will help you so much, not to mention save you money. Learn and then teach your children, and they in turn can teach their children.

  SEW A BUTTON.

  At the beginning and at the end of sewing your button on your garment, don’t tie off the thread with knots, which can easily come undone and create too much of a pull. Instead, add several tiny stitches into the fabric for extra security. Next, sew loosely in two loops across the holes in the button. Don’t just go across the top of the fabric, go through all the layers. This creates a more secure base. Wind around the threads to create a shank—but don’t make the shank too thick. To finish off, take the thread to the wrong side of the fabric and sew a few more tiny stitches to secure the end.

  CHAPTER 7

  YES, YOUR LADYSHIP

  LORD AND LADY SMYTHE-VILLIERS, GRANVILLE HOUSE

  LITTLE CRANFORD, DEVON, ENGLAND

  [1942, AGE TWENTY-ONE]

  Hush a bye, baby, on the treetop,

  When the wind blows, the cradle will rock;

  When the bow breaks, the cradle will fall,

  And down will come baby, cradle and all.

  —LULLABY

  Schedule

  7:00 AM: Woke children and got them dressed and ready for breakfast.

  8:00 AM: Breakfast of bread, jam, and milk in the day nursery. Children to ask to be excused from the table when they have finished their breakfasts.

  9:00 AM: Washed hands. Toilet trips. Teeth brushed and faces wiped clean.

  10:00 AM: Supervised playtime. There were very few toys, so one had to ensure everyone shared.

  10:30 AM: Cleaned day nursery and got children’s dirty clothes ready for her ladyship’s dailies to collect and wash.

  11:00 AM: Gave children drink of milk. Then dressed them in boots, coats, and mittens and took them out for morning walk in the fresh air.

  12:30 PM: Back to the house for lunch in the day nursery. Good manners to be observed throughout the meal.

  1:30 PM TO 3:00 PM: Quiet time. Rest and sleep for younger children. Quiet play and reading for older children.

  3:00 PM: Outside for games of catch and hide-and-seek. Or we picked strawberries straight from the bush and wildflowers in summer.

  4:00 PM: Tea in day nursery of jam sandwiches, fruit, milk, and pudding.

  4:30 PM: Visit from her ladyship.

  5:00 PM: If a Friday we dragged up the tin bath and the children were bathed and washed in front of the fire (including behind their ears).

  6:00 PM: Read children bedtime story by the fireside.

  7:00 PM: Prayers and bedtime.

  7:30 PM: Sat quietly in my room and read or darned.

  10:00 PM: Retired to bed and lights out.

  THE BOTTLE-GREEN DAIMLER WAS THE only car waiting at the station car park, and leaning against its gleaming bonnet, with a copy of The Times tucked neatly under his arm, was its driver.

  Mr. Worboys, his lordship’s chauffeur, was dressed immaculately in a dove-gray suit and peaked cap.

  “Brenda Ashford, I presume.” He grinned, revealing a gap a mile wide between his crooked teeth.

  He was not by any stretch of the imagination a good-looking man. His face was weather-beaten and his skin more pockmarked than a bomb-shattered London street, but everything about him invited friendship and trust.

  “Come on then, Nurse Ashford,” he said with a wink, opening the door for me. “Hop in. We can’t keep her ladyship waiting, now can we?”

  He hoisted my trunk into the boot, leaped behind the wheel, and then we were off, whizzing down the narrow country lanes. As he drove, Mr. Worboys kept up a running commentary.

  “His lordship owns all the land for as far as you can see,” he said, sweeping his arm theatrically over the landscape. “Twenty-five thousand acres they reckon’s ’is parish.”

  Great swaths of farmland stretched out to the horizon. Did Lord Smythe-Villiers really own all this? What a lucky man. In the spring sunshine the landscape looked absolutely stunning. I’d never seen so much lush green pasture, such beautiful woodlands.

  His lordship’s property was deep in the heart of the West Country. Field after field of corn and wheat swayed gently in the breeze, and beyond that, herds of fat cows grazed contently.

  In some of the fields young women, wearing fawn breeches and green jumpers, toiled away, their faces smeared with mud and sweat. As they worked they sang and laughed.

  “Land girls,” explained Mr. Worboys. “They weren’t so welcome with the farming folk to begin with. That’s centuries of farming tradition you’re messing about with, letting a load of flippity young girls loose in the fields, but they’ve proved their worth and now they all rub along together.”

  I stared a mite enviously at these young women. I’d read that more than a third came from London and the industrial cities of the north of England, and now conscription had swelled their numbers to 83,000. Each land girl was paid 28 shillings a week. How wonderful it must be to be let loose in all this beauty and fresh air, away from the bomb-shattered cities.

  “We’re lucky, us village folk,” said Mr. Worboys. “We live off the fat of the land in these parts. You won’t starve, Nurse Brenda, especially not up at her ladyship’s.”

  Soon we were driving through a picture-postcard village and Mr. Worboys was beeping his horn and waving at passersby, who stared curiously into the car at me.

  “This is Little Cranford. You’ll never be lonely ’ere, you know,” he said with a chuckle. “Word will have already reached the furthest farm that her ladyship’s Norland nanny has arrived.”

  If a Hollywood location agent had come looking, he couldn’t have found a prettier picture of a quintessential English country village. Nothing bad could ever happen in Little Cranford, of that I was certain. Whitewashed thatched cottages nestled in verdant gardens, fat cream-colored geese dozed in the sun, and in the middle of it all stood a sweet little church and duck pond.

  “Seventeenth century, you know,” remarked Mr. Worboys proudly. “This village was founded by the Anglo-Saxons.

  “And that there,” he said, nodding toward the building next to the village store, “is the church hall. They have the village hop there once a month. You want to get yourself down there, Brenda, and meet some of our local lads. Farmers’ boys most of ’em, bit rough round the edges but ’earts of gold. Reckons they’ll love you.”

  With that he roared with laughter.

  “His lordship owns all the cottages in this village; in fact he owns most of Little Cranford. That’s Mr. Webb’s place,” he said, pointing to a little worker’s cottage facing the church, with pink roses climbing up the side. “His lordship’s valet. Her ladyship moved Mr. Webb from his old place down the road. He weren’t right happy about that, I can tell you.”
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br />   I was just about to ask him why she would do such a thing when he was off again.

  “Susan, our district nurse, lives over there. She’s friendly with the farmer’s son Bill. Bill and his father, John, are the tenants of his lordship and farm his land.”

  “Does everyone round here work for their lord and ladyship?” I asked.

  Mr. Worboys paused and smiled. “Comes to think of it, yes. A lot of the local women go up to his lordship’s to cook, clean, and wash. My missus, Pat, is one of her ladyship’s dailies. They keep us all occupied, that’s for sure.”

  As we headed on the only road out of the village I noticed there seemed to be an awful lot of children playing in and around the village streets.

  “We’ve got evacuees coming out our ears,” said Mr. Worboys. “Can’t blame ’em. This little corner of England has to be the safest anywhere. No one will drop an ol’ bomb on your head here, Nurse Brenda.”

  I didn’t doubt it for a moment. This sleepy little backwater was a haven of quiet. I couldn’t imagine I’d be ducking flying shrapnel here, that’s for sure.

  “Her ladyship oversaw the evacuation, who was billeted where and with whom,” he muttered.

  “Oh, is she the billeting officer?” I asked.

  “Nope,” he said, “but she tends to oversee things.”

  I wondered nervously what her ladyship was like. I had met her only briefly at the family’s main seat some weeks before, but the interview was too brief to get a real measure of her. I’d been so intimidated by the grand surroundings I’d just sat there in awe.

  She certainly seemed to have a hand in everything that went on around these parts.

  “Hard to believe his lordship owns all this,” I said.

  “True. Mind you, it’s not like his other place, eh, Nurse Brenda.” Mr. Worboys whistled. “That really is summit else, isn’t it. Hundreds of rooms, hundreds.

  “His lordship is lovely,” he went on as we bumped down a country lane. “A nicer gentleman you’d be hard-pressed to find. I takes him to the station three times a week so as he can get his train up to the ’ouse of Commons.”