Utterly infuriating.
“Of all the …” I muttered.
“Er, Brenda,” piped up Joy. “You’d better come and have a look at this.”
I turned around to see Joy hopelessly tugging at Jimmy’s raggedy little shirt.
“She’s only sewn his clothes onto him.”
She had, too. Jimmy’s shirt, vest, and trousers were all sewn together with rough, clumsy stitches.
What on earth?
If this woman wanted a fight, a fight she would have.
“Unpick them, please, and then he can have his bath.”
And so the battle between Gladys Trump and me raged on, with both sides refusing to back down.
We bathed him, she sewed him into his clothes. I warned her not to be late, she carried on turning up at whatever time suited her.
I just could not for the life of me understand why this woman didn’t want her son to be bathed or cared for. At this point I was beyond caring. I had enough on my plate. I was so busy with the day-to-day running of the nursery and spent most of my time ordering supplies, managing rations, and overseeing things—tasks that didn’t come naturally to me, I might add. I didn’t have time for a silly game of one-upmanship with a fishwife of a woman.
Sadly, Jimmy wasn’t the only one. A lot of the evacuee children were almost as filthy. They’d come in on a Monday morning after a weekend with their mothers, their poor bottoms red raw and covered in nappy rash and sores.
I’d well and truly had it with these women. As far as I was concerned they were thoroughly irresponsible.
I thought I’d seen it all when I saw Jimmy’s roughly sewn together clothes, but I was soon in for another shock. The Norland might have taught me a good many things—including how to cross-stitch; steam a pudding; and, above all, how to keep little people scrupulously well cared for—but it hadn’t really opened my eyes to the ways of the world.
Over the common from the nursery there lived a lady, whose name I shan’t divulge to protect her identity, who was happily married to a local man. They had two children together and when war broke out the husband was called up and sent overseas to serve in Belgium.
In his absence an evacuee family, including the mother and various aunts and uncles, moved in next door. The family of twenty-two all managed to squeeze into a tiny little cottage; how they managed I shall never know. But the oldest of them was himself a young man called up to join the troops abroad. He had done so for a short while but had soon discovered the army was not to his liking and promptly deserted. In the four years since the war started he had deserted that many times. Even numerous spells in an army prison had done nothing to curb his fleet-footed ways.
When this man wasn’t deserting, he took up with his neighbor’s wife. This lady and the deserter had gone on to have five children together.
The affair and the illegitimate children were the talk of the village. What her poor husband would make of it all when he returned to find that in his absence his wife had acquired another family was anyone’s guess.
In the meantime her youngest children were under the care of the Redbourn Day Nursery. When her littlest tot needed breast-feeding we simply took him over the common to be fed by his mother, who would nip home from the factory, and then bring him back to the nursery.
One morning it was my turn to take the baby for his 10:00 AM feed. Collecting him from the baby room, I gently swaddled him in a warm blanket and made my way across the common.
“Let’s see if mummy’s already home, shall we?” I said, planting a little kiss on his head.
“Anyone in?” I called, creaking open the front door.
No answer.
Picking my way over the children’s toys scattered through the hallway, I made my way gingerly up the narrow, creaky cottage stairs.
As I climbed I became aware of a strange noise, a sort of frantic scuffling.
At the bedroom door I paused and knocked. “Baby’s here for his feed,” I called.
The door swung open and missus was sitting up in bed, naked, with a thin sheet drawn over her. She looked awkward and tense.
“Hand him over, then,” she muttered.
Suddenly, my eyes were drawn to the floor.
There, poking out from under the wrought-iron bedstead, was a pair of legs. The legs were in a pair of army fatigue trousers and heavy laced brown boots.
Oh, very subtle.
So this was the child’s father, the deserter, cowering under the bed.
She saw my eyes flicker down to the floor and she glared at me. An uneasy silence hung in the air. I handed the child over, not a word was said, and I got out of there as fast as I could.
As I walked across the common back to the nursery, I shook my head in wonder. I didn’t know how these women did it.
She wasn’t the only one, by any means. Adultery was rife. I’d heard lots of talk of people having affairs, and illegitimate children were popping up all over the place. The brief encounter became a common experience as servicemen and -women and civilians sought comfort where they could find it. I suppose every day you were alive in such conditions was a gift, and it made people behave in ways they would never normally.
I looked on at this behavior in curious dismay. Now I’d seen it firsthand. I knew it was not one’s place to look down or judge people—and we were living in extraordinary times, after all—but was it so hard to remain faithful? I thought of Mother and Father, still devoted to each other after years of marriage. They would never dream of cheating on each other.
That night, still perturbed by the sight of the deserter under the bed, I was in no mood to be trifled with.
Come half past six, who was sitting there at reception, still waiting for his mother to collect him? Yes, you’ve guessed it: Jimmy.
Right! I had warned that woman time and again not to be late; in fact I’d even gone so far as to tell her I’d leave him outside if she weren’t punctual. Well, she’d pushed me too far this time. I’d call her bluff, so I would.
Gently buckling Jimmy into his buggy, I wheeled him out to the front of the nursery and pulled the door closed behind us. I left him there and took up a hiding place next to the porch where I couldn’t be seen but could keep an eye on Jimmy.
“I’m right here, sweetheart,” I whispered.
I daresay Jimmy was used to strange comings and goings, as he didn’t even bat an eyelid, just swung his little legs from the buggy and played with his toy car.
I settled in to wait.
Presently, the figure of Gladys came swerving round the corner and gently swayed up to the nursery. She was humming a little tune to herself, probably still flushed from the warmth of the pub, but when she saw Jimmy, she stopped dead in her tracks.
My heart pounded as I waited for the explosion.
Wait for it.
“Jimeeeee!” she screeched in a voice so high-pitched it was almost off the human radar.
There it was.
The fag dropped from her lips as a terrifying scowl crossed her face. Her eyes bulged as she let rip with a stream of obscenities. My goodness, the language. She was still softly cursing to herself as she wheeled Jimmy up the road.
The next morning I braced myself. A night’s sleep had done little to temper her rage.
Jabbing me with a nicotine-stained finger, she let me know exactly what she thought of me.
“It’s a bleedin’ disgrace. Whodaya fink you are?”
On and on she went.
“I warned you I would do it if you were late and what’s more I shall do it again,” I said as calmly as I could with an irate East End mother bellowing in my face.
Do you know, after that I never saw Gladys Trump again. From that day forward she sent one of her older children to collect Jimmy. It was a blessed relief. No matter that they always pinched whatever was hanging from the washing line when they collected him, at least I didn’t have to contend with her again.
A few days later we had a visit from one of my fa
vorite Redbourn village characters. Nurse and midwife Sybil Trudgett, aka Trudge, was a familiar sight pedaling through the village streets on a bike that must have weighed the same as an army tank. She wasn’t the slimmest of ladies, which was probably just as well, as she needed her stout frame to propel that beast of a bike up and down the common.
Nurse Trudgett had probably delivered every baby born within a ten-mile radius. She must have been well into her fifties, and where she got her tenacity and cheerful resilience from I’ll never know, given that she seemed to spend every hour God sent on her rounds. It went some way to explaining why she’d never had her own children.
One could tell she was coming by the way the evacuee boys on the common stopped whatever they were doing to raise their caps and stand clear. She was just the sort of efficient woman who commanded instant respect.
Since taking over the running of things I’d got to know Nurse Trudgett well. The nursery was means-tested and the mothers paid what they could afford. The only person who could possibly advise me on whether to charge them one penny or seven shillings was her. She knew everyone and everyone knew her. A woman like her was as vital to the lifeblood of the village as heating and water are to a home.
She had an affinity with Redbourn that flowed through her body, from the gray hair on her head right down to the tips of her hobnailed boots.
Now, seeing her large figure hove into view, I popped the kettle on. Nurse Trudgett liked her tea strong.
“How are we all today?” she called out as she bustled in.
“Lovely to see you,” I said. “Couple of impetigo, a tonsillitis, chicken pox, and a suspected German measles case for you.”
“Marvelous,” she said, with a grin. “Keeping me busy as ever, I see.”
After I’d shown her Jimmy’s impetigo and she’d prescribed a perfectly horrid mauve cream to spread over his boils, we settled down to chat over tea. I confided in her my despair over Gladys Trump.
Nurse Trudgett listened patiently as I ranted over the state of Jimmy. She nodded when I told her he was sewn into his clothes, and just the merest flicker of a smile played on her face when I told her about hiding behind the porch.
“Well, you and her have been having fun and games,” she said finally, folding her hands neatly on her lap.
“What else am I to do?” I cried, throwing my hands up in despair. “The woman is impossible.”
She smiled and instantly her weather-beaten face softened.
“I understand, Brenda. Really I do. But, you know, you mustn’t be so hard on women like Gladys.”
“But Jimmy’s filthy and she’s always late …” I insisted.
“That may be,” said Nurse Trudgett, her voice growing a little firmer. “But what you have to understand is that she has raised twelve children more or less single-handedly in a tiny two-bedroom flat in the Peabody Estate in Stepney. Those buildings are notorious. They are infested with bugs and in all honesty should probably have been bulldozed years ago.
“You cannot imagine the poverty. Picture the scene, Brenda,” she urged. “Thirteen of them in a dirty tenement flat. There are no facilities in those places. The only lavatory is at the end of each balcony, next to a single tap. There are small children everywhere, sometimes naked from the waist down to save on washing.”
I felt my attitude toward Gladys soften. I remembered that when she arrived in Redbourn I had a grudging respect for her tenacity. She had after all kept her family together under the most miserable of circumstances.
“She loves those children fiercely, with an intensity that you and I who are not mothers could never understand. They are her life! Why do you think she’s here? She’s doing the best she can,” insisted Nurse Trudgett, aware she was finally getting through to me.
“But a bath,” I protested weakly.
“The only bath they have is filled with coal,” she said. “Besides, Gladys doesn’t wash her children because she genuinely believes they will catch their death of cold. That belief is ingrained in her. That’s why she was furious when she realized you had bathed Jimmy.”
“I …” my voice trailed off lamely.
“She hasn’t enjoyed the privileged upbringing that you and I have, Brenda. Not everyone is lucky enough to be born into comfortable houses with money in the bank.”
I thought of rambling Hallcroft, my childhood home, with its many bedrooms, hot running water, rosebushes, and huge garden backing onto wide-open fields.
I smiled as I thought of how Father used to bring back brown paper bags groaning with sweets on a Saturday afternoon, of the way he mowed the lawn to look like railway tracks and spent hours playing trains with us, or his little trick of arranging the fruit on our plates to look like smiley faces. He and Mother had lavished us with love and time and built us the most idyllic home in which to spend our childhood. Then I tried to imagine the squalid, filthy, overcrowded flat of Jimmy’s childhood. The gulf between my start in life and Jimmy’s could not have been wider.
Shame and humility washed over me. How could I have been so impossibly judgmental? I’d grown up and then trained in a different world from these East End folk, a rarefied and privileged existence where etiquette, wealth, and standing ruled. I hadn’t extended my view of life beyond the wrought-iron railings and quiet gentility of Pembridge Square.
Imagine wealthy Iris Beaumont coping in the slums without her chauffeur-driven Rolls-Royce? A woman who adopted two children, then instantly distanced herself from them by hiring a nanny to raise them. For all Gladys’s faults, her raucous behavior, and her foul mouth, she loved the bones off her children. She would sooner carve off her own leg than dream of giving one of them away.
“You know, Brenda, the more I see of life, the less I am surprised by it,” said Nurse Trudgett, sighing. “Each generation has its own ways of raising children and to them it is right. Old country folk round here used to wrap their children in waxed brown paper at the start of winter to keep them warm. And every year a Romany Gypsy family comes through these parts in a horse-drawn caravan. They stop to help with the fruit picking and they are respected and welcomed in the village. They are good people.
“I remember going out once to attend to a birth. The mother was a beautiful Gypsy lady with hair to her knees. The birth was peaceful and full of love. After I’d delivered the baby, she was put in a little cardboard box to sleep under the bed. Some people might frown upon that but not me. I daresay that baby was more loved and cherished than most.”
Suddenly, I thought of the Norland’s insistence on lining up the babies’ cots outside in the snow during the coldest winter in forty-five years, so they could take their naps. That might also be counted a little bizarre, but the intention was just as sincere as that of the Gypsies, the country folk, and the East End mums.
I may have joined Redbourn Day Nursery naive in the ways of the world and a little narrow in my outlook, but thanks to the kindness and understanding of this lovely lady, I left it with a broader perspective and, I hope, a little more understanding.
Later in life I was thrilled to hear that Nurse Trudgett had been awarded the MBE in 1954 for her work in the community, and rightly so. This woman delivered 2,500 babies over her career and kept a community healthy and happy. Nurse Trudgett’s compassion opened my eyes. I never did see Gladys again after our last showdown, but I like to think my newfound insight would have made me softer toward her. She had an enormous effect on me indirectly. I was certainly more compassionate toward other people as a consequence of having met her.
With all the excitement and noise generated by the older children it would be all too easy to forget the babies I spent most of my time looking after, but there was one little girl whose story particularly touched my heart.
Juliet was just a little tot of no more than two when her mother dropped her off at the nursery. She was the prettiest little thing, with soft blond curls and a smile like a sunbeam. Whenever she saw me, she threw open her arms, bounced up and down in exc
itement, and flashed me an adorable smile. How could I resist such a lovely invitation to a cuddle? The paperwork could wait. I always made time for a hug with Juliet.
Tragically, her eight-year-old brother had been sent to live in an institution and probably sterilized on account of the fact that he had Down’s syndrome. Nowadays the medical world knows far more about the treatment and care of people with Down’s syndrome and you would never dream of institutionalizing and sterilizing a child with Down’s, but back in the 1940s it was a more ignorant age.
It was probably a hangover from the eugenics ideology of the nineteenth century that people with “less-desirable traits” should be prevented from having children by placing them in gender-separate institutions. Horrifyingly, some of the first victims of Hitler’s euthanasia program were children with Down’s syndrome, not that we knew that back then in 1943.
Juliet’s parents, first cousins, were bereft at having to give up their beloved son.
“I just couldn’t cope,” the mother confided in me, one morning soon after Juliet started.
“He was so strong and he would hit me,” she whispered. “One day he barricaded himself in his bedroom by pushing the wardrobe against the door.”
She never said as much, but I knew she and the father were praying little Juliet didn’t have the syndrome. That poor woman looked haunted and she doted on her little girl.
“I do so hope Juliet will be all right,” was as much as she would say.
“Don’t you worry,” I said with a smile. “She will be fine.”
After that I always made an extra special effort to spend a bit of time with Juliet and lavish her with cuddles. She was the most affectionate child I’d ever cared for, and her face lit up when I walked into a room.
“She’s got a soft spot for you, I reckon,” Joy said, chuckling, when she saw us.
I was in the baby room one day when I heard a funny noise. I looked down and saw Juliet, sitting on the floor of the nursery where she usually played happily with her toys. Instead of babbling to herself, she was sitting ramrod straight, her back was rigid and she was shaking.
A Spoonful of Sugar Page 21