by Pam Weaver
One day, I had two hours off duty in the afternoon and I was feeling so lousy I went to bed. I was supposed to be back on duty at 4.30 but when someone came to find me, I refused to get up. ‘I’m too ill to get up,’ I whined. ‘I need a doctor.’
The girl went away and about half an hour later, one of the more senior staff came to summon me to Matron’s office. To say that Matron Thomas was unsympathetic would be an understatement. She gave me a right rollicking, threatening to write to my mother to say I was not fit to be a nursery nurse and to ask her to take me home. I was devastated. To get a qualification was the only thing I really wanted. I couldn’t bear the thought of failure. How could I go back to the village with my tail between my legs? I’d endured months of homesickness, which still hadn’t fully gone away, and the slave-like conditions and now she was threatening to stop me from going for my training. She finished off by telling me to go back on duty at once.
‘But I need a doctor,’ I whimpered.
‘Then go,’ she said. ‘And when he sees you, he’ll tell you you’re making it up. He’ll tell you there’s nothing wrong with you.’
I crawled away in tears. The doctor was a bus ride away. My head was banging, I felt dizzy and sick but if I was to get that sick note, I had to get there somehow. I had to make my own way and I was unfamiliar with the roads. Being completely deaf didn’t help either. If I asked directions, I couldn’t hear them and it will surprise you how often people turn their heads away from you as they give directions. Without seeing the person’s mouth, with perhaps the small hope that I could lip read, it was useless. The night itself was foggy and dark. The Clean Air Act had been in force since 1956, so the fog wasn’t as bad as the infamous London pea soupers but it certainly added to the stress of the journey.
Sitting in the waiting room, waiting for my turn, I only knew I’d been called when several other patients gesticulated towards the doctor’s office. He examined me and told me off for coming out with a temperature of 102ºF, but he signed me off sick. I was so relieved.
Next I had to find a chemist to get the prescription made up. I dared not turn up without my medication. Matron Thomas would have left it until the next day before sending anyone out for it and I was desperate to be well again.
With my medicine safely in my pocket I set off for the nursery again but in my misery, I got on the wrong bus and added a half-hour walk to my destination. Matron was furious when I got back and gave her the sick note. She snatched it from me and the look on her face said it all; she obviously hadn’t expected the doctor to sign me off. Her pet worry was that the nursery would be short-staffed and so girls worked all the time when they were unfit and should have been in bed. Back in my room, I crawled under the covers. My roommate was away for a few days, so I was alone. No one came to see me all the next day and frankly, I was too ill to care. Luckily I was right next to the bathroom so I managed to get to the toilet and I drank water from a tooth-mug on the window ledge. It was a miserable time.
Things get a bit hazy after that. I had a pot under the bed and because I felt too ill to go into the bathroom, I used it. No one came to see me or to ask if I wanted food or drink and when the pot was full, I was forced to stagger to the loo with it myself. My salvation came in the form of the doctor. He must have been slightly concerned about me because he turned up a couple of days later, unannounced. That was the first time Matron Thomas came to my room, and she stayed while he examined me. There was a heated discussion at the foot of my bed and they both left. A few minutes later, Matron came back up again, this time with a bowl of water, a flannel, a towel and one of her own nightdresses. She washed me and changed my bedclothes and an hour later, I was in an ambulance and on my way to hospital.
It turned out that I had an abscess on each eardrum and at last Matron understood that I wasn’t making it up, nor imagining it. I was put onto four-hourly penicillin injections and given heat treatment on my neck. Both abscesses were so large, I had already discovered that when I lay on my side, I rested on the lump and not my neck. The only way I could sleep was to lie on my back. Matron Thomas’ uncaring attitude was extended to my parents. No one informed them that I was in hospital, or ill for that matter and it was only after I’d been in hospital two days that they discovered I was there. A working-class home with a telephone was virtually unheard of back then. My mother had asked the local farmer, Mr Wellman, if she could use his phone in a case of emergency. When the hospital decided to operate, because I was still a minor, they needed my father’s permission, so they rang him.
When the call came, Mr Wellman set off from Woolslope Farm to find my mother. She was at work but she left immediately and used the public telephone to call my dad’s boss. My dad was a builder and Mrs Hayward ran two miles across open fields to reach the bungalow Dad was working on at Ashley Heath, near Ringwood. There was panic all round but Dad gave the hospital verbal permission and the next day he and Mum came all the way from Dorset by train. Ward sister allowed them in, even though it wasn’t visiting hours until the afternoon, and I was overjoyed to see them.
By now, the penicillin was taking effect and I was making a slow improvement. Matron had invited Mum and Dad to go to the nursery for tea and Mum told me afterwards, she put on the performance of her life. She appeared distraught, wringing her handkerchief and saying, ‘If only Pamela had told us she was ill. We had no inkling she was unwell.’
Mum bit her tongue. She knew I was terrified Matron would stop me doing my training, so much against her better judgement, she said nothing. Years later she told me just how hard that had been. ‘I was furious with that Matron,’ she said. ‘Everything in me wanted to confront her and tell her I knew she was lying, but you had asked me not to say anything.’
Once I started getting better, I made some friends in the ward. It was very large and if I close my eyes I can still smell the floor polish and disinfectant. The girl in the bed next to me had had an illegal back-street abortion and almost died. I think she was about twenty. She seemed so sophisticated, so grown up, and she wore her make-up in the most amazing way. Her mascara was halfway down her cheeks like a spider’s web, making her eyes look enormous. She had the palest pink lipstick, giving her an almost ghostly look, and her bouffant was parted down the middle and framed her face. It was a look which was soon to become very fashionable.
As my health improved, I was able to join in the fun and laughter patients share on a ward. We were all made to rest after lunch and I woke up one afternoon to the sight of a female patient, aware that men might be around, backing out of her bed to go to the toilet. She told us afterwards she did it that way because she didn’t want to swing her legs over the bed because she had no panties on. The only trouble was, she was wearing a hospital gown which opened down the back and only one of the tapes, the one at her neck, was tied!
Then there was Nurse Driver on the ward. She was an SEN (State Enrolled Nurse, a title given to girls who had completed the three-year training course but had failed their exam. They were limited to general duties and were not allowed to do the medicine trolley). One day, the morning drinks had just been served when she turned up at my bedside.
‘Have you got a headache?’
‘No.’
A little later, after the ward round, she was back.
‘Do you need something from the medicine trolley? Shall I tell Sister?’
‘No, thank you. I’m feeling a lot better today.’
Just before lunch time I saw her coming back again.
‘Are you feeling all right?’
‘Yes, I’m fine, thank you.’
In the end, she was driving me potty so in the vain hope that she would go away, the next time she made a beeline for my bed I said, ‘Actually, I have got a bit of a headache.’ I lay down, thinking she would leave me alone to sleep.
Five minutes later she was back with two enormous pills and a cup of water.
I didn’t want them, or need them so I refused as politely as I could.
‘And in any case,’ I smiled, ‘I couldn’t manage to swallow anything as big as that.’
She hurried off only to reappear with the pills crushed in a dessertspoonful of blackcurrant jam. As I forced the disgusting mixture down she gave me a loud lecture about not suffering in silence.
It was Nurse Driver who had an accident with her stocking suspender. She was busy on the ward when it broke. I think the whole thing had come away from her girdle because usually if only the button at the end came off you could put a sixpenny piece in its place to keep your stocking up. Nurse Driver had tied a bandage around the top of her stocking to keep it up. During her shift, it gradually came undone and we had to bite our cheeks so as not to laugh as she dashed up and down the ward with a long trail of dirty bandage trailing behind her uniform.
And then there was the window. Someone said they felt hot. It was probably because she had a fever, but never one to rest on her laurels, Nurse Driver tried to open one of the windows. Being an old-fashioned building, they were of the long sash cord variety. Short, but undaunted, she found a step ladder and yanked the window down. Now we had half a gale blowing through the ward and of course, the window was jammed and so no one could shut it. It stayed like that for about an hour until two men came from the workshop to fix it.
After a week or so in hospital, I was allowed to go back home to Dorset. I can’t remember who took me home but I’m sure I wouldn’t have been expected to travel by train or coach. My recovery was hampered by a bout of glandular fever and it was three months before I returned to the nursery. I was keen to go back but once I began to feel better, I did enjoy my time at home. As usual, Dad went to the pub every night, so Mum and I watched The Avengers, Juke Box Jury and of course the handsome Clint Eastwood as Rowdy Yates in Rawhide. I spent some days over at St Leonards with my Aunt Betty, just ‘chilling out’ as they say now. I met friends and we went to Bournemouth to the pictures or shopping. I went to a Tramp’s Ball at the West Moors youth club, which turned out to be the last time the kids I grew up with got together. By now, we were all out in the world of work and beginning to make new friends. I remember the time fondly for so many reasons, not least because one of the lads tried to get on the bus to get to the youth club but his tramp’s outfit was so convincing the conductor chucked him off! We had a great time.
The following Monday, I went back to my GP and was signed off. The silly thing is, if Matron had let me go to the doctor right at the start, I would probably have needed only a couple of days off sick but because of the delay in getting treatment, she had been without a member of staff for three months. There was also an assumption that we would do anything to ‘skive’ off work. What a shame she didn’t trust us more. If she had, she would have seen that we were loyal, both to the nursery and the children, and would only have taken time off if it were really necessary.
Chapter 4
Not everyone who lived in the home looked after the children. Some were unmarried mothers, who worked as cleaners or in the kitchens. Back then, having an illegitimate child still carried an awful stigma, but the first faint rays of change were coming into the care services. Most mothers were forced to give up their children for adoption. I have been told some very harrowing stories by my contemporaries in life, who were badgered and browbeaten into signing their babies away. A popular mantra was, ‘You want the best for your baby, don’t you? What could be better than to give him a Mummy and a Daddy who will love him and give him the best in life?’ Under duress they signed their babies away and some girls were actually locked in a room at the mother and baby home when their child was taken, in case they made a scene. These women may be in their sixties and seventies now but recent programmes on TV show only too well that they are still traumatised by events that happened when they were young. It hurts them all over again when they finally meet their offspring and they don’t really believe their mother put up enough of a fight for them. For those who wanted to keep their child, there was little or no public money to support children staying with them. Today’s society has little or no concept of how difficult it was, especially if the family were too ashamed to help. I have heard young people saying, ‘There’s no way I’d have given up my child. Nothing would have got in my way.’ But one wonders how they would have managed with no family support, no day nurseries, virtually no social security, and back in the sixties even the most caring of employers were reluctant to offer work to women with children, especially young children.
The mothers living in the nursery may have been only offered very meagre wages in exchange for their services but the system meant that they could at least keep their babies with some dignity. The children stayed in the nursery itself, and were well cared for by trained staff. Best of all, the mothers had them to themselves in their off-duty hours.
We may have all been far more subservient to authority than today’s society, but that didn’t mean we were passive doormats. Everyone developed ways of getting their own back on the powers that be and one of the best ways to do so was to shock. One of the mothers we had in the house was a fourteen-year-old schoolgirl. Social services spent a lot of time with her, pressurising her into naming the father of the baby. In the end, she retorted, ‘Look, if you’d eaten baked beans on toast and you got indigestion, would you know which bean gave it to you?’ Matron Thomas nearly fainted and the child care officer (which was what they called the social worker back then) almost fell off her chair.
That story was repeated in every nursery I worked in until it became legend. We all admired anyone with real spunk. The best of it is, the girl may have still been at school, but she’d only had one boyfriend and, as young as they were, they loved their baby and planned to marry as soon as she was sixteen. I often wonder if they did.
The unmarried mothers weren’t always young. Mary wasn’t the sharpest knife in the drawer but she had a good heart. She had led a sheltered life, first in an orphanage and then in a hospital. She was the sort of girl hardly anyone notices. When she was discharged from the home where she grew up she was placed in the local hospital, where she worked doing routine chores and errands as a ward orderly. She enjoyed her work and people liked her. Her corny jokes were legendary. ‘I’ve got a frog in me throat and it won’t jump up,’ was one of her favourites, and if you said, ‘Are you all right?’ she would reply, ‘No, I’m half left,’ and think it hugely funny.
Mary met the love of her life towards the end of the Fifties. He paid her a lot of attention and she fell hopelessly in love. Though her teenage years were by now far behind her, Mary was an innocent; he was more worldly wise. Their love affair was brief but intense and before long she began to notice the changes in her body. A visit to the doctor’s confirmed her worst fears: Mary was pregnant.
At first, although she was upset, she wasn’t unduly worried. After all, her man had declared his undying love every time he had climbed the back stairs to her room. She was confident he would ‘do the right thing,’ but her whole world was shattered when she found out what the rest of the world knew, that he was already married. For the first time in her life, Mary’s gentle spirit was crushed. She was ill for some time but thankfully, the world was moving towards more enlightened times. Twenty-five years before, in the 1930s, girls like Mary were still declared insane and shut up in mental homes, sometimes for the rest of their lives, but the doctor dealing with Mary was a lot more understanding.
As part of this fairly new initiative, as soon as Jennifer was born, Mary was moved to our nursery. She worked in the kitchen while her daughter was looked after in the nursery. It was an ideal arrangement. The council had a ‘permanent’ member of staff (where else could Mary go with her baby?) and Jennifer was with her mother.
Mary was a loving and devoted mother. Nearly all her hard-earned cash was spent on her daughter and she also spent every spare minute of her off-duty time with Jennifer. They made a contented pair and the light had returned to Mary’s eyes. Because Mary had what we now call ‘learning difficulties�
�, she needed the guidance of others to help her with her child’s upbringing. She was also a bit scatty. One evening she called me into her bedroom. She had knocked a water glass off her bedroom table and absent-mindedly stepped straight onto a small shard of broken glass, which was embedded in the sole of her foot. One of the other girls called Matron, who wasn’t best pleased, because she worried constantly about staffing levels. Mary went by ambulance to the local hospital and once X-rayed, the doctor gently pulled the glass out and there was no lasting damage. When Mary came back, complete with bandaged foot, she dined out on that tale for weeks to come.
For women working in the nursery with their children, it could only ever be a temporary arrangement. The nursery only catered for children until they were five. Once they were ready for school, they either moved to another children’s’ home or into foster care. I left the nursery in 1962, when Jennifer was just over a year old. Mary may have been offered a similar situation in another children’s home when Jennifer was five. I hope so –they belonged together.
I wish now that I had written down some of the things the children said. We would repeat them at staff meal times and perhaps to a friend outside the nursery but so many of their quirky remarks are long since forgotten. Of course we never ridiculed them but some of the things they did were so sweet. The children all had their own individual combs and although they were marked with their names, they were supposed to keep them in their own pocket, which was hung over the radiator guard in the bathroom. I can still see Paul, standing with his legs akimbo and his hand on his hip in exactly the same way Matron Thomas did. He’d even captured her cross face as he boomed out across the playroom, ‘Julie, let me tell you somesing. You have left your comb on the top of the raid-it-ator card!’
Or Gary, who was dragging his feet when we were out for a walk. Knowing that Matron would complain if he scuffed his shoes, I said languidly, ‘Gary, pick up your feet.’ He stopped walking and looked behind him. Turning back to me, he said with a quizzical expression, ‘But I haven’t dropped them.’