by Pam Weaver
Still, I had the name of the house and the number so I set off to find it for myself. The houses in her street were very large with huge gardens. It was clearly the sort of place where bankers and pop stars lived. Laura’s house was a tad smaller than the others in the road but it was detached and in its own grounds. As soon as her mother opened the door, she almost had an apoplectic fit. She put her hand to her head and leaned dramatically in the doorway.
Slightly confused, I introduced myself. ‘Hello, I’m Pam, Laura’s friend.’
Putting both hands on her head she cried out a tirade of words, ‘Oh Pamela, poor Laura! She’s waiting for you at the bus stop. She went that way and you’ve come up from the other side. She’ll be devastated that you haven’t come. Oh, I can’t bear it! You must go and find her. You must go to her, Pamela. Go. Go now!’
Bewildered and a little shocked by the amateur dramatics, I turned tail and ran down the road. I met Laura coming back. ‘Your mother was terrified that you’d think I hadn’t come,’ I smiled awkwardly.
Laura seemed unperturbed. ‘I guessed what had happened,’ she said.
When we got back, her mother fussed over us like an old hen. She offered us coffee and went to the kitchen to prepare it. When she came back, she set up a folding stand and put a big brass table on the top of it.
‘We live very humbly here, Pamela,’ she assured me. ‘People think because of the area, we are rich but as you will see, that is not the case.’
Well, she certainly looked well off to me, not that I cared one jot.
Laura and I had quite a nice day but her mother was totally overbearing. She gave us coffee in the sitting room, insisted we sat in the garden until lunchtime, and after the meal, sent us up to Laura’s bedroom until it was time for the brass table and a pot of afternoon tea.
It was shortly after that that Laura left the nursery. We simply got the message that she wasn’t coming back. I really hope it was nothing to do with me, but I can’t help wondering. Perhaps after our day together, her mother decided that she didn’t want her well-bred daughter mixing with the likes of me. I felt sorry for Laura and even more sorry that I never got to say goodbye.
Things were about to change. It was the end of August 1962 and I had completed my year as a nursery assistant. Latterly, I had enjoyed my time there and I think I had gained a little more confidence. I had finally overcome my homesickness, made new friends and I had taken on board some of the more important aspects of childcare. Now I was moving to the nursery, where I was to begin my two-year nursery nurse training. I was keen to get on with the job and a little nearer that all-important qualification. If I’d thought I’d had it hard as a nursery assistant, life had been a picnic compared to what I faced now.
Chapter 5
My new nursery was a large bleak building surrounded by rolling lawns. The rest of the grounds that had surrounded it when it was a private house dwelling had been sold off. Some had been developed and given over to council housing and shops. The whole estate was entered by a long sweeping driveway, ending in a cul-de-sac and the house.
The home was run by a Matron who was very large. She always wore a navy nylon overall and because of her great weight, she lumbered along. She had short dark brown hair, a round face and looked a lot like the Queen Mother before she grew very old; she also had a rather high-pitched whiney voice. The day I arrived, she called us new girls into the office, one by one. There were four of us who began as students together. Hilary had come with me to the same nursery but Evie had gone to another one, somewhere else in the county.
When it was my turn to meet her, Matron Dickenson (we called her ‘Dickie’ behind her back) gave me a limp lettuce handshake and puffed up her ample bosom. ‘We are all happy in this nursery,’ she barked. ‘And you will be happy.’ It was more of a command than an invitation.
Hilary and I were faced with more or less the same kind of routine so it didn’t take us very long to settle in. The hall landing and stairs were very dark and even in bright sunlight we had to have the light on upstairs. There was a lot of dark wood panelling; dark parquet floors and the mahogany doors were heavy. Once again the children were divided into three groups, Babies, Tweenies and Toddlers, and we spent most of the day cleaning.
We may have been slaves to the routine in the new nursery but there was still a lot of fun to be had. The day began at 7 a.m. when we arrived in the nursery to begin dressing the children. Every child had a wash in the morning. The babies and tweenies were ‘topped and tailed’ and the older children went to the bathroom to make a valiant attempt to wash themselves. We had to get everyone dressed by 8 a.m. when it was time for breakfast. The children ate in their own groups. Babies were bottle-fed in the baby room, while the tweenies and the toddlers were together in the children’s dining room. The meals were enormous. For breakfast they would have either cereal or porridge, then a cooked breakfast, which might be bacon, egg and half a slice of fried bread, or maybe scrambled egg on toast. The night nurse had made marmalade sandwiches for everyone. Tweenies had half a slice of bread made into a sandwich each, and the toddlers a whole slice of bread (two sandwiches). They drank milk or milky tea. After breakfast, everybody went to the toilet. At 9 a.m. the girls who had had their breakfast at 8.30 a.m. came back to relieve those who had stayed to look after the children. There was free play in the playrooms until 9.30 a.m. In the tweenie room, the children, after another visit to the toilet, then went into their prams outside. Sometimes we took them for a walk, but mostly in the morning, they slept in the pram shed or out in the garden while we cleaned the nurseries. The toddlers had the better toys under the supervision of the nursery warden. We also had water, sand and painting for them to do. They were divided into two groups and half the morning was spent with the messy stuff, and the other half in the playroom. If it was fine, everybody was outside in the garden. Lunch was around twelve noon and they would have two courses. After lunch, it was time for a rest. The toddlers slept on stretchers in the playroom, while the babies and tweenies were in their cots.
Many years ago, I met one of the children I’d looked after as a little one. He was in his twenties and he enjoyed reminiscing about his stay in the nursery. One thing puzzled him.
‘You used to make us sleep on the table,’ he told me.
I couldn’t believe what I was hearing and then realised he’d obviously thought the stretchers were tables!
After lunch it was back to the playroom, going out for a walk, or having a spell playing in the garden. Tea was at 4 p.m. and they had bread and butter, maybe a boiled egg, and cakes. After tea we told them stories until it was time to get ready for bed.
Two of us did the bathing from 5 p.m. Another girl collected the children from wherever they were (in the playroom or the garden) and brought them upstairs for us. As soon as they were undressed, we gave them a short time of free play in the bath. I loved bath time. The children had toys to play with and sometimes we’d splash and make a mess. Bearing in mind some of the awful conditions these children had come from, there was nothing nicer than putting a warm, happy child, smelling deliciously of talcum powder, into a clean bed. The children themselves were usually keen to come up for their baths. I remember the time when Mark came upstairs from the garden, where he’d been running about in the evening sunshine. He looked hot and sticky. I went to help him undress but he told us he was a big boy and could get undressed himself. As he whipped off his trousers he looked down at himself and said, ‘Awww, look. My willy has gone to sleep!’
Everybody had a milky drink and they would have a bedtime story in the nursery before we kissed them goodnight. After that, we sorted their clothes ready for the morning and then it was time to go for our supper at 7 p.m.
My two new roommates were Marilyn, a bubbly girl with short dark curly hair, who loved sailing, and Paula, a rather austere-looking girl. The old feeling of homesickness came back but this time I was better able to cope with it. Off duty was more or less the same as it had b
een in my nursery assistant days, with the same long hours and one day off a week. The big difference was that now I was going to college as well. That meant I would work two weeks in the nursery and then have one week in college. To get there, I would leave early in the morning to travel to Guildford by train, returning to the nursery at about 4 p.m. We had to work until 7 p.m when we got back to the nursery but the best bit was that we’d have Saturday off as our day for that week and Sunday off for the next week. A whole weekend every three weeks, what bliss! It meant I could catch the Royal Blue coach from Guildford High Street to Ringwood in Hampshire and then the bus to West Moors and be back with Mum and Dad at around 9.30 on Friday night. I’d be back on the bus to Ringwood at three on Sunday afternoon and I’d arrive in the town at around eight. It was a tidy walk to the nursery, but it didn’t matter, not even when it was dark and lonely. Back then it didn’t bother anyone being out alone at night.
We trained at Guildford Polytechnic, doing childcare and child education. I had hoped Evie Perryer might be there, but she went on a different week so I met and made friends with whole new set of girls. They were a friendly lot; one, Elspeth, was very elegant and had expensive clothes and Arlene was the class swot. Another girl ended up being called ‘Brown Susan’. Her name was Susan Brown and as top of the list on the register, whenever our lecturer called her name, she always got it round the wrong way and it stuck. Our lecturers were Mrs Davies, who taught us child education, and Miss Mountford, who was an ex-district nurse and taught us child development.
Miss Mountford was very forthright and she loved to shock. The first time we ever met her she swept into the room and said, ‘Dear, dear, somebody in here smells! Which one of you didn’t wash her knickers last night?’
We all froze to the spot, dreading that she might point to one of us with a much more personal remark. She was perfectly capable of doing that. She once drew me aside and advised me to buy a new underarm deodorant. I was so mortified, as soon as I got back to the nursery, I threw the handknitted jumper I was wearing into the bin.
Almost as soon as I settled in, I realised I had a problem. Marilyn was alright, but Paula and I didn’t get on. She was volatile and I always managed to rub her up the wrong way. She would make snide remarks and I rose to the bait every time. What began as a prickly relationship quickly deteriorated into not speaking and vindictiveness. The thought of spending two years in the same room together was pretty daunting for both of us. I don’t remember exactly how it happened, but in the end we made an agreement not to antagonise each other. It was quite incredible because we stuck to the arrangement and although I can’t say we were ever best friends, there was a kind of mutual respect between us and we learned to rub along together.
As time went on, Paula found herself a policeman boyfriend and he got her pregnant. Back in the early Sixties, people still ‘had to’ get married, but we students had signed an agreement with the council. Our parents had promised to pay back whatever expenses the council had incurred for our training, if we left before our two-year contract was up. This left Paula in a tricky position. She not only faced being an unmarried mother and homeless but she would also be landed with an enormous debt. In the twenty-first century, homelessness is considered a misfortune, nobody cares about being an unmarried mother anymore and debts are an inconvenience. Back then, all three carried a huge stigma of shame. Paula was at her wits’ end.
Surprisingly, she confided in me. She burst into tears and wept on my shoulder. As I comforted her, we worked out that if she could continue to work until her due date and then take the couple of weeks’ holiday she was owed, that meant that she would be able to complete her contract. That was one problem solved. Next I encouraged her to tell her boyfriend what had happened. She was terrified at the thought but when she told him, he was keen to marry her anyway and as a policeman he could get help with housing. Another problem solved. In fact, the council waived the contract, having decided that a heavily pregnant girl on the premises would be a bad influence on the rest of us! Paula left to get married in her seventh month of pregnancy.
Once again, it was time for me to work in the baby room, this time with a Nurse Astley, who was lovely. The routine was as rigid as it had previously been but now I was allowed to handle the babies straight away. I would come on duty, wash the babies and dress them in their day clothes. Then they would have their feed or breakfast. I would then go to the staff dining room for my breakfast. After breakfast, the babies would go out in their prams and then it was time to clean. The baby bathroom, milk kitchen and playroom all had to be spotless. The washing had to be taken downstairs to the laundry room for whoever was on laundry duty. Then it was time to make up the feeds in the milk kitchen. Lunch time was another round of feeding, and then time for my lunch. In the afternoon, after the babies had had a rest, we might take them for a ‘walk’ or park them in their prams in the garden. At 4 p.m. it was tea time and then we would bath the babies and give them their night feed before settling them down. In between times, I might be the girl on laundry duty, or perhaps I’d be cleaning prams. Life was still hard work but I was doing what I wanted at last, training to be a nursery nurse.
We had to keep a file on a child in our care. It was to be a kind of diary, charting the child’s progress day by day. My first child study case was a five-month-old boy called Peter Chippers. I had to keep a record of when he fed well, any illnesses he had, the day he first crawled and sat up on his own, when we began his weaning and keep a check on his weight. I was allowed to take photographs of him and I made an attractive album out of a scrapbook. The object of the exercises was to make me observant. Sadly the scrapbook was destroyed once I had finished my training and I often think how sad it was that nobody kept it for him. His mother, who through no fault of her own had put him in care, wasn’t offered the opportunity to have that diary, nor did she know it existed. It should have been easy enough for the powers that be to keep that record with Peter’s personal papers and he would at the very least have had some record of his childhood. He was a sweet child and made good progress. I watched him roll over for the first time and eventually begin to crawl as I encouraged him by putting a toy just out of reach. He had a warm chuckle and he loved eating the homemade rusks they made in the kitchen. Cook would soak bread fingers in milk and then put them on a baking tray in a very slow oven. The children loved them and they were a lot cheaper than the shop-bought varieties.
When I began my case study book, Peter was only four months old. I thought it would be hard to find something interesting to write but I soon discovered the value of the exercise I had been given. As it turned out, I didn’t have to look for interesting things, Peter was interesting. He enjoyed his bottle, giving little grunts of pleasure as he drank it, and sometimes he patted the bottle or stroked it as well. His eyes were beginning to focus and if I talked to him, he managed a lopsided smile. When I offered him a toy he could distinguish between us. He would study the toy and then look to me for guidance. Of course, I would be smiling so he would know the toy was something good. By six months he was beginning to pick things up or manipulate toys within his reach. He loved to be bounced on my knee as I sang nursery rhymes. He especially loved ‘This is the Way the Ladies Ride’ and he would chuckle uproariously as I jigged my knees faster and faster with each verse.
We were moved around the nursery during the two years I was there. This was to ensure we had an all-round education. The next child I had as a case study was Keith Devlin. He had a sister in the Tweenie room called Jane and they were very close. Keith was in Toddlers and he had a more active life. He loved painting and what might have looked like a blob on the paper had real meaning for him.
‘What’s that, Keith?’ I would say.
‘A man on a bike,’ he’d say proudly. Or ‘Our Jane eating a biscuit.’
Keith and Jane were in care because of homelessness. Their parents were East Enders who had fallen on hard times. Slum landlords were charging extortionate r
ents and unscrupulous landlords such as Peter Rachman (who didn’t achieve notoriety until a year later during the Profumo Affair) built up their property empires on the backs of people like Mr and Mrs Devlin. If they couldn’t pay the rent, they were intimidated or evicted. The council was duty bound to take in a homeless child while the parents had to fend for themselves. Mr and Mrs Devlin were probably on the council house waiting list but with Britain only just coming out of the austerity years after the Second World War, they might have a long wait.
Keith could count up to ten and he was learning the concept of size. ‘Mine is bigger than yours’, he’d say. He enjoyed reading books and could do just about every puzzle in the toy cupboard but he hated playing with clay. I can’t say I blame him – I’ve never liked the feeling of clay under my fingernails either.
Gradually, I settled into the routine but it was during one of my weekends at home that Dickie began a reign of absolute misery in the nursery. During her final rounds of the day, she found a small window open in the sluice room and demanded to know who was responsible for leaving it open. Nobody owned up so with everybody gathered in the staff dining room for supper, she marched in and announced that she had stopped everybody’s off duty. Everyone was upset about it. It was the weekend and some of the girls had planned to meet friends. We weren’t allowed to have telephone calls at all and they were forbidden from going down the village to use the public call box.
Hilary led a rebellion of the disgruntled girls. Everybody was upset about having to work a twelve-hour day with no break. It seemed unfair and besides, she was sure it was illegal.
‘If I go into the office and tell her it’s illegal, will you all stand by me?’
‘Of course we will,’ they said.
Psyched up by their encouragement, Hilary strode to the office and knocked on the door. Dickie listened to her complaint and told her to go back to work. Then shrewdly, she called the other girls into her office, one by one. When faced by Matron on her own, every girl denied knowing anything about it; Hilary was left out on a limb.