Bath Times and Nursery Rhymes

by Pam Weaver

  As the year wore on, it was getting closer and closer to the time when I had to take my final exam. I had worked hard; I couldn’t bear the thought of failure.

  According to the NNEB syllabus, during my two-year training period I had to be taught about the health of the young child, including his development and signs of good health in general. I should know how to feed him, stimulate physical activity, give him adequate rest and sleep, ensure he had plenty of outdoor life and that he wore good clothing and footwear. I was taught about good personal hygiene habits for children and the care of nurseries and their equipment. I was given a rudimentary knowledge about infection and infectious diseases and a solid understanding of public health bodies and the medical services available. I was also taught about the education of the young child at home as well as in the nursery or nursery school setting. Above all, I was taught how to be observant so that the children in my care would be happy and healthy. My training involved taking copious notes, end-of-term tests and keeping diaries on the children in my care. I also had to make a child’s dress with smocking, knit a jumper and create a dossier containing all my college work and nursery observations. I completed everything except the smocking. My Auntie Betty was much better at smocking than I was! One of the girls in the nursery discovered a lucrative way of making money with her new-found talent of smocking. The White House, an exclusive shop in New Bond Street, sold smocked romper suits and dresses to the rich and famous, and they paid good money to skilled workers. She could get twenty pounds for garments that would retail at fifty to a hundred pounds.

  My exam was held on 1 July 1964 and there were two papers. I had two and a half hours to answer five questions. I began with, What are the special points to be considered when buying (a) a cot and (b) a perambulator for a baby? In the afternoon I had another two and a half hours to answer the second paper.

  One question was: A baby aged three months has sore buttocks. What might cause this condition and how should it be treated? And another was, How can the year-old child be helped to share in family meals? Describe a suitable menu for the midday meal. I was fairly confident but we had to wait five agonising weeks for the results.

  There were one hundred and twenty failures that day but I was one of the 1,211 candidates who passed and my registration number was 28115. I had done it at last!

  In her final report, Matron Dickenson had some kind things to say but still managed a last few unfairly hard criticisms. She said I was withdrawn and still needed to assert myself more. (And remember I was the one who had organised the Christmas show and written most of the sketches and songs.) In fact, she saw my shortcomings as a failure on her part. It hurt me for years to come, probably because I only saw one word … failure.

  Looking back at it with a more mature and detached eye, it is so obvious that she never really knew me. My friends have laughed at the idea of me being withdrawn about anything. I enjoy a good laugh and I’m not ashamed to say I love being at the centre of one. Having said all that, looking at it now, it’s not such a bad report and I wonder if her erratic behaviour was the reason I walked away with such a jaundiced view of myself and my own capabilities.

  Chapter 10

  I had contracted to work as a staff nursery nurse for a year after my training. Whenever we were upgraded from nursery assistant to student nursery nurse and then on to staff nursery nurse, we had to move to another nursery. This was so that we wouldn’t be put in the position of having to tell people who had once been our friends what to do. I arrived at my new nursery on the last day of August 1964 knowing that in exactly one year I could turn my back on nursery life for good. I enjoyed being with the children, but the restrictions were beginning to get to me. The fact that you never knew your day off until the Sunday of the same week, the difficulties of getting an evening off, especially a specific evening, the low pay, the strict routine … I longed for less restraint and more freedom. My new matron, Mrs Harrison, was about five foot tall with square hands and a totally authoritarian manner. She shared her accommodation with her family but they kept well away from the nursery.

  Since passing my exam, I had joined the ranks of the elite. I was now an NNEB, but I still had to share a room with two other girls, Nurse Judy Crawford and Nurse Rosalyn Taylor. Judy was very large, blonde and passionate about Avon Topaz. She had the talcum powder, the perfume, the bath oil, the soap … everything, and I can never think of her without remembering that smell or think of Avon without remembering her. Ros was a gentle and loving girl and we became very good friends.

  I worked in Tweenies and to my absolute delight, Evie Perryer came to work there as well. She was a little bit embarrassed that she had actually failed her exam but the council had given her a second chance. It was obviously a case of exam nerves because she re-took the exam again in the autumn and passed with flying colours. Because the three of us got on so well, Judy moved into a single room and Evie, Ros and I shared a room near the top of the house.

  We spent some time swapping stories and told Evie that we had heard how the Matron in her nursery had taken her up to the attic and held her legs out of the window while she was made to clear the leaves from the gutter. Apparently it wasn’t quite like that. Evie had indeed gone up to Matron’s room and been told to clean out the windows on the outside. She was standing outside on a flat roof cleaning the corner windows when Matron obviously forgot she was there and shut the window. To Evie’s horror she was stranded and she had to attract the attention of somebody in the garden before she was let back in! ‘It was perishing cold,’ she told us as we sympathised. It was still a horrific story and it’s a wonder to me that Evie wasn’t emotionally scarred by the incident.

  Once again the regime in the nursery was very strict and the children were looked after with the same divisions centred around their ages; Babies (up to a year), Tweenies (one- to two-year-olds) and toddlers (three- to five-year-olds). Miss Forest, the nursery warden, was a very caring woman and I think the children in her room were genuinely happy. It was light and airy, she had a piano and the walls were full of colour. She also had a cat and the children loved him.

  We had the same sort of duty and off-duty times but of course I had to forfeit my monthly weekends at home. For now on it was one day a week, the occasional weekend and two weeks’ holiday a year, however I had in effect a huge pay rise. The council was no longer docking monies for my training so my wages went up from six pounds, four shillings and five old pence (six pounds, twenty-two pence in today’s money) to nine pounds and ten shillings (nine pounds, fifty pence) a month. I was rich!

  In the Tweenies, there were eight children in my care, all between the ages of one and two years old. One child was dear to all our hearts. Little Kieran lived in a world of his own. He had some sort of glucose deficiency and had to be given medication every day but so long as he had something in his hand which flipped when he patted it, he was happy. A piece of paper, a leaf, a floppy toy, he would spend hours patting it with the back of his hand. In this day and age there would have been a deeper diagnosis, perhaps with experimental care thrown in, but back then, as long as a child wasn’t disturbed in any way, they were left pretty much to themselves. Sadly, long after I’d left the nursery, I heard that Kieran had died. He was about four years old.

  Miss Forest liked to do things a little differently so that in autumn, the girls in the Toddler room made pretend harvest loaves with the children. They created a harvest corner where they put their field mouse decorations and they talked about harvest time and gathering in the crops. Later on they sung harvest songs around the piano. As everyone turned to leave, one child looked at Miss Forest with a puzzled expression. ‘Please, Miss, what is Harvey’s Vegetable?’

  I settled down and I was fairly happy but in truth I was living out my time there, longing for the day when I could leave the confines of council nurseries. During my twelve months there as a staff nurse, I had only one serious brush with the Matron and that was when I was on night duty. T
he routine was that we gave the children a tiny drink of orange squash when they got up in the morning, just to freshen their mouths. I went to the kitchen only to find that the orange bottle was nearly empty. Looking in the larder, I found another bottle and used it. I left a note on the kitchen table saying something along the lines of ‘Dear Matron, There wasn’t enough orange squash for the children’s morning drink so I took a new one from the larder, signed Pamela Cox’. When I had poured the drinks, I left the empty bottle and the opened bottle on the kitchen table beside the note.

  When I gave Mrs Harrison the night report at 8.30 a.m. I could tell that she was annoyed about something. Her lips were pursed and she kept clenching and unclenching her fists. While she was doing her best to control her temper, I was racking my brains to think what I had done. What could have been so awful to put her in this mood? As soon as I’d finished my report she hurled herself at me. ‘Who gave you permission to go into my larder?’ she barked.

  I was startled. She’d made it sound as if the larder were her own personal property.

  She glared at me angrily. ‘I will not tolerate a thief.’

  ‘But I didn’t take anything for myself,’ I protested hotly. ‘It was for the children.’

  ‘The children,’ she declared unreasonably, ‘will have water rather than you go into my larder.’

  I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. We argued heatedly but she would have none of it. As far as she was concerned, I was a thief and that was that. I managed to hold on to my dignity until I left the room, but when I got upstairs to bed, I hurled myself onto my bed and cried myself to sleep. I woke up thinking how ridiculous the whole thing had been. I had just given myself a headache by crying over two inches of orange squash. We hadn’t cottoned on to the phrase back then but the feeling was ‘get a life!’ When I came on duty I was astonished to find that she had gone to the ridiculous expense of sending for a handyman, who had not only put a lock on the larder door but there was also a padlock and chain around the handle!

  The routine was still very strict, but somehow life was easier in that nursery than it had been in the other two. At Christmas we managed to persuade Matron to let us have a party but we were faced with the same old problem … where to find some men. The International Friendship League was still going but we wanted men in bulk. Somebody managed to get a few trainee doctors to come along and I fell for a chap who was the spitting image of Dave Buckley from The Ivy League. Their song, ‘Funny How Love Can Be’, was high in the charts in February 1965.

  Occasionally I used to stay at Hilary’s place on my day off. Her mother always thought I was a really bad influence and did her best to discourage our friendship. If she had but known I was the restraining influence on her daughter! There were many occasions when Hilary was cross with me because I wouldn’t do something she wanted. Like the night she and I and her younger brother played with an Ouija board until I was too scared to go on. We had made our own board with each letter of the alphabet in a wide circle and two cards in the middle, Yes and No. Then we had asked the spirit of the glass some simple questions like, ‘who died this week?’ It must have been around January because it spelled out Churchill. Indeed, Sir Winston Churchill, the man who had led the country through the Second World War, had died a few days before. We stuck to known subjects until Hilary accused one of us of pushing the glass. That’s when it got scary because we asked questions that none of us could possibly know the answer. Hilary’s sister was pregnant. ‘Will she have a boy or a girl?’ we asked, and it spelled out B-O-Y. The questions became more personal and then I wanted to stop. In the end, I refused to do it anymore and they couldn’t do it with just two of them. Hilary’s parents were upstairs. They were deeply religious Methodists and I often wonder what they would have said if they’d known what we were doing in their lounge.

  I used to go to London to have my hair done. That may sound posh but there was a hairdressing school near Baker Street and you could get your hair done by one of the students for less than a pound. It was great. If I had my hair cut, there was always an experienced teacher on hand to make sure the student didn’t make any ghastly mistakes, and a couple of times I was looked after by a student who was weeks or even days away from working in an upmarket beauty salon. I was paying pennies for a hairstyle by someone who would charge a lot of money in the days ahead, and they loved doing my hair, which I wore long and flicked up at the sides. It was the days of the bouffant and getting the deep wave I had falling slightly over the right side of my face just right was a work of art. After a hairstyle, it was time to go window shopping. Sometimes I’d meet up with Hilary or one of the other girls and we’d head for Carnaby Street or more likely C&A to try and occasionally buy. By 1964, London was at the forefront of the Swinging Sixties.

  The gardens at my new nursery were large. The children had a few big toys. There was a climbing frame and a Wendy house and some baby swings. On warm days we would get the paddling pool out and they would have great fun. At one time, Tony was sitting in the paddling pool when I added a little more warm water to it.

  ‘Don’t put in too much,’ he said. ‘I’m scared of heights.’

  With the rise of children from ethnic backgrounds coming to live in the nurseries, we had to learn new methods of care. For example, we used to try and brush Afro hair with Western hairbrushes until an agency nurse from Nigeria pointed out that we needed to use a comb with long teeth in order to give a satisfactory clean. Nobody bothered much with suntan lotion back then. The children all had calamine lotion on their skin but generally, we avoided being outside when it was very hot and if we were outside, there was plenty of tree cover in various parts of the garden.

  Having been in two places which were isolated in their own grounds, this nursery had neighbours. One particular day we heard two of our neighbours having a humongous row. It went on for ever and finally we could hear crockery being smashed. We all giggled and enjoyed it but I suppose it was a salutary reminder that even if you had a home of your own, it wasn’t necessarily a happy one.

  I was still a dab hand with the sewing machine and I often made my own clothes. It was possible then to make a dress for less than half the price you would pay for a shop-bought dress. I even had a go at making a coat. Sadly, I was no tailor and I had an inflated belief in my own skills. It was in white lightweight wool and fitted at the waist. The skirt was made up of several panels and the top had a low-necked Peter Pan collar. I lined it as well and when I put it on, I thought I looked wonderful. It was getting near my time to leave the nursery and I wore it for a job interview. I didn’t get the job, and on my way home I had to walk under a footbridge near a fish and chip shop. There was a man eating his fish and chips out of newspaper at the far end of the bridge and I couldn’t avoid walking past him. As I drew level he said, ‘Hello, ducks. How much do you charge?’

  I was so mortified that when I got back to the nursery, the coat went into the bin!

  It was late at night. Mrs Thompson wasn’t a nosy neighbour but she was very concerned. The baby next door had been crying for far too long. She could hear his little brother running about but she couldn’t hear any adult voices and she was increasingly convinced something was wrong.

  ‘They won’t thank you for interfering,’ her husband warned. ‘Keep out of it.’

  On her wedding day, Mrs Thompson had made a promise to love, honour and obey, a vow she took very seriously, but this time it was different. It had been a couple of days since she’d seen the children’s mother. She wasn’t very friendly and Mrs Thompson didn’t approve of the way she looked after her kids. Richard and Eddie never looked clean. Half the time Eddie’s nappy hung between his knees, foul-smelling, obviously very wet, but his mother seemed uninterested.

  Mrs Thompson bridled at the unfairness of it all. She and her husband had tried for a baby for years with no success at all, and yet there was the woman next door with two lovely boys who were neglected.

  The child’s wail waf
ted through the walls again and Mrs Thompson knew she would get no sleep tonight. She’d be lying there, listening and worrying. Little Eddie’s cry was definitely weaker now and besides, he hadn’t moved out of the bedroom all day. And what was Richard doing, still running around at this time of night? His mother usually screamed at him if he was naughty, but Mrs Thompson heard nothing.

  ‘Something’s wrong,’ she told her husband again.

  ‘For God’s sake, woman, give it a rest will you?’ Mr Thompson wasn’t a bad man but he was tired. He worked hard all day and when he came home he valued his bit of peace and quiet. He wasn’t a man to make waves and his motto in life was ‘keep your head down’. Besides, he remembered what had happened to the woman across the road. She had reported another neighbour when she saw her dishing out an extreme and dangerous punishment to her child. The NSPCC had gone round and the young inexperienced officer had accidentally let slip which of the neighbours had contacted them. As soon as they’d gone, the woman knocked on the informant’s door. As she answered, a fist smashed into her face and she was sent reeling backwards. She’d made a full recovery but Mr Thompson didn’t want the same thing to happen to his wife. Richard and Eddie’s mother looked perfectly capable of doing far worse.

  Mrs Thompson lay awake in bed until her husband dropped off to sleep and then ran down to the phone box on the corner.

  When the police broke in they found a terrible state of affairs. Eddie was still in his cot with two empty feeding bottles. He was desperately trying to get some nourishment from the teat and when the WPC gave him some plain water, he couldn’t get it down fast enough. The children had head lice and body lice too. Richard had been trying to look for food: the rubbish bin in the kitchen had been tipped out. The place stank. Eddie’s cot sheets were grey with dirt and wet with urine. Richard hadn’t fared much better. He wore no nappy but he was far from toilet trained. After a check-up at the hospital, the two boys were sent to the nursery.