by Pam Weaver
I was also frustrated by Mr Valentine’s attitude. He kept giving me ‘would-you-just jobs’ and I resented it.
‘Oh Nanny,’ he would say in an off-hand manner, ‘would you just iron my shirt while you’ve got the ironing board out?’ ‘Nanny, while you’re washing that shirt for Rupert, would you just rinse my swimming trunks and the towel?’
I did some jobs, mostly with a bad grace, but his attitude towards me was changing as well. I never liked him but I was beginning to feel uncomfortable about the way he was looking at me. ‘Leering’ would have been a bit more accurate.
The day he made a joke about my breasts was the last straw. We’d been having trouble with the door knocker on the front door and one afternoon it finally fell off. Mr Valentine handed it to me and said, ‘When you go into the village buy us a new one, Nanny. You’re the expert. After all, you’ve got a lovely pair yourself.’
I knew he was joking but I was furious, though I chose to adopt a higher tone. ‘How dare you!’ I snapped. ‘I am employed by Mrs Bancroft to look after Rupert,’ I said haughtily. ‘I’m sorry, but my duties do not include me doing a million and one jobs for you, nor listening to your snide remarks.’
With that, I stalked out of the room. He had gone way too far and as far as I was concerned, it really was time for me to move on.
I knew I’d have to have a really good reason if Mrs Bancroft was going to let me go with a decent reference. If I let them, they would talk me out of it, so I thought of several different reasons why I had to leave.
When I had taken the job I had only just become a Christian. I knew it was important to nurture my newly-found faith and so it was important to me to be allowed time off to go to church. Back in London, Rupert and I alternated between churches but his parents became upset when he enjoyed mine more than his. After the incident when I couldn’t find the exit, going to church was brought to an abrupt halt. Because of my employer’s social calendar in France, it was proving to be impossible for me to go at all. My day off sometimes dwindled down to half a day. If Mrs Bancroft had been up late the night before and didn’t rise until noon, I couldn’t go. Today’s private nanny has a clearly written contract which has been agreed upon by her employer and herself. If I had had such a thing, it would have made life a lot easier. As it was, they constantly took advantage. I had managed to get to the occasional mid-week meeting at the Baptist church but I had only gone to the Sunday service once. Beginning with the church thing, I gave in my notice and just as I had predicted, I was immediately promised a weekly opportunity to go. It was time to use my second reason for leaving.
My dad was ill. He was only fifty-five but from that time, although he lived until he was seventy-seven, he never worked again. I told Mrs Bancroft that I needed to be nearer home for my mum’s sake. Immediately I was promised that if needs be, they would get me on the first flight home but I stuck to my guns.
I was put under great pressure to stay. Judy kept telling me about the car, little realising it was the promise of a car that had freaked me out in the first place.
‘It’s a lovely little red Mini,’ she would tell me. ‘I’ve seen it. I wish someone would give me a red Mini.’
I was unimpressed so they tried another tactic. Mr Valentine took Mrs Bancroft, Rupert and I over to Spain for the day. It was supposed to be a special treat but I hated it. He had no idea that by trying to make himself look good in his nephew’s eyes he was actually making me look a fool. I nearly died of embarrassment in the restaurant because I couldn’t understand the menu. I felt even worse when he gabbled a translation in a superior tone as he eyed Rupert to make sure he was listening to his perfect Spanish translation. By the time he had finished, I’d forgotten the first thing he said and still didn’t know what to eat. I felt so uncomfortable I wished the ground would open up and swallow me. ‘I’ll have what you’re having,’ I said feebly.
When we got back to France, he insisted I go back to the cottage in his car. Within sight of the cottage, he pulled up and began to pressure me to stay.
‘I know what it is to be a Christian,’ he said. ‘I’m a Christian too. I gave fifty pounds to charity the other week at the golf club. Mrs Bancroft needs you. If you leave you’ll be doing a very unchristian thing.’
There was no point in arguing with him so I said nothing. When we got back to the cottage, I put Rupert to bed and then rang the pastor of the church. It was late in the evening and luckily he spoke good English, but bless his heart, he came out to pick me up. By the time we reached his home, I was in floods of tears. He and his wife calmed me down and then they brought some rational thinking into the situation. ‘Giving money,’ he said gently, ‘even as much as fifty pounds, to charity is no proof of being a Christian. You want to go to church and you also want to honour your parents. Now that’s good thinking.’
I worked my notice and left a week before my twenty-first birthday.
Chapter 13
I had a small ‘do’ for my twenty-first birthday on 19 April 1966 at my home. The only people there were Mum and Dad, my Auntie Betty and Uncle Bob, Elaine, three schoolfriends and Hilary. We ate egg sandwiches and cake. My greatest coup was getting two brothers called Michael and Rafe Tunnicliff to come. They were the local talent (think James Dean), both public-school educated and absolutely gorgeous! Having them in my house was as good as dying and going to heaven but I’m not sure why they came. They didn’t appear to fancy any of us, so I rather suspect that they were having a little laugh at our expense but who cared? They made my day and they were FAB!
As soon as I got back home, I applied for and got a job working in the premature baby unit at the local hospital. Employing nursery nurses in the hospital situation was quite a new innovation. It was always difficult for the nursing staff to juggle the needs of the patients when there were tiny babies to feed until someone had the brilliant idea to introduce nursery nurses onto the wards. Because we were trained in the care of healthy babies, we could take up the slack, leaving the Midwives, SRN and SENs to care for the sick children and their mums. We were given responsibility for the care of healthy babies, making sure the feeds were prepared and doing other duties, like helping the mothers to learn how to bath their baby. As time went on, however, we were asked to do much more than we should have done and certainly we were not trained to do some of the tasks demanded of us. If we had plenty of staff in the unit and the mums were fit enough to feed their babies, we might be asked to sit with someone in the labour ward. We never actually nursed them, but having someone in uniform hanging around in the room during the long hours of labour (fathers didn’t go in to see their babies being born at that time) was comforting for the mother. If one midwife was trying to cope with two deliveries at the same time – babies never understood the concept of being patient in a queue – we could at least keep the mum who had a long way to go calm.
The hospital building was old but the maternity unit had been purpose-built later on. It was an oblong shape with individual rooms along the two longest corridors. Each room held two beds and could be totally private if the wooden shutter bearing the words ‘No Entry’ was thrown across the window in the door. At either end of the oblong were two nurseries. The one nearest the labour ward held the most premature babies and the babies who were very ill. The unit had two main nurseries in which the cots were against the walls. On the other side of a corridor, there were three isolation cubicles and a room which was sometimes used for medical procedures. Sister’s desk was at one end and the clean milk kitchen (where the babies’ feeds were made up) and dirty milk kitchen – with its washing sinks, where the feeding bottles were washed before sterilising – were opposite. The nursery at the far end of the oblong was for healthy babies, although it too had two isolation cubicles. All the walls in both units were made of glass.
Nursery nurses fed the long-stay babies, those whose mothers had gone home to look after older siblings. We also fed the babies with mothers who were sick after their delivery and w
e were responsible for taking the rest of the babies to their mothers at feeding time. The system of care was very different back then. If a baby had been a normal birth, as soon as the next time for feeds came around, he would be taken to his mother. If he had been a forceps or a breech birth, or he was a caesarean then he would be ‘rested’ for a few hours. It wasn’t until much later that doctors realised how dangerous this practice was. The babies could so easily become hypoglycaemic and in the most serious cases that could result in seizures and even (in rare cases) brain damage. These days, as soon as a baby is born he is put to the breast.
The hours of duty were nowhere near as long as they had been in the nurseries. A typical day would be a 7 a.m. start until 2 p.m. or 2 p.m. until 8 p.m. or a split shift. No one liked the split shift, which was from 8 a.m. until 12 noon, then 4 p.m. until 9 p.m. Night duty was from 9 p.m. until 8 a.m. in the morning. We wore a uniform which was very similar to the nurses’. They wore blue, but the nursery nurses wore a peach coloured dress and we had an apron and a plain cap with a red band on it. I lived in the nurses’ home, which adjoined the hospital, and for the first time, I had a room to myself. We shared a communal bathroom and toilets but the home had a cleaner, so we didn’t have to worry about housework. I made friends with one of the cleaners called Rose. She treated me like royalty and I went to her house a few times for tea. She once let slip that she and her husband made love every Friday night and it because a long-running joke just between the two of us. If I saw her grinning, I would look at the clock or at my fob watch and say, ‘It’s not Friday, is it?’ and she would fall about laughing. We all ate in the staff canteen although we were allowed to have a kettle and make tea and coffee in our rooms. Right from the start, I loved it. I had longer off-duty times and I enjoyed the company of the other girls. Best of all, I was close enough to home to be able to go back for my days off and my grandmother lived within walking distance of the hospital so I was able to see her every week.
We would congregate around Sister’s desk when we came on duty so that we could hear the reports. Sister Baker was an excellent nurse and I liked her a lot but she was a little sparse with her reports. She read slowly and deliberately in a sing-song voice, ‘Little Baby Harris, satisfactory, Baby Cook, satisfactory, Baby Wright isn’t feeding very well, Baby Swift satisfactory, Baby Vaughan has a scratch on her face and is wearing gloves but apart from that she’s satisfactory …’ With upwards of thirty babies in our care, sometimes it was hard to stay awake!
Once the report had been read, we were allocated our duties. Depending on how many staff were on duty, we might be asked to look after the babies in the bottom nursery, the one furthest from Sister’s desk, or to stay in the premature baby unit itself and tube-feed some of the very tiny ones. Tube feeding wasn’t part of the nursery nurse’s training but we had been taught how to pass a nasogastric tube down the baby’s nose and into his stomach, how to ensure it was in his stomach and not in his lung, and how to use it. Some of the babies were so tiny, the smallest being only as long as the width of my hand, and yet on the whole they were born survivors. No matter how tiny the baby was, a good nursery nurse would apply her training. Babies need to feel loved, and so that touch of the hand or stroke of the face and simply talking to them as we cleaned them up or tube-fed them was so important.
If there was no breast milk available, Sister fed them on Carnation milk. It made them very solid but it put on the weight quickly and that meant they could go home. The normal calculation for feeding a normal baby was 3oz milk (60 calories) per pound of body weight per day. It was believed that a premature baby needed eighty to a hundred calories per pound of body weight per day. These small babies required three-hourly feeding rather than four-hourly. The ratio of Carnation milk to water was half and half. All other babies were fed on SMA. The babies would have to be at least five pounds, seven ounces before they were deemed to be strong enough for the home environment. With the very tiny babies, that could mean spending as much as the first three months of life in hospital. Although it was difficult for the mums, it did mean that we nursery nurses could form some sort of bond with the babies in our care. I would encourage that first smile and bath times with a growing baby were always fun. We gave some of the stronger babies a bath even if they were still in the incubator because the nurseries were kept at a constant 80°F (27°C). Of course as soon as they were up to the required weight of five and a half pounds, they would go home, but until then it was good to have an alert and happy baby on my arm. Their mothers were encouraged to come in as much as they could, but that wasn’t always easy, especially if they had other children at home or they lived a long way away from the hospital and had to rely on public transport.
Some of the mothers wrestled with guilt. They were torn between the baby they had to leave behind and the needs of the other siblings at home. The midwives were caring people but it was often the nursery nurse sitting alongside her feeding another baby who had the time to listen to her concerns and encourage her. She usually only needed someone to tell her she was doing her best and succeeding under very difficult circumstances and then she would be fine again.
The nursery nurses were responsible for making up the feeds, although Sister and the doctors stipulated what was actually required. We were also responsible for looking after the dirty milk kitchen as well. That meant we washed the bottles under cold running water after use and then, using a bottle brush and hot soapy water, cleaned them thoroughly. After the bottle was rinsed again, it was put into a Milton solution (a liquid used to sterilise the baby’s feeding bottles) for at least one and a half hours. The Milton was diluted to one part in eighty (two ounces of Milton to one gallon of water), and it was completely changed every twenty-four hours. The teats were rinsed in cold water, then rubbed thoroughly with salt to get rid of all the milk. They were then submerged in the Milton solution in the same way as the bottles. We had to take great care that the bottle and the teats were completely covered in Milton solution. The bottle should have no air bubbles and the teats were held down by a weight. This was to avoid cross infection and contamination when we made up the feeds next time. For the same reason, the teats had to be covered at all times when they weren’t actually in the baby’s mouth.
When we were on general duties, we used to take the babies out to their mothers for feeding. One day I put a baby in one woman’s arms. She looked at it and said, ‘That’s not my baby.’
With a quick apology, I whisked the baby away and took it back to the nursery. I had taken him from the cot with the mother’s name on it but the baby had kicked his label off his leg. When I looked in, it was still on the sheet. I told Sister and we were vigilant with all the other babies, checking their labels very carefully before we took them to the mums. No one else had a label missing and the only baby left was the baby I had taken to her once already. Sister put on a new label and I took the baby back. My heart was in my mouth as I handed the baby to her. She smiled lovingly at the child and said, ‘I knew that first one wasn’t mine.’ And giving the baby a kiss, she added, ‘You’re my little darling, aren’t you?’ I walked away, heaving a sigh of relief.
These days babies have two labels, one on a left arm and the other on a right foot. It would be a very unlucky baby who lost both labels at the same time!
Our routine was the same every day but every day felt different. We would feed the babies at 6 a.m., 10 a.m., 2 p.m., 6 p.m., 10 p.m., and 2 a.m. if they were on four hourly feeds. If they were on three hourly feeds it was 6 a.m., 9 a.m., 12 noon, 3 p.m., 6 p.m., 9 p.m., 12 midnight, and 3 a.m. Each child had a feed chart, which was religiously kept up to date. We also had to write in how much of the feed the baby had taken. As we fed the babies we chatted amiably and I got to know some of my colleagues very well – like Thelma – who was married, with two growing girls. A small woman with her hair pulled tightly back in a French pleat, she had been one of the first nursery nurses ever trained, gaining her certificate in 1946. Then there was Nancy, w
ho made us roar with laughter and got us into trouble for bad behaviour when she told us about her little girl, all grown up now, who had upset the family at a wedding. She had been told she was going to see a beautiful bride who would look just like a princess. When the bride appeared, she had a dress made of feathers (highly fashionable) and trimmed with swan’s down. While every woman in the church took in her breath with admiration, Nancy’s little girl was horrified. ‘But Mummy,’ she protested in a very loud voice, ‘she looks just like a duck!’
We fell about laughing and Sister came into the unit to tell us off. ‘This is a hospital,’ she snapped, ‘not a musical hall.’
We looked dutifully remorseful. ‘Yes, Sister, sorry, Sister.’
As Sister hurried away, we started to giggle again. ‘If only she had said a swan,’ Nancy sighed ruefully. ‘Half of my family are still not speaking to each other.’
I say the days were different because the babies were constantly moving on and moving in. Confinement lasted ten days for the first baby and five for the second and any other subsequent babies a mum might have. Unless the baby or the mum was ill, the turnaround was quite quick. Sometimes if we were short of beds, the mums would be allowed home a day or so earlier. Most mums were eager to leave, but some of the more seasoned mums enjoyed the enforced rest away from family.
As time went on, I remembered some of the returning mums. Mrs Coxall lost her little girl the first year I was on the unit. She was a good weight at birth but sadly she had a serious infection. Despite being put on penicillin, the baby eventually had a fit and died. Mr and Mrs Coxall were broken-hearted but that didn’t stop them coming to find me and thanking me for all the help I had given their baby. I kept it together until they had gone and then I went into the linen store to have a weep myself. Fifteen months later, Mrs Coxall was back to have another child, this time a boy. It was a bittersweet moment but this time she went home with a beautiful healthy baby.