by Pam Weaver
‘It’s over here,’ they cried, ‘come and see!’
They dragged us along the corridor, their voices high-pitched with excitement. ‘It’s ever-so big, right up to the sky. And it had presents on its back and then we all had a ride.’
Of course we were amazed when they told us but even though we searched for ages, we never did find it. ‘I guess it must have been a magic pantomime horse,’ Maria said eventually, and all the children, wide-eyed with wonder, nodded sagely.
In the evening, after a sumptuous Christmas meal in one of the playrooms after the children were in bed and asleep, we put on a show for Matron and the rest of the staff. Miss Armstrong delighted in telling us how the year before she had had to bring the Christmas turkey from the kitchen in the other house to the nursery in the pouring rain with an umbrella over it. By the time she’d got there, her feet were wet and the turkey was cold. Because of her determination not to allow that to happen again, we now had a purpose-built walkway between the two houses. Though small in stature, she was a giant in what she achieved in that place. She wore glasses and had a slightly receding chin but when she laughed, you couldn’t help joining in. I don’t think she was a particularly religious woman, she certainly never said as much but her favourite expression was ‘Glory!’ and she would tug at the hem of her jumper or blouse as she said it.
The first Christmas I was there, I had New Year’s Day off duty. A girl from Malta called Renata and I decided to go to the Lyceum Ballroom in London to welcome in the New Year. Renata was a careful woman. She was a lot older than me and she had only a few things but they were all top drawer. At a time when to spend ten pounds on a coat was a lot of money, she bought a black astrakhan Persian lamb coat, which set her back a whopping forty-two pounds. She wore the coat to the dance that night.
When we arrived, we went to the cloakroom. I passed my humble Richard Shops coat over the counter and the attendant gave me a cloakroom ticket in exchange. I explained to Renata that she should do the same, but when the attendant gave her a cloakroom ticket, it was clear that she didn’t want to leave her coat behind.
‘It’ll be much safer here,’ I told her. ‘No one can take it unless they have the ticket.’
But she was having none of it. She took her coat into the ballroom and of course, being New Year’s Eve the place was packed. I found us a table near the dance floor (a miracle in itself) and we sat down. Before long, someone asked me to dance but Renata refused his friend. Someone had to stay behind and look after her coat, she said.
Of course, it put a real dampener on the whole evening. If I was dancing with someone, I was worrying that she wasn’t having a good time but even when someone asked her to dance, she only stayed with them for five seconds.
‘Why don’t you stay a bit longer?’ I asked at one point. ‘You don’t have to come back until you’ve had three dances with your partner.’
‘He was not a Catholic,’ she said dourly. ‘He could not marry me.’
‘Renata, you’ve come here to dance, not to get married!’ I complained.
By the time we saw the New Year in, with all the balloons and Happy New Year wishes, I was feeling quite murderous. I had certainly made a vow in my heart never to ask her out again. She didn’t like the noise, she didn’t like the men. She thought the other girls were lewd and nobody was a Catholic. She wouldn’t have a drink from the bar – they were too expensive – and she even put her coat back on when she went to the toilet.
At twelve-thirty we came out into the cold night air and walked to Trafalgar Square to catch the night bus back to the nursery. Back then, once midnight came, everybody went straight back home, so the Square was almost empty. We waited for the bus and I tried to shut my ears to Renata’s continuous complaints that she was cold.
‘I thought you said your new coat was very warm,’ I said eventually in barbed overtones.
She ignored me and pulled her collar up to cover her ears.
The bus came and the people at the bus stop surged forward. We went inside and found two seats together. Renata settled down to doze during the hour-long journey home. The bus was packed. In fact there were way too many people on it and the conductor rang the bell three times. ‘No standing upstairs,’ he shouted, ‘and only eight standing downstairs!’
I looked around. People were standing upstairs, on the stairs, and we had about a dozen squashed in downstairs. Nobody moved. The conductor repeated his edict, adding, ‘If you lot don’t move, the bus doesn’t move.’
Nobody would budge an inch so the conductor rang the bell four times and the driver cut the engine. The next hour at the bus stop was the longest hour the good Lord ever made. People were tired, frustrated and angry. We all wanted to go home but because the last people wouldn’t get off and wait at the bus stop for the next bus, nobody was going anywhere. After about half an hour, tempers flared. A couple of men landed punches and the language was getting a bit ripe too. One man was being particularly belligerent. He stood beside his seat and bellowed at the people standing in the aisles and then hammered the window to abuse the driver and the conductor, having a fag under the bus shelter. There came a moment when he really got up my nose.
‘Look,’ I shouted, ‘if this bus went around the corner and had an accident and you lost your leg, you’d be the first to complain to the bus company!’
‘Well, I lost my leg in the war,’ he shouted back, ‘so that puts you in your place, doesn’t it?’
Almost immediately I could feel my face heating with embarrassment. I swallowed hard. ‘No,’ I retorted defiantly, ‘It merely proves my point.’ But I retired from the fight. Of all the people in the bus, I had to pick on the only one-legged man to make my point.
An hour later, the next bus arrived and the people standing where they shouldn’t have been jumped off and clambered aboard. Finally, we were underway.
‘Next year,’ I told myself when I climbed wearily into my bed, ‘I shall bring in the New Year quietly and at home!’ I suppose I dined out on that story for some time to come but clearly, Renata expected something else when she agreed to come to the Lyceum. We remained friends but we never went out together again.
Chapter 17
Daniel was a highly intelligent little boy, taken into care because his mother, a single parent, was still at school. Even in the baby room, he was the one who worked things out. Every other child smiled and enjoyed looking at the ‘baby in the mirror’ but Daniel explored behind the mirror first. He seemed to be very frustrated with the limitations of his own body. He would try and get a toy just out of reach but if he couldn’t grab it first time, he’d get angry about it. He enjoyed someone playing with him, but hated to be left to amuse himself. His cries were far-reaching and ear-piercing. Although I can’t bear cruelty of any sort, whether it’s against a child, a beast or a man, for the first time in my life, I could understand how a desperate parent might be driven over the edge by a child like Daniel. I had days off duty to get away from the continuous screaming but a mum would be with him round the clock.
‘If I were in a flat with him,’ I remarked one day, ‘and the neighbours were banging on the walls, I think I’d struggle to cope. It’s no wonder some mums do awful things.’
We had an odd job man in the nursery. Mr Reed came in daily and did everything, from putting the dustbins out for the dustmen to the gardening and mending a light switch. He was the sort of person who was very friendly until the day you crossed him. In other words, he was a good friend but a bad enemy. He spent a fortune on the Daily Mirror because he bought almost every girl in the nursery her own copy. As I made my remark, Mr Reed was putting my Daily Mirror in the drawer.
It took me a while to realise that he wasn’t speaking to me, although I had noticed that I was no longer a recipient of the Daily Mirror. Then I discovered that if I passed him in the corridor and said hello, he would stick his nose higher in the air and walk on, but I was at a loss to know what I had done. We had had some long conversations i
n the past. Mr Reed had struggled with long held beliefs, especially when on 21 July 1969 the American Neil Armstrong became the first man to walk on the moon. He stood with his Daily Mirror in his hand, reading aloud: ‘As he put his left foot down first, Armstrong declared: “That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.”’
Mr Reed shook his head sadly. ‘I can’t believe in him now.’
‘Who?’
‘God,’ he said. ‘How can I believe in Him now that a man has walked on the moon?’
I didn’t see the connection myself, but we spent times like that discussing the changes in the world. In a way, it didn’t bother me that he’d decided not to speak to me again, but it clearly bothered him. He looked so miserable and hurt.
I talked to the other girls first. ‘Have you any idea what I did to upset Mr Reed?’
They all shook their heads.
‘It might be something to do with what you said about Daniel,’ Valerie suggested. ‘He thinks you said it would be okay to hit him.’
‘What?’
I decided to take the bull by the horns and stood in the doorway of his shed one day when he was inside. He had nowhere to go so he was forced to listen to what I had to say. I apologised that I may have hurt him, I told him that I would never, ever, under any circumstances hurt a child, but that I was simply trying to understand the frustrations someone under enormous pressure might feel. I told him if he didn’t want to speak to me anymore that was fine, but that I valued his friendship. He stared somewhere into space as I rattled on and said nothing at all, so I left. The next day, there was a Daily Mirror in the drawer.
Daniel was put up for adoption. If I close my eyes I can still see him bouncing away in a baby bouncer I put in the doorway. He loved that. It gave him something to do and he could see all the other children and the staff moving around. With his new-found abilities he quickly became a loveable, intelligent little boy. We knew there would never be a dull moment with Daniel around and Miss Armstrong was keen to get the thing moving before he was forgotten. He went to a college lecturer and his deputy head teacher wife. I can’t help thinking it was a very good choice.
Susan was what was once referred to as ‘spastic’. This was a medical term widely used at the time and referred to people with cerebral palsy. There was even a UK charity called The Spastics Society, which had been founded in 1951. The word was dropped as official vocabulary in the 1980s because it became a particularly unkind term of abuse and even The Spastics Society changed its name to Scope in 1994.
Susan was reluctant to move because everything was such an effort. Miss Armstrong once told me that she hadn’t a chance of being fostered because she made no attempt to walk. What could I do to help her? I had been reading that some people with her condition had been helped by swimming. In my off duty, I filled the staff bath right up to the overflow and put her in. Susan loved it. We didn’t have a swimming baths near us or I would have taken her there, but in the meantime, she used her limbs as she had never done before. Susan had a lovely nature and we loved her to bits. I last saw her when she was about three. She was still in the nursery but she was very much a part of her family group. The day I visited, she was sitting at the table and began to slip from her chair. I resisted the temptation to rush to her aid to see what would happen. When she reached the point when she felt she would not be able to pull herself back up, she said to Alison (the girl who had had the huge hernia), ‘Alison, I’m slipping.’ Little Alison jumped down from her seat and gave Susan a hefty shove back into place. I had to turn away in case they saw the tear in my eye.
We used to have quite a few staff who lived out and came into work daily. Some commuted quite a distance. One such person was Ellen. She always looked very glamorous and at the time the big Afro hairstyle was in vogue. I used to wonder how Ellen found the time to keep her hair so beautifully done. It never looked out of place. I soon found out why. One morning in the snow, she got off the bus and fell over. Her hair went one way and she went the other!
I only ever once crossed swords with Miss Armstrong in the whole time I worked at the nursery. I admired her deeply and respected her but I didn’t agree with what happened to a boy called Jack. Jack had tight curly hair and a sweet face. He was in the baby room because his mother had a drugs problem. Normally that wasn’t reason enough to take him into care and as yet there had been no court case, but he had been removed from his mother’s care to a place of safety. He was thriving very well when she turned up again. She wanted to take him with her and there was no legal reason why we should refuse her but Miss Armstrong asked us to string it out as long as possible while she tried to find someone in authority who could stop this from happening. Clearly the mother and her boyfriend were in no fit state to look after an eight-month old child. They were moving about like zombies and their pupils were dilated. When I spoke to her, the mother gave me a blank glassy-eyed stare and yet didn’t seem to be paying attention. I packed a case, taking my time, and made up a couple of bottle feeds for Jack that she could take with her. I also packed a couple of packets of baby milk powder because when I asked her if she had any, she looked at me with a blank expression as if she hadn’t even thought of it. Miss Armstrong was on the phone to Jack’s social worker but frustratingly, she was unavailable. We kept them hanging about for over an hour but in the end, we had to let them go. Most of us were saying a silent prayer as we saw their battered car bumping along the driveway with Jack in the back.
The child care officer found Jack a week later. He was found abandoned, starving hungry, covered in fleas and locked in a shed in a large hippie commune. When Jack was brought back to the nursery, he was terrified of being left. I cleaned him up and Mr Reed burned his clothes. He was deloused but Miss Armstrong wanted him to spend a week in isolation. After two days of pulling at my clothes when he knew I was leaving the room, and listening to his heart-rending sobs on the other side of the door, I could bear it no longer. Jack was back in the nursery. We argued about it, but I was determined to have my way. Shutting him away, in my humble opinion, would do more damage than the risk of giving one of the other children in the nursery fleas. We kept his cot apart from the others and he played on a rug by himself for a few days, but he was happy to see people around him. His child care officer told us that his mother had no recollection that she had even been to the nursery, let alone demanded her son back. She was persuaded to give him up and Jack went for adoption.
The childminder looked at her watch. It was seven o’clock and usually Beryl Collins was here by now. Could something have happened to her? It was annoying that she was so late. Mrs Stephens had planned to go away this weekend. The car was all packed up and her husband was putting the last of the camping gear in the boot. The weather was perfect and Mrs Stephens was looking forward to a lazy weekend with a good book. They always went to the same place and were familiar with the farm and the farmer’s wife. Mr Stephens would have a beer in the local pub while she unpacked everything and put everything in its place. But now they were stuck with Adam. He was a good baby and although ‘Mrs’ Collins (who was a Yorkshire lass) wasn’t married to him, Adam’s father (who came from the West Indies) loved him to bits. Mrs Stephens looked at her watch again. Where was she?
By eight o’clock it was too late to go camping and there was still no sign of Mrs Collins, so Mrs Stephens rang the police. When they arrived at Mrs Collins’ flat they were all in for a surprise: it was empty. Mrs Collins had packed up everything and left without leaving a forwarding address. Baby Adam was taken into care. He had been well cared for and his father had visited him regularly. They had a real bond and it was obvious that the man only wanted the best for his son but the problem was that because he wasn’t married to the boy’s mother, he had no legal standing.
I was dating Adam’s child care officer at the time. Bob Carter had a horrendous case load. He was the child care officer for eighty families, which in itself sounds bad enough but when I realised that some of
the families he was helping had anything up to eight children, it gave me an insight into how difficult things were for him. With the influx of new immigrants, they were also having to adjust to new cultures and beliefs, some of which were hard to get your head around. He once told me that an African man had walked into their offices and asked them to take care of his children because he was going to die. Everyone was most sympathetic and the wheels were set in motion. Eventually Bob asked the father how long the hospital had given him.
‘It wasn’t the hospital,’ said the man, ‘it was the witch doctor.’
The man was told politely that the office couldn’t help him and he was sent away. He was regarded as a timewaster until about a month later when the police called to say that he had been found dead in his bed. There were no suspicious circumstances. The man had simply gone to sleep and not woken up but once the children had been taken into care, Bob was left wondering if the witch doctor really did have the power over life and death after all.
Adam’s mother was eventually traced to another part of the country. She wasn’t very happy to be found because she had a new love in her life and he didn’t know anything about Adam or his father. She signed the papers to let her son go. His father wanted to care for Adam but because he wanted to take him back to the West Indies, where his mother would look after him, Bob found this too hard to take. ‘Why?’ I asked him.
‘The child should be looked after by his parent,’ said Bob.
‘That’s true according to our culture,’ I said, ‘but you know yourself a lot of West Indian children are born here and go back to be with relatives during their childhood. It’s their way of doing things.’
‘But he won’t be brought up as an English boy,’ came the reply.
‘So? What’s wrong with that?’ I said indignantly.
‘There are better chances in this country.’
‘He’s half English, half West Indian,’ I said, ‘what difference will it make which half he’s brought up as?’