by Pam Weaver
I could tell Bob really hadn’t thought of that and although I can’t say I influenced his decision, eventually Adam went back to his father’s homeland and family. I’m sure it was right for him. Father and son clearly adored each other and in my book, that’s all that mattered.
Chapter 18
We worked with some interesting people in the nursery. Miss Keen worked in the kitchen. She was coming up for retirement and looking forward to moving into a new flat. The only drawback, so she told us, was that she was going to have to get rid of her grandmother’s picture. It had hung on the wall in her parents’ home for as long as she could remember.
‘When things got bad,’ she told me, ‘we would say if it doesn’t improve by next week, we’ll sell Granny’s picture.’ Somehow, they never had to, but it had been such a comfort to have it there. Now, at last, it was time for it to go. She took it to a reputable dealer but the dealer had bad news: it wasn’t worth what she thought it would be. Undeterred, Miss Keen took the picture to two more dealers. They gave her the same bad news: ‘The picture is worthless.’ It was a bitter blow but she was philosophical about it. ‘At least the thought that it might be worth something kept us going all through the war,’ she said.
My pay wasn’t as bad as it had been in the past but I wasn’t exactly flush either. My basic pay was sixty-eight pounds, fifteen shillings and eleven pence a month. Eight pounds and fifteen shillings went on tax, my superannuation (a council retirement pension) was three pounds, seventeen shillings and six pence and my other deductions (accommodation and meals) were nineteen pounds and ten shillings. That gave me the grand total of forty pounds, eighteen shillings and three pence a month. I wanted to go on holiday to Spain in the summer and needed a bit of extra holiday money, so I used a week in the spring to do a bit of moonlighting, and took a job as a maternity nanny. I was really lucky because the baby came bang on time and I had promised to work for one week. I went to look after Simon Silver, the first child of his parents. The week went without hitch and I enjoyed being with them. I got the baby into a settled routine and encouraged his mother to overcome her nervousness when handling him. She and her son soon had a firm bond. I was the one who got up in the night to do the night feeds, which meant that Mrs Silver had time to recover from the birth and to get a good night’s sleep.
The family were Jewish and I found their culture fascinating. There were two sinks in the kitchen. One was for washing dairy utensils and the other for anything which had touched meat products. I was curious to know why and they told me it was a tradition which had been passed down through the generations from Moses. We compared notes and they were astonished to see how much of their scriptures were in the Bible. The family had a separate cutlery drawer and separate tea towels as well. I once used the wrong spoon and my employer washed it thoroughly and then stuck it upright in the garden, even though it was silver, for a period of time before having it back in the house again.
At the end of the week the family had a small get together with some relatives and I met a Mrs Hyams, who was expecting her first baby in the autumn. She was very beautiful but not very practical. Someone gave her two boiled eggs and asked her to shell them. We were all talking in the kitchen when Mrs Silver noticed that her friend was still standing at the sink holding the two boiled eggs under the cold water tap. She had the tap on as far as it would go and she was getting wet.
‘What are you doing?’ Mrs Silver asked incredulously.
‘My grandmother told me if you hold a boiled egg under the cold water tap,’ said Mrs Hyams, ‘the shells come off quite easily.’
I was destined to meet up with Mrs Hyams later in the year. She and her husband had asked me at Mr and Mrs Silver’s house to come to their home when their baby was born and to look after him or her in the same way as I had looked after Simon. However, I knew that I had taken a bit of a risk with Mrs Silver. If Simon had been overdue, I couldn’t have done the job and Mrs Silver would have been let down big time. I was also a bit scared that if the council found out I was moonlighting I might be in trouble, so I said sorry, but I was unavailable. However, some months later, late one afternoon I had a telephone call at the nursery. It was Mr Hyams and he sounded quite desperate. He had employed his old nanny to look after their baby girl but the baby had screamed for three days and nobody knew what to do about it. He said his wife was close to a nervous breakdown and he was at his wits’ end. It just so happened that I had three days off beginning the next day so I agreed to come and made arrangements to cancel what I had already planned to do. He picked me up in his flashy car as soon as I’d finished my duty.
The Hyams’ house was amazing. It could easily have featured in Homes and Gardens or any other glossy magazine. The dining room chairs came from Italy and cost over two hundred pounds each and the glass top table with its tubular steel frame had been made to order. Everything seemed perfect but as we walked in, I knew I would have to be firm if I was to help them. Half the family was there, giving Mrs Hyams the benefit of their advice. The baby, Chloe, was in an auntie’s arms and fast asleep. Mum, who was surrounded by more flowers than you’d get in the Chelsea Flower Show, was almost in tears because this was the first time the baby had slept in hours but Auntie was insisting that baby’s feed was due at 6 p.m. and she must be woken up to take her bottle.
‘If Chloe hasn’t slept for a while,’ I said. ‘I think it best to put her down until she wakes up.’
But the auntie was having none of it. Everyone was looking from one to the other. I sensed that there were too many different opinions in the room and someone had to take the lead. I turned to Mr Hyams. ‘If you want me to help, I am more than willing to do so. If you would prefer someone else to help you, that’s fine, but please take me back to the nursery now.’
The baby was thrust in my arms and the auntie out of the door before I had even finished putting her into her cot. I sent her mother, who was clearly exhausted, to have a sleep and asked Mr Hyams if he would tell their visitors to give her a couple of days’ breathing space.
It didn’t take long to work out what had happened. The old nanny had been used to inferior dried milk products. Mrs Hyams had her newborn baby on full cream SMA and the nanny had advised putting in one and a half scoops of powder to every ounce of water instead of one scoop to one ounce. As a result, Chloe was being given a mixture which was far too rich for her delicate stomach. In short, the poor child had a raging stomach ache. When she cried, someone stuffed yet another bottle in her mouth and made it ten times worse. Once I had worked out the proper feeds for her using a lighter milk formula more suited to a new baby’s digestion and she’d had a bit of a rest that night, Chloe was fine.
It made life a lot easier once I’d got everything together. The old nanny had bits and pieces all over the house. The Milton solution was in the baby’s bedroom, which was far from ideal when it came to making up the feeds. Instead of keeping all the baby’s things together in her own little drawers, I had to hunt the clean nappies down. The soiled nappies had been thrown onto the bathroom floor so I requested a bucket with its own lid, which could be kept next to the changing mat.
After I’d had the Milton bucket moved to a small area in the kitchen, I showed Mrs Hyams how to make up the solution with cold water. Now that it was on its own tray, along with a container containing salt to clean the teats on the bottle, it was a lot easier to keep track of things. She already knew she had to totally immerse everything in the Milton solution but there were still a few things she hadn’t got quite right. For instance, she didn’t know that she should not put metal spoons in the solution because Milton destroys metal. I also had to explain that she should not rinse the Milton from the bottle before she used it because it would make it unsterile again.
Mrs Hyams wrinkled her nose in disgust. ‘But it smells funny,’ she complained.
‘It’s a tried and trusted method of keeping baby’s things clean,’ I said. ‘I promise you, Chloe won’t taste a thing.’
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I also told her that the tray should be kept away from strong sunlight because it would destroy the disinfectant qualities.
‘There’s so much to remember,’ she wailed.
In the end, I wrote it all down.
Chloe had a strong personality right from the start. When I had demonstrated changing her nappy, I wrapped her in a shawl and gave her to Mum. Chloe began to cry. Her mother was distraught: ‘She doesn’t like me. What am I to do?’
It happened again at the next feed but I wasn’t so convinced that the reason was that Chloe was upset to be in Mum’s arms. She was an active baby so I took the shawl away and Chloe was happy. What she hated was being wrapped up; she was much happier when she could do her windmill impersonations.
A couple of days of normal living and Mum was overjoyed. So was Dad. You would have thought the sun shone from my ears and they offered me a full time job at a fabulous wage, but it wasn’t for me. I had done that before and the loneliness was too much to bear. About eighteen months later, they tried to tempt me again when their son was born, but once again, I said no.
I did one other stint of maternity nannying the year I left the nursery. Mrs and Mrs Kaplan had a baby boy called Samuel. He was a lovely boy and my stay was uneventful.
The money I had got from looking after Mrs Silver went towards a holiday. I went to Spain with one of the girls from the nursery. We had a great time and enjoyed ourselves very much. During my holiday in Spain I had several pictures taken. One was of me with my head thrown back and laughing. Someone remarked about the lump in my neck. I couldn’t see it at first but when I pressed Sylvia, she pointed out that everyone was talking about it, but nobody knew how to tell me. ‘It was just a trick of the light,’ I told them, ‘a bit of fat in my neck, that’s all.’ I went to the doctor, convinced that everybody was making a fuss about nothing, but three weeks after my visit to the GP, I was in Charing Cross Hospital having a goitre removed from my neck. In view of my speedy treatment, I have often wondered if the medical profession had suspected something more sinister. They never said and I never asked. Happily for me I made an excellent recovery and needed no further treatment. It was, however, the beginning of the end of my romance with Bob Carter. We spent most of our dates rowing about something or other and yet neither of us had the courage to end it. He came to visit me in hospital but the three-week convalescence I spent at home gave me time to think. When I got back, we met for the last time and parted as friends.
Janine was Anglo-Indian and her mother had died when she was only a few months old. She was a beautiful child, with big brown eyes and very thick long black hair. Her hair was right down her back and reached her bottom. It was far too heavy for her and Miss Armstrong wanted to get it cut but her father refused permission. In the summer, the poor child sweated buckets and complained of headaches, but he said he had promised her mother on her death bed he would never have it cut, so that was that. He couldn’t look after her himself but he didn’t want her to be adopted either. I have always struggled with parents who never make an effort to visit their children and yet resist every attempt to make their lives better. I suppose they feel responsibility and guilt at the same time, but somehow they don’t seem to think about the effect their decisions, or lack of them, have on their children.
People are curious to know what happened to the children in the end and I have to say I have no idea. It was a different time back then. Today, everyone wants to know everything about everybody. In the late Sixties there was still a feeling that you didn’t pry into another person’s affairs. People kept family secrets and you could share a confidence and know it would stay there. Like most of my contemporaries, I have scant knowledge about the children in my care. I was told just enough to be helpful but not enough to invade their privacy. This is probably why people of my generation resent having to ‘tell all’ when dealing with officialdom. I hope that Janine was fostered or that her father remarried and gave her a new home, but the truth is, I simply don’t know.
Charles’ mother rang up to say she was coming to take him out. We got him ready and he was very excited. He wanted to wait by the front door, so Miss Armstrong let him. He waited there all day. She never turned up and his heart was broken. She rang a couple of days later to say she was sorry but she’d got held up. Miss Armstrong was pretty annoyed with her on the phone and told him how disappointed Charles had been. She promised it wouldn’t happen again, so Miss Armstrong agreed that he could go out with her that afternoon. This time, nobody said anything to Charles. ‘I think we should leave it as a surprise,’ said Miss Armstrong. ‘It won’t take long for you to get him ready, will it?’
It was a good job she did that. Charles’ mother never did turn up.
Janine began having terrible stools. They were very dark and smelly. The carer in her room took her to the doctor and he asked for a sample. When the results came back, she was quite poorly and already in hospital with severe stomach pains. As her mother had died of cancer, Janine was put through a barrage of tests. She gradually improved and although the source of her problem was never discovered, she was sent back to the nursery.
Before long, the terrible stools and the severe stomach cramps were back and she was once again taken into hospital. This time Miss Armstrong was summoned to meet the doctors for a consultation. ‘One of your staff is feeding her large amounts of iron,’ he told her.
Miss Armstrong was furious. ‘There’s no way any of my staff would do such a thing,’ she said. ‘Run the tests again.’
Janine made a good recovery and she came back to the nursery a third time but it didn’t take long before she was exhibiting the same symptoms.
‘This is very serious,’ the child care officer told Miss Armstrong. ‘I think the hospital want to make it a police matter.’
It was a real puzzle. Unless someone was deliberately targeting Janine, there was no way she could be getting the vast quantities of iron the hospital was talking about. They said she was drinking a whole bottle of iron tonic mixture every two days. That sort of medicine tastes foul anyway, so it would be nigh on impossible to make a three-year-old drink such quantities without someone in the nursery being aware of it. None of us could work out what was happening. We were all told to watch her like hawks.
Miss Armstrong had an open door to her office. The children could go in at any time to see her and show her a picture or tell her their ‘news’. When Janine came into the office to tell Miss Armstrong something, she noticed that the child had dirt around her mouth. Miss Armstrong cleaned her up but later that day noticed more dirt around her mouth. At the same time she saw one of the girls with a dustpan and brush sweeping a shelf. Someone had knocked over a pot plant and spilled the soil. It seemed that Janine had been eating the dirt. It was almost unbelievable but the fertiliser around the plant was made up of nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium and iron. What was even more surprising was to discover that Janine was addicted to it. The pot plants were removed and yet she still kept producing these awful stools. It kept happening until the nurse in her room discovered Janine had hidden a large quantity of the soil under the false bottom of a dolly’s pram. She might have appeared to be innocently playing in the Wendy house with the dolls but she was secretly eating more soil. Once the source was entirely removed, her body reverted to normality and the craving ended.
Charles’ mother ended up in prison. The authorities explained that her little son could easily be adopted by a loving family. He had everything going for him: he was blond, blue-eyed and a lovely little boy. She was facing a very long term in prison followed by an uncertain future. Gone were the days when people were coerced or bullied into giving up their children. Nobody wanted to go back to that, but the authorities pointed out that Charles was destined to stay in a home for a very long time, if his mother wasn’t around. It took a long time, but Charles’ mother finally agreed to let him go when he was six. Sadly for Charles, by then it was far too late. Most people adopting a child back then wa
nted someone under four years old. Because there are so few babies waiting to be adopted, people will adopt an older child now. The only trouble is, an older child is far more likely to have been damaged by their experiences and may take a long time to adjust to new surroundings. Real life isn’t like the Hollywood version, where after being placed in a good home, everyone lives happily ever after. Adoptive parents may be in for a bumpy ride and although today’s Social Services help them with long-term support, it’s still not easy. In the 1960s it was a case of sink or swim and few parents were willing to take a chance.
One of the most radical changes Miss Armstrong brought to the nursery was the way it was decorated. Normally the building would have been re-painted in a maximum of two colours. In my first nursery it had been mismatched wallpapers and blue paintwork, whereas the nursery where I trained was still stuck with dark browns and the occasional splash of canary yellow. Miss Armstrong had very different ideas. She met with a howl of resistance and horror when she told us what she’d planned and I know that it raised more than a few eyebrows at County Hall, but she stuck to her decision.
There was a long corridor which went through the whole building. The walls were bare brickwork and apart from the occasional cupboard to break it up, mostly it was painted in the same old magnolia. The corridor had two right-angled turns and one left so she proposed making each turn an entirely new experience. As I put it down on paper, it will seem as shocking as it was to us at the time, but the amazing thing was, it absolutely worked. The ceiling in one area was black and the walls were a peach colour, with a slightly lighter shade for the cupboards. As you turned the corner, the ceiling changed into a light blue with yellow walls and duck-egg blue cupboards on the third bend; it was teal walls with a darker blue on the cupboards. Every now and then, instead of the painted walls she had a fussy floral wallpaper and the bold colours elsewhere had been picked to match the colours in the paper. Everyone who came to the nursery remarked that it was wonderfully colourful and great fun. Apart from the untiring way she championed the children, this has to be her greatest triumph. Out of the same budget, I was given the chance to choose the decoration for the baby room. With her encouragement, I went for a Sanderson patterned wallpaper and the matching material for the curtains. On the three walls which were plain, we matched the blue in the pattern and when I went back to the nursery about six years after I had left, to celebrate Miss Armstrong’s retirement, the room looked as fresh and new as it had done when I’d been in charge.