Why did I not admit that I was not happy with Mum’s rules? Was it family loyalty? Or a kind of pride? I would not have known what all these words meant anyway, but my prickly attitude ensured that I was not all that happy at school. No one knew, of course, because no one asked me.
I was glad that they did not know what went on at home.
After hurrying home from school, I had to say ‘Hello’, then take my shoes off, put my slippers and apron on and clean my shoes. Then I went to the lavatory, washed my hands and wrists in the kitchen sink and wiped the bowl round afterwards, Mum watching and timing me. Then I sat at the table and ate my bread and butter and jam before I was allowed to drink the one cup of tea. I was often very thirsty in hot weather by the time I had hurried home, but I had to stick to this ritual. I always ate under Mum’s eye but not with her or Daddy. I would then wash my plate and cup and saucer, wipe the sink round and go into the garden or the other room until quarter to six. I had to keep an eye on the clock and tell Mum when it was bedtime. If I forgot and was a minute or two late, there was trouble. It was difficult when I was in the garden, because I had no watch.
I would go upstairs and undress; everything taken off in a certain order. All had to be folded precisely and placed neatly on my chair. Then I put my nightdress on and went into the bathroom and brushed my hair, being careful not to look in the mirror. All this would not have been so unreasonable, but Mum timed me, and I was rarely quick enough to please her.
She would then hear me say my prayers, which followed the same pattern every night. Then the curtains would be pulled, and I would get into bed. Mum would say ‘goodnight’, give me peck on the cheek (or not, if I had been too slow) and go, telling me not to fidget about and to ‘get to sleep’. In the summer, the sun shone into the room, and it was hot. I would have liked to move to a cool patch of the bed, but the springs squeaked and Mum would hear and shout up the stairs, ‘Just lie still and get to sleep!’ No dolls, no teddy, no books … just sleep.
It was worse when I had a cough because I was not allowed to cough! Mum said it was not necessary and I was just fussing, so I tried to stifle it. But it was usually a tickly end-of-cold cough and I couldn’t stop it, so I got into trouble. If I had been allowed a drink of water, it might have been better.
In the holidays, I was not to get up until Mum called me, and that was often not until about ten or eleven o’clock, by which time I was starving, having had tea at four-thirty the day before.
One day I did get up and come down. Mum was so cross.
‘I thought I would get up and …,’ I said.
‘Well, you can just get off back to bed until I call you. And you don’t need to think. I’ll tell you what to think,’ she shouted, and I crept away.
Sometime later (I think), Mum said, ‘It might be as well if you don’t tell people how late you get up. They might think you are lazy.’
I didn’t want people to think I was lazy, so, as usual, I complied. Now I can see that she was afraid that people would hear that she made me stay in bed to be out of the way.
Once a year, in the summer holidays, I was allowed to have a little friend, Sheila, to play for the day. And once a year I could go to her house to play. I loved going to her house, as her mum gave us nice drinks and we could play indoors or out and have as many toys with us as we wanted. I was less happy when she came to our house because, apart from the restrictions, which I knew she would find odd, I was afraid that she would say something that would get me into trouble. Perhaps I had not worn my hat out to play in the playground (no one else did), or maybe I had stood on the wall to watch the aircraft. She might talk about this and then Mum would know, and, after she had gone, I’d be in trouble.
‘Trouble’ was not often just spanking; more likely it was being sent to Coventry, or Mum would tell Daddy that I was a naughty girl, or there would be some pushing or pulling through a doorway or up the stairs.
One day, she pushed me down the back steps for some reason—I think I had been slow doing something. I had in my hands a small, sturdy wooden stool. I fell onto it, and one of the legs went into my ribs. It hurt a lot every time I took a breath, but I went into the garden and sat on the bench. Mum must have had some idea that she had hurt me.
Later, she said, ‘Did you hurt yourself when you fell?’
I could tell from the way she said it that it was going to be my fault, so I muttered, ‘No.’
It hurt for several weeks, and many years later, an X-ray for something else showed a healed greenstick fracture of two ribs.
But sometimes Mum could be nice, even friendly, telling me tales of her youth and the fun that she and friends used to have. And when Daddy had time we would all go for a walk round the village with Tig, or perhaps Mum and I would watch him playing bowls—he was a county ‘reserve’ player, which I understood meant he was very good at bowls. Occasionally before petrol rationing and again after the war, Daddy would take us out to Exmoor or the Exe Valley, or to the sea at Clevedon or Weston for the day. So it wasn’t all doom and gloom. But I always had to be very careful about what I did and how quickly I did it and what I said.
Tragedy
At the time we moved to Meadow View, Daddy let his bungalow by the river to a family called Anderson.
Mrs. Anderson wore long, flowing dresses and coats and looked very quaint. Mum said she was very odd. There were two boys about my age and a little girl, perhaps about three years old.
The boys were quite tough and roamed about brandishing sticks. One day they barred me from walking down the lane after school so that I was very late home. Mum thought I was making it all up, but eventually Daddy, who had heard ‘no good of these boys’, went to see Mr. Anderson about it. Mum just said that I should have stuck up for myself. I wondered how, when there were two of them, plus a couple of their friends, all with sticks, standing in a line across the lane.
But soon this family experienced a most dreadful tragedy. The little girl, Elaine, had a tricycle, and one day when Mrs. Anderson was inside the bungalow, Elaine rode her tricycle too near the river’s edge and toppled in. No one saw: no one knew. And she drowned.
The whole village was shocked and blamed her mother for allowing her near the river on a tricycle at the age of three. My parents were outwardly sympathetic, and Daddy did what he could, but he said that Mrs. Anderson was ‘not right’. Grandma and Grandpa, next door in Homelea, could not understand ‘that woman’, and there was much discussion about the generally odd lifestyle of the Andersons.
Some months later we were told that Mrs. Anderson was going into hospital. No one mentioned breakdown, or mental strain, or depression—things like that were not spoken of in the 1930s—but she must have recovered in some way, because they were still there, apparently, in the 1950s.
The drowning was talked of in hushed tones for months. All these years later, I can still picture the little fair-haired, fairy-like child.
Such a tragedy!
Things That Go Bump
It seems odd that I do not remember the first sirens or the first bombs of the Second World War. At some stage, it was all just there. I would lie in bed and hear the siren go. The sound was exciting, and frightening, too. I was not allowed to get up and get ready to go to the shelter; I had to wait for Mum to call me.
One night the siren had only just died away when there was a huge bang: the house shook, the windows rattled and even my bed seemed to wriggle. I was terrified, but, even so, I did not dare to run downstairs or even to get out of bed. I lay shivering with fear until I heard Mum on the stairs, shouting at me to ‘get up and bring your dressing gown’. I grabbed Ted, and my slippers and dressing gown, and rushed onto the landing, and we ran down to the shelter. There were more thumps and gunfire but nothing quite as loud as the first. I felt better in the shelter.
A huge bomb had fallen just on the opposite side of the river, missing three houses and landing in a field. Daddy had seen the explosion from the garden, where he had been fire
-watching. It was so loud that it had sounded as though it had fallen in the garden right next to him!
The next day, through Daddy’s binoculars, we could just see the hole and a very big pile of earth.
‘Why didn’t you come straight down when you heard the bang?’ asked Daddy next morning.
‘I have to wait for Mum to tell me,’ I said.
‘Mum doesn’t mean at times like that.’ He seemed amused, but I still didn’t know how bad the bangs had to be before I could come down.
The school was higher up in the village, so we could look across the river from the playground and see the big hole much better. We were all standing in a row on the playground wall, gaping at the sheer size of the crater, when a tractor chugged across the field. It stopped, and the man got off to look into the hole. Then he returned to the tractor, collected a package and walked over to sit in the shelter of the hedge to eat his sandwiches.
We could still hear the tractor engine.
‘Why hasn’t he turned the engine off?’ I asked.
A knowledgeable farmer’s son spoke up. ‘It’s the spark plug.’
What was a spark plug?
We all got bored looking at a hole and a chugging tractor and were turning to resume our games when there was an enormous bang. We stared as earth, rocks, smoke and bits of tractor flew up into the air, gradually falling back to the ground with clatters and thumps.
As the smoke cleared, we could see the figure of the man standing by the hedge with his sandwich still in his hand, staring at the pile of metal that a moment ago had been his tractor.
‘Cor!’ said one of the boys, echoing everyone’s thoughts. ‘If ’ee ’adent stopped fer ’is dinner, ’eed be a goner!’
This stark possibility destroyed even the boys’ excitement—but only for a minute.
The man’s lucky escape was the talk of the village for a long time.
‘Luckiest man around,’ said Daddy. ‘The vibration from the tractor probably set the time bomb off.’
Next day, the field was full of army men walking up and down to see if there was any sign that more bombs were buried there. We children were sorry that they did not find any, because we were told that they would have blown them up and that would have been fun to watch.
Pigs, Mice and Puzzles
During my childhood, my father was friendly with a neighbouring farmer named Tom Rayner. There was a funny little unmade-up lane—a secret lane—from the back of the Works fields to his farm. I used to wonder why we sometimes went that way when the proper lane would have been easier.
Well … there was a reason. Every time one of his sows farrowed, Tom would fail to declare one piglet to the Ministry of Food.
‘A bit dodgy,’ said Daddy.
When the piglet had grown big, it was slaughtered, and Tom’s various friends would go up the back lane to the farm to be given a joint of pork. The front parlour of the farmhouse had big shutters on the windows, and if ever they were closed, we knew that there was a dead pig hanging from hooks in the ceiling.
The farmer’s wife, Edith, used to give me big pieces of cake and mugs (not cups) of tea if I had been allowed to go with my father to collect the pork. I hated to see the pig hanging from the ceiling, but I enjoyed the pork—and the crackling.
Tom and Edith had a little boy called Jim. When scarcely out of nappies, he used to accompany his father everywhere on the farm in the tractor or the trailer. He just went to ‘work’ when his dad did and came home for meals with him. If he was tired, he’d sleep wherever they happened to be working. He was a wild, happy child, totally devoted to his father.
He started school when I was about eight or nine. He did not understand that he had to sit still or that he could not run out to set off home just when he wanted. He ran round and round the classroom, yelling and lashing out at the teacher, who tried to restrain him. Tom was sent for and removed his son for several months while he gradually made him realise that he had to behave differently in school.
Jim was very bright, but he thought his life with his father would never change. I was sorry for him but at the same time was envious of the life he’d enjoyed before his school days—and which he still enjoyed in the evenings and on weekends.
Whenever we went to the farm, we would see the little curly-haired child in the tractor or plodding along beside his father, fetching the cows in for milking. Perched on a specially made stool, he had been able to milk a cow by hand at the age of four.
One day when I came home from school, Mum was smiling. ‘There is a surprise for you in the greenhouse,’ she said.
The greenhouse was built onto the back of the house. We kept logs, bits of furniture and tomato plants in it, and against the back wall was the concrete air-raid shelter that Daddy had built.
‘Can I—I mean, may I—go and see?’
Normally, shoes had to be cleaned and hands washed before anything else.
‘Yes,’ said Mum and followed me.
There was a tiny cage on the bench, and four bright little eyes peeped out of the straw.
‘Mice! For me?’
Young Jim had brought his mouse into the classroom a week or so before, and it had escaped and caused a lot of fun, and we had all wanted mice from then on.
‘Well,’ said Mum, ‘you went on about Jim’s mouse so much that we thought you might like some yourself. But you must look after them: feed them, clean them out, give them water and so on.’
‘Oh yes. I will. Thank you.’ I was very excited.
Mum seemed as pleased about the mice as she had been about Tig. I was surprised, but I didn’t know why.
‘It’s a boy and girl. What are you going to call them?’
I called the girl mouse Winnie and the boy Bobbie.
When Daddy came in and I had thanked him, I told him what I was calling them.
He burst into laughter. ‘I don’t know whether Mr. Churchill would be pleased to know that a mouse has been named after him!’ I had forgotten that Winston Churchill was called Winnie.
That evening I was allowed to stay up a little later, and I saw Daddy kiss Mum! Apart from a quick ‘goodbye’ peck, it was the first time I had seen them kiss at all. I went to bed in a sort of hopeful glow. They were nice to each other—and Mum to me—for several days. But then there was a lot of shouting, and Daddy stomped off into the garden and started to dig very quickly. Foolishly, I asked Mum if I might go to help him.
‘No,’ she snapped. ‘Just get off to bed.’
I crept away. It was not even my bedtime.
The nice few days were over, and I wondered why. But at least there was Tig, and I had Winnie and Bobbie now. I cleaned them out regularly, fed and watered them, and stroked their warm little bodies and was rewarded by their obvious excitement when I approached their cage.
Then one day, in their nest of wood shavings, there were four tiny pink naked babies. They were not pretty, but I was thrilled.
These days, a nine- or ten-year-old would know exactly how and why the babies had been created. But even living in the country with animals all around, I did not know about the birds and the bees.
Oddly, I didn’t ask about the mice, but one day, as Mum and I were walking through the village, we stopped and Mum talked to a lady. After we moved on, I felt that I could ask a question.
‘That lady is going to have a baby, isn’t she?’
‘Yes, she is. But how did you know?’
‘She’s got it in her tummy: that’s why she’s fat. But how does it get out? And how did it get there in the first place?’
Mum went very pink and said, ‘We’ll talk about that when you are older.’
Later, I heard her say to my father, ‘She’s starting to ask far too many questions these days.’
But over the next few days it wasn’t the questions that were not answered that troubled me, rather the things that I would be told about my mother and my future.
The raids were more frequent now, and seemed to be getting nearer
, so we went to bed in the shelter to avoid having to get out of a warm bed to go to a cold one when the siren went. At least I didn’t have the problem of guessing how loud the bangs had to be before I could go downstairs.
One evening, Daddy came into the shelter after I had gone to bed and spoke to me very sternly. I had obviously displeased Mum in some way.
‘You should be grateful to Mum because she is a better mother to you than your own would have been.’
How I hated being told that! Surely it wasn’t true. How could he know? Mummy had loved me—Auntie Jinny had said so. I didn’t think Mum did. And I had not been afraid of Mummy, as I often was of Mum.
‘Yes, Daddy,’ I replied. But I didn’t like Daddy for a long time after that, and it was at about this time that I started to call him ‘Dad’.
But there was worse to come.
The next morning, Mum said, ‘Daddy had a word with you, I believe. Just you remember what he said.’
‘Yes, Mum.’
She looked at me in a funny way and said, ‘Of course, your mother and father never wanted you in the first place. Grandfather Radford told them to have a child to cement their marriage.’ She paused. ‘No. They didn’t want you at all.’
She went back to the cooking, saying over her shoulder, ‘Have you finished cleaning the bedrooms yet?’
‘No, Mum.’
‘Well, it’s high time you had. You know, if you don’t buck your ideas up, no one will want you when you grow up, either.’
I crept away to finish sweeping, mopping and dusting the bedrooms, hoping that she would not see my tears.
So, did no one want me?
Mum obviously didn’t. Aunt Doris hadn’t. Grandmother Radford didn’t seem to have. Aunt Lizzy was too busy. And now, it seemed, my mummy and daddy hadn’t wanted me in the first place.
The Country Nurse Remembers Page 10