The Country Nurse Remembers

by Mary J. Macleod

  What had I done that no one wanted me? Or that no one ever would if I didn’t ‘buck my ideas up’. What did that mean?

  I wasn’t really bad, I thought. I didn’t get any bad school reports. But I didn’t always clean my shoes very well and I was slow at peeling potatoes and I sometimes mumbled instead of speaking up. I hurried home from school, but I must have dawdled now and then because I was a bit late sometimes. I didn’t always use toothpaste because some sorts made me feel sick, but I couldn’t remember anything else, although there must have been lots of things, I supposed.

  But Mummy must have wanted babies because she had another one after me: the baby sister who had died. She wouldn’t have done that if she had not liked me, I reasoned, in my innocent, childish, uncomprehending way.

  But it didn’t seem to help, so I came back to thinking that it must have been my fault. But how could it be my fault before I was born?

  I don’t think I felt anything at all for a long time after that. There did not seem to be anything in me left to hurt, so I didn’t feel, didn’t think and didn’t cry anymore. I suppose it was because I was feeling so miserable that I looked back to the good times; this gave me a warm feeling inside because it was where I believed my heart to be. It must be there in my chest, I reasoned, because that was where I felt the pain when I was in trouble or Mum told me things I didn’t want to hear—like not being wanted. And it was where it hurt when I wondered what had happened to Crib.

  And that was where I had a warm feeling when I thought about Mummy.

  But even thinking about that time could sometimes make me sad, because it was now so long ago and I couldn’t get back there because Mummy was dead, and no matter how much I wanted her she would stay dead.

  I sometimes talked to her as though she were still alive, mostly just in my head but sometimes out loud when no one was about. But did she hear up there with Jesus? What did people do all day when they had gone to see Jesus? The vicar talked about ‘eternal rest’, but then we sang about ‘rejoicing with the angels’. Some of the gravestones in the churchyard said, ‘Asleep in the arms of Jesus,’ or ‘Fell asleep in the love of God.’

  So which was it? Was Mummy asleep? If so, how could Auntie Jinny be so certain that Mummy knew how I was getting on? Or was she chatting with Jesus and the angels?

  When I talked to her, did she hear me? And did she answer? I couldn’t hear her voice. I would have to ask Auntie Jinny when we next visited.

  Make Do and Mend

  Life in the 1930s and ’40s was very much a ‘make do and mend’ affair for ordinary people like ourselves. That was the catchword. When the war came, it was even more necessary, as so many ordinary domestic things became unobtainable. Merchant vessels, bringing goods from other countries, were being sunk by U-boats, so the markets and shops were often nearly empty. I’m not sure if I was aware of this at the time or if I learned about it later.

  DIY was not a catchphrase, however; it was already a way of life. In fact, I don’t think the acronym had been invented. I know Grandpa mended the family shoes on a last in his shed. He mended chairs or beds or anything that was broken. Daddy mended kettles and saucepans when the gas burner had made the bottoms so thin that they leaked. Old saucepans and frying pans were scrubbed with sand when we couldn’t get Vim anymore.

  I remember once that we had some fun when Daddy was mending a metal teapot. The handle had come off, and he had been riveting it back on. He had just finished when the spout, by which he had been holding the pot, fell off, too. He burst into laughter, threw his hands in the air in mock despair and jumped on the teapot, squashing it flat. I liked that: Daddy being silly did not happen very often these days.

  We had tea out of the best china teapot after that. Of course, there were no teabags then, so the loose tea was put in the teapot, and people had tea strainers. Tea out of mugs was almost unheard of. In fact, I don’t think china mugs were around at all, only tin ones for men to take to work.

  Mum darned socks, let my dresses down, unpicked some of Daddy’s old pullovers to save the good wool for a jumper for me or gloves for him. Old curtains were made into clothes, and men’s collars and cuffs were turned to hide the frayed bits. This sort of thing had been done for years by careful housewives, but now because of the shortages everyone had to do it.

  Rag-rugs, for in front of the fire, were made by cutting up old lisle stockings—tights had not arrived on the scene at that time. Large rugs were turned to even the wear, and old lino was patched or turned round so that the worn bit was under a piece of furniture. Men’s trousers were remade to fit a growing son, while knickers were worn back to front when the seat had worn thin.

  Clothing coupons did not go far, although growing children were issued with more than grown-ups. New clothes were expensive, anyway, and often they were not available at all because cotton was not getting through from the cotton-growing countries and wool seemed to be in short supply. There were no synthetic fabrics; those came later. So, many of the growing children wore clothes that were far too short in arm and leg or perhaps too big because they had been made to allow for growth. Buttons were removed from defunct clothes and hoarded like gold for shirts and trousers.

  Food was not too much of a problem for us, as Dad grew vegetables and soft fruit in the garden; we had the apple orchard, and there were many plum trees beside the private road leading to the Works. In the season, we had plenty, but, without electricity, there was no freezer (very few people had freezers anyway), so the old-fashioned ways of preserving were used.

  Potatoes were stored in clamps; apples were wrapped in newspaper and placed in a dark loft, while plums and damsons became jam, and tomatoes were made into chutney. Peas, beans and carrots had to be eaten up, as no way had been found to preserve these, while sprouts, swedes and cabbages seemed to last in the ground for most of the winter. Swedes in particular seemed to be eternal and indestructible, and I remember eating plates full of them. How I hated swedes! Potatoes were never rationed, though, and in fact the general shortages were worse for a few years after the war than during the hostilities.

  During the war years, we rarely saw oranges, lemons or bananas, as these were imported. When bananas did get through, some were kept back for small children with Coeliac disease, and we were encouraged to give up our ration, too. I was more than happy to give mine up, as bananas made me very sick!

  Meat, fish, sugar, butter, milk, sweets, chocolate, eggs, tinned foods, salt, soap (detergents had not arrived then) and many, many more commodities were rationed (I believe meat and chocolate were still rationed well into the 1950s). Women queued for hours at butcher’s shops and fruiterers, clutching their ration books, because, in spite of the fairness of rationing, there was not always enough to go round and it was sometimes first come, first served. I often stood with Mum for long periods for very ordinary goods.

  Dad decided to get some geese because the eggs were bigger than chickens’ eggs. We had kept chickens for years and ate the old ones when they stopped laying. If you kept chickens, you were not supposed to get the egg ration of one egg a week. I’m not sure how this was policed, if at all, however. A goose, meanwhile, made several good meals. Like most country men, Dad also shot rabbits for the pot. Some men shot pigeons, but Dad said that the amount of meat on them was not worth the effort.

  Most housewives baked puddings, pies, cakes and sometimes bread in the 1930s and ’40s, but when the war came, ingredients were difficult to get. However, glucose in big yellow tins needed fewer coupons than sugar, while dried eggs were possibly unrationed. Recipes were published for ‘eggless cakes’, ‘sugarless puddings’ and ‘dried egg omelette’.

  People living in cities, with no access to ground for growing vegetables and no hope of keeping chickens or shooting rabbits, were sometimes hungry. But the generally austere diet meant that everyone was a lot slimmer and, in many ways, healthier than they are now, in the twenty-first century. However, the unbalanced diet and the pall of smoke whic
h hung over the industrial cities caused many children to have rickets. Today, we would call this smoke ‘smog’, but it didn’t adopt that name until the 1950s.

  Coal, by which most homes were heated, was also by then in short supply. Power stations were coal-fired, and the huge factories making guns, bombs, tanks, aircraft and ammunition needed vast quantities to feed their furnaces. So domestic needs were well down on the list of priorities. People raided woods and forests, chopped down garden trees, burnt rubbish: anything to keep warm.

  Again, we were lucky, as there were plenty of gnarled old trees on the Works that could be felled and chopped up. The remaining ‘chaps’ brought their wheelbarrows and took logs home with them. Once more, people in the cities were worse off than us; centres were opened where old people could gather to keep warm and drink the soup on offer. Many were trying to survive on the old-age pension, which was meagre and insufficient to meet the inflated prices of necessities.

  Other things in short supply included ink, paper, pencils, books, flashlight batteries, petrol, paraffin, needles, nails and screws. I remember having to write lessons on the back of rolls of wallpaper that Governess found in her loft because the exercise books had not arrived.

  At about this time, Dad, at last, decided that I should stay up on Fridays and Saturdays to hear the six o’clock news, as he felt that I should know what was going on in the world. So I began to understand a bit more about the progress of the war. I remember the deep voice of Alvar Lidell, saying, ‘London calling’; then there were the lighter tones of Stuart Hibberd and the gravelly ones of Bruce Belfrage, telling us of victories and defeats in about equal measure, as it seemed to me.

  I was excited to hear Bruce Belfrage, because, in 1940, during the London bombing, he had been reading the news when Broadcasting House took a direct hit. People listening heard the explosion—it was so loud—but Bruce Belfrage went on reading as though nothing had happened, although he was covered in soot and plaster and had had to brush the dirt off his notes. I asked Dad about it.

  ‘It was to keep up morale,’ said Dad, who had been most impressed by the cool-headed announcer.

  I supposed that ‘morale’ meant cheerfulness.

  It seemed to be in short supply. Like everything else.

  The Bath Blitz

  At the Thursday school church service, the vicar had said that we must be stalwart. We had no idea what that meant, so we all nodded and tried to look as though we did. Then he said that we must have faith. We had lots of that because we knew, without a shadow of a doubt, that God was on our side. Everyone said so.

  But over several nights in April 1942, God seemed to have forgotten about Bath. Bath was being bombed out of existence, said Dad. How could that happen? Bath was the only town I knew, but it was too big to be bombed out of existence, surely.

  The thumps and explosions and the gunfire had been getting closer over the previous few nights as Bristol was getting it. The factories, docks and airfields were the main targets, but houses were bombed too, and many people were killed. The noise of the attacks on Bristol was frightening, but it went on for so many nights that I eventually slept through most of it.

  On this particular night, however, the noise was even louder, and the bombs seemed nearer. The shelter shook, and I could hear the tinkling of glass as parts of the greenhouse shattered. I could see the glow of the fires caused by the incendiary bombs that were raining down on the village and the fields around us. This was much worse than before. I was told not to undress but just to lie in my bunk with all my clothes on. Tig was in the shelter with us and kept whining. He did not like the thumps and bangs. Dad kept popping in and out of the shelter. He was fire-watching because the Works was in danger from the incendiaries. He and Mr. Burn, the foreman, took it in turns, one watching one night and the other the next. But on this night they were both watching together because there were so many bombs. When Dad appeared on one occasion, his clothes were muddy from where he had flung himself onto the ground as a particularly close bomb had sent showers of mud and shrapnel into the air.

  ‘Bath’s getting it again tonight,’ said Daddy. ‘I can’t see why Bath. There’s nothing there for them.’

  At the time, these raids on Bath were a mystery to people, as there were virtually no factories—and certainly no airfield or docks—in the city. The mainline railway came through Bath and went on to Bristol and the West, but that did not seem enough reason for the vicious attack.

  After the war ended, however, we heard these were called Baedeker raids, but none of us knew anything about that at the time. (In 1937, a German called Baedeker had written a guide to historical and cultural British towns and cities, such as York, Exeter and Bath, and the Germans used this information to identify and bomb such places. Bath had beautiful Georgian buildings, and many of these were destroyed. I remember the piles of rubble.)

  Dad was worried because all the pipes coming to the Works were from Bath and its surrounds, and he knew that there would be a lot of damage to them.

  Mum sat quietly knitting by the light of the oil lamp to keep her mind off it. She was very worried, because her parents lived in Bath and there was no way of knowing if they were being bombed; her cousin, Harry, was a patient in the Mineral Water Hospital in the centre of Bath, too. Dad was not very hopeful about Harry’s chances. But all they could do was wait until morning and hope for the best.

  ‘Hope for the best’ was on everyone’s lips.

  The best of what?, I wondered.

  Bath was behind a hill as you looked out from Meadow View but was only about three miles away as the crow flies, so we could see the angry red sky and the clouds of orange smoke. The searchlights continuously swept the sky, occasionally picking out a plane, and then the guns would start their ‘crump-crump’ sound. How did they know the plane was one of ‘theirs’—it was so high up? Occasionally they must have shot one, because we heard the whine of the engines getting closer and closer as the aircraft plunged to the ground. It always sounded as though it were going to hit us, but none did. There was nothing we could do, anyway, but just cower in the shelter and ‘hope for the best’. Most of the planes crashed in fields and woods, often catching fire and adding their own red and orange light and black smoke clouds to the chaos in the sky.

  The noise of bombs and guns went on and on until the sky began to lighten towards morning. Then we heard the drone of many planes over the house and the village. Dad explained they were making for home in France or Germany—usually France, where the Germans had built airfields, because Germany was much farther away and the planes could not carry enough fuel to fly so far.

  ‘I hope they land in the Channel,’ said Dad. But many of them crashed in the villages around, often killing people on the ground. I think I dozed off, but I don’t think Dad and Mum slept at all that night.

  I did not go to school the next day—I don’t believe anyone knew if the school was still there. So I was at home when the telephone calls started. We were amazed to find that the phone lines were still working.

  Dad went rushing off to Bath.

  ‘Find out what you can about my mum and dad,’ called Mum, as he disappeared.

  Dad had to go to the worst-affected areas to inspect any water and drainage pipes that had been blown up. Gas pipes were leaking and the gasometer at the gasworks had been hit, so the gas supply was cut off to hundreds of homes, including ours.

  Dad told us later that the city was still burning and in utter chaos, with people being dug out of collapsed buildings, huge craters appearing everywhere, roads being blocked or cordoned off and unexploded bombs being made safe by the bomb-disposal chaps.

  ‘I wouldn’t have their job for all the tea in China,’ Dad had said. ‘It’s very dangerous work.’

  But he had to go in amongst all the devastation and near these bombs to inspect the various pipes and recommend the action to be taken in repairing them. So he was in danger, too.

  Later in the day, he found Grandma and
Granddad S.—Mum’s parents. They were in a neighbour’s house because their own had been so badly shattered by the blast from a bomb in the road that it was unsafe. Dad brought them home to Meadow View.

  Grandma S. was hysterical and couldn’t stop sobbing, while Granddad S. was ‘stoic’, Mum said. I had heard that word before and thought it must mean ‘silent’, because he seemed unable to say anything at all for a long time. He just stood and stared out of the window.

  Before Daddy could eat his lunch, another telephone call came to say that the Mineral Water Hospital had been so badly hit that it was just a pile of rubble. The patients had been evacuated in time and they were all safe, but there was nowhere for them to go. Mum’s cousin Harry came from Southsea, which was a long way off, so he had given her name as a contact. Dad set off for Bath to collect him.

  Harry had a condition that made his back completely stiff in the upright position so that he could not sit, so in order for Dad to get him home, he had to take the passenger seat out of the car and help Harry onto the back seat, with his legs stretched out in front of him so that he was almost lying down.

  Suddenly our house was full. I was very sorry for Grandma and Granddad S. because their house was in ruins—or so we thought at the time. It was not quite as bad as that, and later they managed to rescue some furniture, which went into storage until after the war. I was even sorrier for Harry, though he was quite cheerful. He said he was glad to be alive and he hadn’t had any possessions with him to lose.

  Mum ran about arranging the spare bedroom for Grandma and Granddad S., and Dad got a bed from somewhere and put it in the other room for Harry, as he could not go upstairs. We had a downstairs lavatory, but I don’t recall where Harry washed; perhaps a bowl in the other room.

  I was able to fetch and carry and run about helping, which I enjoyed. This was something real; not just the usual bedroom- or stair-cleaning. I even managed to cheer Grandma up a bit by brushing her hair and finding her perfume in her handbag. I helped Mum make up the bed for Harry and arrange the furniture so that he could get around with his two sticks. He was always singing or humming. And he talked to me about all sorts of things: my school friends, my books, his house in Southsea, the weird treatments that he was getting for his back … Other grown-ups wanted to know what I was doing at school but once I had told them never seemed to know what else to say.